Creativity Quote by John Cale

For John Cale to say "The avant-garde makes more sense to me" is to flip the usual hierarchy: the supposedly difficult becomes the intuitive, while the mainstream starts to look like the real abstraction. Coming out of the Welsh classical tradition and into La Monte Young's drone experiments before detonating rock music with the Velvet Underground, Cale isn’t posturing. He’s describing a native language. In his world, repetition, noise, and dissonance aren’t aesthetic stunts; they’re honest representations of how the mind and city life actually feel.

The line also carries a quiet rebuke. "Makes more sense" suggests that conventional taste is less rational than it pretends to be, held together by habit, marketing, and a fear of seeming weird. Cale’s deadpan phrasing is the tell: no manifesto, no brag, just the calm certainty of someone who’s spent decades watching audiences treat experimentation like a moral failing. He’s not asking permission to be challenging; he’s implying the challenge is the point.

Context matters because Cale’s career is basically a long argument with categories. He produced punk records with pop bite, wrote tender ballads, then swerved back into abrasion. The subtext: coherence isn’t about smoothness; it’s about commitment. The avant-garde "makes sense" because it maps to a consistent ethic - follow the sound where it leads, even if the crowd needs a map.