Art & Creativity Quote by Ike Turner

Turner is doing two things at once here: brushing off the gatekeepers and writing his own epitaph. “They have all different names for music” is a sly jab at the way critics and industry people slice sound into marketable categories - R&B, rock, soul, funk - as if naming something is the same as understanding it. He’s implying the labels are late; the music is first. That’s a musician’s complaint, but it’s also a power move: if the categories are flimsy, the people enforcing them are, too.

Then comes the bigger flex: “the music I’m going to change the style with.” He’s not talking about having hits; he’s talking about altering the blueprint. The doubled “really, really big” reads like a performer leaning into conviction because he knows the room may not grant it to him. And “years and years after I’m gone” shifts the timeline from charts to legacy, from applause to archaeology. He’s betting on delayed recognition - the kind artists reach for when the present tense feels unfair.

Context matters because Turner’s reputation is a knot of innovation and infamy. He was central to early rock’s DNA (often cited around “Rocket 88”), yet his story is frequently told through Tina Turner’s survival narrative and the public accounting of his abuse. That history doesn’t cancel the musical claim; it complicates why it needs to be made so loudly. The subtext is anxious and defiant: you can rename the genre, reframe the story, even erase the man, but you can’t fully erase the fingerprints on the sound.