Creativity Quote by David Johansen

Rock flamboyance, in David Johansen's telling, wasn’t some deep personal truth as much as a job requirement. The line is funny because it treats identity like a dress code: you put on the feathers and the attitude because that’s what the genre’s employee handbook seemed to demand. Coming from the frontman of the New York Dolls, it also lands as a sly correction to the myth that glam was purely fearless self-expression. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was also a bunch of downtown kids reverse-engineering what “rock star” was supposed to look like.

The subtext is about performance as apprenticeship. “We thought” signals a collective, almost innocent misunderstanding: not “we were,” but “we were supposed to be.” That tiny shift turns flamboyance into a learned language, a set of cues borrowed from earlier icons and amplified for a new scene. It’s a reminder that subcultures are built as much from imitation as rebellion. You copy the silhouette to earn entry, then you bend it into something real.

Context matters: early-70s New York, pre-punk, when rock was calcifying into macho arena seriousness. The Dolls’ flamboyance wasn’t just glitter; it was a provocation against rock’s narrowing masculinity and a way to seize attention in a crowded cultural marketplace. Johansen’s phrasing punctures the romance while still honoring the thrill: flamboyance as both armor and advertisement, a deliberate overstatement that made room for new kinds of masculinity, queerness, and play.