Creativity Quote by Holly Johnson

“Hype” lands here like a charge sheet, not a compliment. Holly Johnson is pushing back against a familiar music-industry sleight of hand: turning success into suspicion. The word pretends to describe marketing noise, but it’s also a moral judgment, a way of implying that if people love you at scale, someone must have engineered it. Johnson’s irritation exposes how “hype” functions as a cultural defense mechanism, especially in scenes that prize authenticity. Calling a band “hyped” lets tastemakers keep their cool, protect their status, and retroactively deny their own role in building the machine.

The key move is how he splits agency. Advertising budgets and “column inches” are real, but Johnson refuses the idea that bands “are responsible for all of that.” He’s not claiming innocence so much as pointing to the asymmetry of power: publicity ecosystems have their own momentum, and once the sales numbers spike, the story writes itself. “That is something that happens to you” flips the usual narrative. Instead of artists manipulating the public, the public (and the press) creates a gravitational field around artists.

There’s a second, sharper subtext: “hype” is often deployed selectively, as a way to delegitimize certain kinds of popularity. Millions of records don’t merely indicate reach; they trigger backlash, a need to frame mass appeal as contamination. Johnson’s line reads like someone who’s watched acclaim turn into a sneer, and who’s tired of being blamed for the megaphone others insisted on handing him.