Creativity Quote by Robert Quine

Nasty and ugly lands as praise, not insult: a musician’s shorthand for authenticity that refuses to sand itself down for polite company. Robert Quine is talking like a player who’s tired of virtuosity-as-respectability, and who hears in the Rolling Stones a kind of corrective. The words are deliberately blunt, almost anti-review. They reject the precious language of taste and replace it with a gut report: this band sounded like trouble.

The second half is the giveaway: “doing songs I was familiar with.” Quine isn’t worshipping novelty; he’s describing the jolt of recognition when familiar material gets dragged through the mud and comes out charged. Early Stones were famously steeped in American blues and R&B covers, and Quine’s line captures how that worked culturally: they didn’t “introduce” Black American music so much as re-stage it with a sneer, speeding it up, roughing up the edges, making it feel like a threat in a buttoned-up British context. Familiarity becomes a weapon. You know the tune, but you don’t know this attitude.

For Quine, a guitarist who’d later become a patron saint of punk and no-wave abrasion, the attraction is also autobiographical. “Nasty and ugly” names a permission slip: you can be technically serious without sounding tasteful; you can love tradition without reverence. The subtext is a manifesto against polish. Beauty is easy to market. Ugliness is harder to co-opt, which is why it keeps calling to the people who want rock to mean something beyond competence.