Creativity Quote by Ric Ocasek

Ocasek clocks a very late-20th-century craving with the dry impatience of someone who watched “cool” harden into a social currency. The line isn’t a romantic defense of community; it’s a side-eye at belonging as consumer choice. “Hip or whatever” is the tell: he punctures the solemnity people give to taste, reducing it to a shruggy filler phrase. Coolness, in his framing, is less an identity than a product you buy into, then perform.

The subtext is that a clique can feel like an escape from “society” while actually reproducing its pressures in miniature. You don’t opt out; you just switch rulebooks. It’s a neat inversion of the counterculture myth: the promise of authenticity becomes another status ladder, with gatekeepers, uniforms, and the constant low-grade terror of being out of date. Ocasek’s choice of “not society” sounds like a pitch people tell themselves, the story that makes exclusion feel like independence.

Context matters: as the frontman of The Cars, he sat at the junction where punk’s anti-establishment energy collided with MTV-era polish. That vantage point makes the critique sharper. He saw how quickly rebellion could be packaged, how fast scenes turn into brands, and how belonging can become the most obedient impulse of all. The sting of the quote is that it doesn’t accuse people of being shallow; it suggests they’re lonely, and that “hip” is just loneliness with better lighting.