Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson is throwing a small grenade into the polite fiction that “timeless” equals “better.” Coming from a musician whose work prizes sound design, rhythm science, and an almost mischievous refusal to settle, the line reads less like cranky futurism and more like a diagnosis: when ideas calcify into tradition, they stop behaving like ideas and start behaving like presets.

“The older ideas” isn’t just nostalgia; it’s the whole machinery of inherited formulas - safe chord progressions, familiar drops, genre markers that once felt like discoveries. His verb choice, “rendering,” is telling. It suggests a process, like boiling down a stock until all the sharpness evaporates. Blandness here isn’t an aesthetic accident; it’s the predictable result of recycling gestures after their original cultural charge has drained away. The subtext is that reverence can be its own kind of censorship: you don’t have to ban risk if you can market safety as authenticity.

There’s also a quiet jab at the way innovation gets museum-ified. Electronic music, especially, moves fast: yesterday’s breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s plugin pack. Jenkinson’s point isn’t that the past is worthless; it’s that unexamined inheritance produces work that performs “music-ness” without the unsettling friction that makes it memorable. He’s defending estrangement - the moment a sound makes you lean in because it doesn’t already know how it’s supposed to feel.