Creativity Quote by Boyd Rice

Rice is taking aim at the bureaucratic itch in modern culture: the compulsion to name, tag, and file reality until the filing system becomes more real than the thing it’s meant to describe. The line is engineered as a warning but it lands like a diagnosis. “Will” is the tell; labeling isn’t framed as a neutral tool of language, it’s a drive for control. Once you call something “punk,” “problematic,” “terrorist,” “genius,” “outsider,” you’re not just describing it - you’re narrowing the range of acceptable reactions to it.

The subtext is that labels don’t merely simplify; they dominate. They pre-select meaning, outsource thinking, and turn messy experience into a manageable consumer or moral product. Rice’s phrasing sets up a bleak power imbalance: the labeler wins, the labeled loses. That “usually” is doing cynical work, implying exceptions exist but are rare enough not to redeem the habit. The cost is “truth or understanding” - not necessarily both at once, because labels can sometimes preserve a fact while still killing comprehension. You can be accurately categorized and still profoundly misunderstood.

In the context of an artist’s life - and Rice in particular, whose career sits near subcultural provocation and the politics of contamination by association - the quote reads like a preemptive defense against being reduced to a headline. It also doubles as an indictment of critics, journalists, and audiences who treat taxonomy as engagement. The line’s sting is that it implicates everyone: labeling isn’t just something institutions do; it’s how we perform certainty when we don’t have time, patience, or courage to actually look.