death of the slow burn

There used to be something romantic about obscurity. Not because obscurity itself was desirable, but because it implied that an artist's relationship with their work existed independently of whether anyone was watching.

Musicians disappeared for years and returned with records that altered the course of someone's life. Writers spent decades filling notebooks before publishing novels that would eventually become part of the literary canon. Photographers wandered cities chasing light that no client had commissioned and no algorithm had requested. Art was allowed to mature in private. It was permitted to fail quietly, to evolve slowly, and artists were permitted to become themselves before anyone asked them to become profitable.

Today, that kind of patience feels almost unimaginable. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking artists to make art and started asking them to become content creators. The musician is now expected to be a videographer, copywriter, social media strategist, brand manager, community manager, editor, and analyst before they are allowed to simply be a musician. Painters are expected to condense every brushstroke of a masterpiece into a time-lapse clip. Writers are pressured to distill years of thought into carousel posts and catchy quote cards. Just to be heard. Just to be seen.

What troubles me most isn’t that this labor is exhausting. Us creatives have always worked tirelessly while carrying the quiet hope of being seen. The tragedy is much subtler than creative fatigue. Somewhere along the way, public visibility began masquerading as significance. We have quietly accepted the idea that to be seen is to matter, and if art remains unseen it is evidence of failure.

I have spent the better part of my life around underground musicians, and if there is one thing I have learned, it is that some of the best music may never exist outside the rooms where I first heard it. I've sat in cramped apartments while unfinished records played through borrowed speakers. I've listened to rough mixes in parked cars after midnight. I've been sent private audio files that only a handful of people have ever heard.

What once made me feel trusted and special has slowly become something closer to what feels like grief. Every exclusive now feels less like a privilege and more like watching another piece of art disappear before it ever reaches the world.

I will never stop asking my friends: "When are you dropping it?"

Even though I already know the answer.

The mix still needs work.
The visuals aren't ready.
The rollout isn't finished.
The algorithm isn't favorable.
The timing feels wrong.
We're dropping it soon.

Soon never comes. Months become years. Years become archives. Entire periods of someone's life remain trapped inside external hard drives because they are waiting for a moment of certainty that never arrives. Every unreleased project becomes a time capsule of an artist they no longer are…and in that sense, never become.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Never before has it been easier to distribute music to the entire world, yet never before have so many artists felt incapable of releasing it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is another phenomenon that has become equally common. These artists appear to exist everywhere. Every week brings another teaser, another behind-the-scenes clip, another podcast interview, another carefully curated montage documenting the process of "being an artist." Their online presence suggests relentless productivity. Then you open their streaming profile. There is almost nothing there. Or worse, there is something there, and it simply isn't very good.

Documentation has somehow become more substantial than the work itself and has given a platform to people who, in my humble opinion, have no fucking business holding a mic.

It's infuriating.

The digital landscape is crowded with creators who possess aesthetics, polished graphics, strategic rollouts, and engagement metrics, yet have never developed the craft that once justified calling themselves artists. Because anyone with enough money and a Canva subscription can manufacture the appearance of legitimacy, we have witnessed a slow erosion of discernment. The wrapping paper is so beautiful that no one seems particularly concerned whether the box contains anything at all. Meanwhile, genuinely gifted artists retreat further into themselves, convinced they cannot release anything until they have more followers.

The marketplace rewards confidence. It rewards views. Art rewards patience. Those are not the same thing.

We often speak about the attention economy as though artists are competing against one another. They are not. The battlefield has changed. A song no longer competes with another song. It competes with political outrage, relationship drama, beauty tutorials, conspiracy theories, travel influencers, AI-generated absurdity, and an endless stream of professionally engineered distractions. The algorithm is not evaluating artistic merit. It is measuring interruption. And its only question is whether what you post can delay the next swipe.

Marshall McLuhan argued that "the medium is the message," suggesting that the form through which information travels ultimately shapes culture more profoundly than the information itself. Social media may be the clearest confirmation of his thesis. The platform does not merely distribute art. It quietly reshapes the kind of art capable of surviving within it. That kind of corruption is almost invisible because it doesn’t arrive as outright censorship, rather, as optimization.

Eventually, the artist begins creating with the platform already sitting in the room. The questions change from:"What does this piece need to be great?" to "How will this perform on the gram?"

That isn’t just a technological shift. It’s a philosophical one. The internet hasn't just commercialized art, it has commercialized the artist. And it’s brainwashing you to think that is ok.

Perhaps this explains why so many creators feel simultaneously overexposed and unseen. Audiences know what they ate for breakfast, how they arrange their studio, what plugins they use, what coffee they drink, and what books they pretend to read. Yet they know almost nothing about the work itself because the tangible creative output has become an accessory to the performance of being creative.

And honestly? The slow burn of creation is the greatest casualty in all of this. Not every artist is meant to go viral and erupt into public consciousness overnight. Some artists are oak trees. They spend decades adding invisible rings before anyone notices their size. Careers unfold quietly, accumulating strength and history long before recognition ever arrives.

As a listener, I do not care about your content calendar. I do not care about your rollout strategy. I do not care how often you post. The BTS clips are cool but forgettable.

I care whether I can listen to your music while I'm getting ready in the morning, driving home from work, or hitting the treadmill at the gym. I care whether your words return to me years later while I'm washing dishes or driving through a city I no longer live in. I care about the memories that flood in when I hear a song from that time because your music became a part of my inner life.

Listeners do not build relationships with algorithms. We build relationships with catalogs. The algorithm demands to be fed, I get it…but those of us with souls are starving.

What saddens me most is that the artists most vulnerable to this system are often the most talented. Mediocrity rarely hesitates to play this game because winning it doesn't always require competence. It is almost always the most exceptional artists who become trapped pursuing impossible perfection, believing that one more revision, one more visual, one more strategic rollout will finally make the work worthy of release.

If there is one thing I hope artists understand, it is this: when you withhold your work indefinitely, you are not protecting it. You are preventing it from having the only relationship that ultimately matters…the relationship between the artwork and another human being.

A song can’t change someone's life while it remains trapped inside a hard drive. A novel can’t comfort a stranger while it sits inside an unpublished folder. Art fulfills its purpose only after it leaves us.

I used to imagine lost masterpieces as paintings destroyed in fires or manuscripts abandoned after their authors died but this generation has manufactured a more devastating disappearance. One where the masterpiece isn't burned in a fire, it simply never leaves the studio.

If you are an artist waiting for the perfect moment, let it go. It isn't coming. Drop the song. Build the catalogue. Turn your back on the phantom audience of millions who don't know your name and pour everything into the handful of people who already believe in you.

Algorithms have never created art that mattered. Legacy has always belonged to the stubborn people who kept making beautiful things even when it felt like no one was watching.