Creativity Quote by Wes Borland

There is a delicious candor in the way Wes Borland turns rock’s oldest anxiety into a punchline. “We’re gonna totally sell out and try to dominate the world” sounds like a villain monologue, but it’s really a preemptive strike against credibility police: critics, purists, and anyone who treats commercial success as moral failure. By saying the quiet part loud, Borland drains it of scandal. If you already confessed, nobody can “expose” you.

The phrasing matters. “Totally” and “gonna” keep it unserious, almost cartoonish, like he’s riffing rather than issuing a manifesto. That casual tone signals the real target: the performance of authenticity that bands are expected to maintain while still wanting bigger stages, better budgets, and omnipresence. “Sell out” is framed not as a fall from grace but as strategy, paired with “dominate the world,” the kind of grandiose ambition pop culture rewards when it’s honest about its appetite.

Contextually, Borland comes out of the late-90s/early-2000s nu-metal era, when bands like Limp Bizkit were both massively popular and constantly scolded for it. The quote reads like an artist watching the industry’s hypocrisy up close: labels demand hits, audiences punish you for delivering them, and the media narrates success as corruption. Borland’s wit refuses the shame script. He’s not begging to be taken seriously; he’s exposing how performative “selling out” accusations can be in a market where attention is the currency and domination is just the job description with better branding.