Art & Creativity Quote by John Philip Sousa

Sousa is picking a fight with the kind of snobbery that loves to call itself “taste.” He starts by ventriloquizing the “average mind,” then loads that voice with a neat pile of insults: “vulgarly conceived,” “commonplace.” It’s a small act of rhetorical theater. By making the dismissal sound blunt and lazy, he frames it as secondhand prejudice rather than serious judgment. Then comes the pivot - “That is absolutely false” - a marching-band downbeat of certainty that mirrors his own musical persona: decisive, public-facing, built to cut through noise.

The intent isn’t just to defend popular music; it’s to defend the public. Sousa, the king of the march, worked in forms designed for crowds, parades, civic rituals - music meant to be heard outdoors, carried by bodies moving together. In that world, “popular” isn’t an aesthetic compromise; it’s a function, even a democratic claim. The subtext is class-coded: calling popular music “vulgar” is often a way of calling its listeners vulgar, too. Sousa’s rebuttal refuses that moralizing.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in an era when “serious” European concert traditions were treated as cultural credentials, Sousa had to navigate being wildly successful while still being taken seriously. His line anticipates a modern argument: accessibility doesn’t equal emptiness, and mass appeal doesn’t disqualify craft. He’s not begging elites for entry; he’s questioning why they get to police the door in the first place.