Art & Creativity Quote by Alan Vega

Vega is diagnosing a flattening of the musical middle class: the “in-between” zone where quirks, mistakes, and regional weirdness used to live. When he says so much music “sounds so much alike,” he’s not doing the lazy old-guy “kids these days” routine. He’s pointing at a pipeline problem. If the only options are polished commercial product or total obscurity, artists learn to sand down the edges early. Risk becomes a luxury good, and sameness becomes the safest bet.

The phrase “no in-between” carries a whole infrastructure critique in four words: fewer independent labels with patience, fewer scenes that can incubate half-formed ideas, more algorithmic sorting that rewards immediate legibility. Vega came up in a world where texture mattered - Suicide’s raw minimalism and confrontational repetition were practically a manifesto against tidy genre boundaries. His career is proof that the “button-turning” era wasn’t nostalgia; it was a method.

“So it’s kind of nice” is the tell. He understates the stakes, but the subtext is defiant: experimentation isn’t a grand art-philosophy lecture, it’s a habit you either keep or lose. “Turn some buttons” sounds casual, almost domestic, which is exactly the point. Discovery can be as simple as touching the gear, nudging parameters, choosing the imperfect take. In Vega’s hands, knobs become a metaphor for agency - the human hand interrupting the preset.