Creativity Quote by Ikue Mori

Mori’s line lands like a blunt stage-direction: repetition isn’t a side effect of the rock band; it’s the job. “Over and over and over” isn’t just emphasis, it’s an audible loop - the grind of rehearsals, the locked-in arrangements, the expectation that a “song” is a stable object you reproduce night after night for an audience that came to hear it the way they already know it. The phrasing is almost comically unsentimental, a musician puncturing the romance of the band myth with the reality of muscle memory.

The subtext is aesthetic and political. Mori emerged from New York’s downtown experimental scene, where her work (often with electronics) treats sound as a living system rather than a product. Against that background, “rock band” becomes shorthand for an industrial model of music-making: practice until uniformity, tour until the set hardens, repeat until the market recognizes you. The repetition can be pleasurable and communal, sure - but Mori’s point is that it carries an implicit constraint. It rewards fidelity over curiosity.

Context matters because Mori’s career is a case study in refusing that bargain. Improvisation, noise, and machine-driven textures let her escape the narrative arc of verse-chorus-verse and the social script of the band as a little corporation. So the quote reads less like a complaint than a declaration of method: if you want new sounds, you can’t keep rebuilding the same house every night.