Creativity Quote by David Crosby

Crosby isn’t just taking a cheap shot at suits; he’s staging a little morality play about cultural authority. The gag is bodily and grotesque on purpose: a “song” isn’t merely missed, it’s so present it could invade your face and still not register. That’s rock-and-roll hyperbole doing real work. It turns ignorance into something physical, almost proudly inert, as if the executive class has developed an immunity to the very thing they sell.

The second knife-twist is the shift from incompetence to indifference. “They haven’t a clue” could be fixed with taste, curiosity, hiring people who listen. “They don’t care” is a structural indictment: the business no longer needs belief in music, only belief in metrics. Crosby’s quoted reply - “Yeah? So, your point is?” - is devastating because it’s plausible. It captures a corporate worldview where aesthetic judgment is an eccentric hobby, not a job requirement, and where criticism is processed as noise unless it threatens revenue.

Context matters: Crosby came up in an era when labels could still function as messy patronage systems - imperfect, predatory, but occasionally guided by ears. His late-career complaints land in the post-Napster, streaming-dominant industry, where catalog monetization and algorithmic discoverability can outweigh artist development. The subtext is grief dressed as sarcasm: he’s watching the language of music get translated into quarterly reports, and he’s furious that no one even pretends to speak it anymore.