Creativity Quote by Jerry Only

There’s a punk-rock economy to Jerry Only’s line: no metaphors, no distance, just a blunt inventory of damage. “Dragged” makes the system physical, something with hands on your collar, hauling you whether you consent or not. It’s a verb built for someone who’s spent a career in music’s back rooms, where contracts and rights don’t feel like abstractions; they feel like bruises. The phrase “got burned” carries that classic rock-and-roll sting: you didn’t merely lose money, you were marked by it, taught a painful lesson by people who knew the rules better than you did.

The real tell is how he frames agency. It’s “we got dragged,” “we got burned” - passive constructions that sound like resignation but function as accusation. The grammar mimics the experience: when you’re trapped in legal disputes, you’re always reacting, always catching up, always paying to be told what’s happening to you. “Crooked lawyers” is less a legal claim than a cultural one, tapping into a well-worn narrative of artists exploited by intermediaries who monetize confusion. In punk, authenticity is currency; calling out the machinery around art is part of defending the art itself.

“And the list goes on and on” does double duty. It gestures toward stories he’s not naming (for legal reasons, for exhaustion, for self-protection) while suggesting the harm is systemic, not a one-off bad actor. The line isn’t trying to win a court case. It’s trying to reclaim the moral high ground: we made the noise, they ran the numbers, and somehow we’re the ones paying for it.