Art & Creativity Quote by Trevor Horn

Horn is smuggling a whole sociology of taste into an offhand studio anecdote. He frames electronic music not as a clean break, but as a recurring family argument: the kids bring home a new noise, the gatekeepers call it fake, and time quietly proves the gatekeepers wrong. By comparing rock musicians' skepticism toward early electronic sounds to his dad's likely disdain for beat groups, Horn collapses two generations of backlash into the same reflex. The point isn't that rock was once rebellious; it's that rebellion ages into rule-making faster than anyone wants to admit.

The subtext is a neat little reversal of rock's self-mythology. Rock culture has long positioned itself as the authentic, human alternative to "cold" technology, yet Horn suggests rock musicians were playing the exact role their parents played: defenders of a supposedly real tradition threatened by novelty. His phrasing "people like my dad" is doing a lot of work. It's affectionate, not contemptuous, which makes the critique sharper. He's not dunking on older listeners; he's naming the cycle as inevitable, almost tenderly.

Context matters: Horn comes out of the late-70s/early-80s hinge moment when synthesizers, drum machines, and sampling started moving from novelty to infrastructure. As a producer who helped translate those tools into pop language, he understands that the real fight wasn't about sound quality; it was about status. Who gets to decide what counts as musicianship when the "instrument" is a machine and the performance can be programming? Horn's answer: the argument repeats, the music survives, and authenticity is mostly just the last generation's comfort food.