Parenting & Family Quote by Maurice Gibb

There’s a hardened performer’s shrug in the first clause: “We don’t mind being ripped apart.” Maurice Gibb is speaking from inside the machinery of pop fame, where criticism is a permanent weather system and the artist’s persona is fair game. He frames public scrutiny as survivable, almost expected, because a celebrity self can be armoring, even disposable. But the pivot lands like a boundary line drawn in marker: “don’t rip the songs apart.”

The intent is protective, but not precious. Gibb isn’t begging for softness; he’s insisting on precision. Attack the haircuts, the falsetto, the disco backlash, the tabloid caricature of the Bee Gees as a cultural punchline if you must. Just don’t mistake the work for the spectacle. The subtext is a quiet moral claim: songs are not content; they’re labor, craft, time, and private history compressed into three minutes.

“Like our kids” does two things at once. It grants the songs a kind of personhood - fragile, dependent, beloved - while also exposing how vulnerable art makes its maker. You can take a hit as an adult; it’s different when the blow lands on something you helped bring into the world and can’t fully defend. In an era when critical narratives could flatten disco into a fad and reduce its creators to kitsch, Gibb’s line reads as a demand to separate aesthetic snobbery from honest engagement. Critique all you want, he’s saying, but don’t be lazy about it.