Creativity Quote by Luther Vandross

Fame turns the body into public property, and Luther Vandross skewers that entitlement with a line that’s as funny as it is bruised. The setup is simple: at a bigger size, strangers and headlines felt licensed to label him “fat.” After he loses weight, the commentary doesn’t soften or grow kinder; it just mutates into melodrama: “they say I died.” The punch lands because it exposes a no-win economy of celebrity scrutiny where the audience demands transformation, then punishes the evidence of it.

The subtext is a quiet accusation: people weren’t really worried about health, they were addicted to verdicts. Vandross frames criticism as a kind of sport that requires a target, so the target stays the same even when the facts change. “They say” is doing a lot of work, too. It’s a shrug toward the faceless chorus - tabloids, callers, casual acquaintances - a reminder that the cruelty is distributed, deniable, and therefore endless.

In context, it reads like a veteran performer’s hard-earned clarity about what gets consumed alongside the music. Vandross was a master of intimate, controlled emotion in his voice; here, he uses the same control to make a public point without begging for sympathy. The line doesn’t ask you to pity him. It asks why the culture insists on narrating artists’ bodies as morality tales, and why we keep confusing our commentary with concern.