Creativity Quote by David Byrne

Byrne’s line lands like a casual reminiscence, but it’s really a diagnosis of how scenes get made - and how they get flattened. “When we started” is doing heavy lifting: it points to the CBGB-era petri dish where Talking Heads came up, a moment when punk wasn’t yet a uniform or a streaming genre tag. The subtext is less nostalgia than contrast. Difference wasn’t a marketing hook; it was the default condition of a small ecosystem where everyone was improvising in public, borrowing from art school, funk, minimalism, reggae, whatever was in the air, and there wasn’t an algorithm quietly rewarding the safest midpoint.

The phrase “a lot of bands” also sidesteps hero narrative. Byrne isn’t claiming singular genius; he’s crediting a cultural infrastructure that allowed strangeness to coexist. That humility reads as a subtle critique of what followed: once an aesthetic becomes legible, it becomes reproducible. Scenes turn into “sounds,” then into packages - haircuts, drum tones, guitar pedals, press photos - and the market rewards coherence over mutation.

There’s also an implied warning to younger musicians hearing this now. If your peers all sound alike, it may not be a failure of imagination so much as a shift in incentives: touring economics, platform metrics, and genre branding nudging artists toward recognizability. Byrne’s intent is to remind you that “different” used to be the baseline, not the outlier - and that it was thrilling precisely because no one knew what would work.