Creativity Quote by Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham’s blunt little diagnosis lands less like a thesis statement and more like something muttered backstage after the lights go down: weary, suspicious, and hard to argue with in the moment. “That’s basically what’s going on now” frames the claim as ambient reality, not a debated idea. He’s not announcing a conspiracy so much as naming the vibe of the era: the sense that every message arrives with strings attached, whether it’s a brand, a politician, an algorithm, or even a friend curating a self.

The kicker is “Everything is propaganda.” The absolutism is the point. Propaganda used to mean a coordinated campaign from a state or party; Buckingham stretches it to cover the whole attention economy, where culture is engineered to steer feelings, purchases, loyalties. Coming from a musician - someone who’s lived through radio gatekeepers, MTV image-making, label politics, and now streaming’s data-driven incentives - it reads as lived experience. Art has always been packaged, but the contemporary packaging is interactive and relentless: the audience is also the distributor, the marketer, the product.

Subtext: trust has collapsed. If everything is propaganda, then sincerity becomes suspect by default, and the listener is forced into permanent defensive interpretation. That’s a darkly rock-and-roll posture - the artist as the last person still trying to mean something in a world optimized for persuasion. It also doubles as a quiet self-indictment: musicians, too, sell narratives. In 2026, the line hits because it captures our most common cultural fatigue: not that we’re being lied to constantly, but that we’re being targeted constantly.