Creativity Quote by Les Baxter

The line lands with a jolt because it treats a world-historic catastrophe like a neat plot twist. “Clever” is the giveaway: not “brutal,” not “strategic,” not even “inevitable,” but the word you’d use for a card trick or a rhyme. Coming from Les Baxter - a musician best known for exotica’s glossy, travel-poster fantasies - the phrasing feels less like a moral stance than an aesthetic reflex. History as production value.

The subtext is the mid-century American habit of consuming other cultures as mood. Baxter’s era sold “the Aztecs,” “the Spanish,” and the whole conquest as atmospheric props: dramatic, colorful, safely distant. In that context, calling the conquest “clever” isn’t just ignorance; it’s a kind of unconscious alignment with the conqueror’s narrative, where domination gets framed as ingenuity and the conquered become a set piece. The passive construction (“came in and conquered”) scrubs away contagion, massacres, forced conversion - the violence that makes the event more than a tidy switch of regimes.

What makes the quote work, uncomfortably, is that it reveals how cultural products can anesthetize reality. Baxter isn’t delivering ideology with a megaphone; he’s showing how easily entertainment logic slips into historical judgment. If your job is to arrange sounds into pleasing spectacle, you can start hearing empire as orchestration: an entrance cue, a takeover, a “clever thing.” That’s the chill: the conquest becomes craftsmanship.