Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Setzer

Setzer is doing two things at once: taking a victory lap for the Stray Cats and quietly calling out a whole corner of “authentic” retro culture for coasting on nostalgia. The flex isn’t just that they could play rockabilly with conviction; it’s that they refused to treat the genre like a museum exhibit. “We took the music somewhere else” lands as a rebuttal to the idea that rockabilly’s job is to reenact 1956 forever, hairspray and all.

The key phrase is “we wrote our own songs.” In scenes built on revivalism, originality can feel like heresy. The subtext: if you’re only covering, you’re not extending the tradition, you’re renting it. Setzer’s point about a “weak point in modern classics” is a neat little jab at the tribute-band economy that thrives on familiarity while claiming subcultural purity. Rockabilly and blues, especially, come with canonized heroes and “approved” chord changes; the danger is that devotion becomes dependency.

Context matters: the Stray Cats broke in the late ’70s/early ’80s, when punk had made pastiche and reinvention feel urgent again. Their success wasn’t simply retro; it was retro with authorship, hooks, and pop discipline. Setzer’s intent is to define legitimacy not as perfect imitation, but as contribution. The real tradition, he implies, isn’t preservation. It’s risk.