Creativity Quote by Johnny Thunders

Johnny Thunders isn’t praising the New York Dolls for their chord changes; he’s grading them on vibe, and doing it with the blunt economy of someone who lived and died by vibe. “An attitude” is both compliment and defense brief. It frames the Dolls less as a band you evaluate on technical merit and more as a cultural weapon: a look, a sneer, a refusal to tidy themselves up for anyone’s approval. In rock history, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the whole point.

The line also carries Thunders’ own self-mythology. Coming from inside the Dolls’ wreckage, “If nothing else” admits the chaos: sloppy gigs, uneven records, self-destruction looming in the wings. It’s a shrug that still lands as a flex. Even when the machine is failing, the posture can still win. That’s punk’s foundational bargain: the performance of certainty matters when you’ve got little power anywhere else.

Context does the rest. The Dolls hit early-70s New York like glitter thrown at a bar fight, queering macho rock imagery while playing it louder, dumber, and more joyous. They weren’t trying to be respectable; they were trying to be unignorable. Thunders’ repetition of “attitude” is the tell: he’s insisting that style isn’t superficial here, it’s the content. The subtext is almost tender in its fatalism - if the legacy is a pose, at least it’s one that cracked the future open.