"But of course it's always gonna be Suicide, our fingerprints, ya know? You can't ever get rid of that"

Alan Vega, as the frontman of the influential band Suicide, channels a sense of inescapable identity and personal legacy in his words: “But of course it’s always gonna be Suicide, our fingerprints, ya know? You can’t ever get rid of that.” His reflection captures the indelible mark of an artist’s past, how everything created leaves a unique imprint, shaping not only their own narrative but resonating across the larger cultural landscape. For Vega, Suicide was more than a band name. It represented the unfiltered core of himself and his musical partner, Martin Rev, a confessional fingerprint stamped on every subsequent piece of work.

There’s a duality in his statement, a recognition of both pride and burden. Every artist dreams of breaking new ground, but for those whose creative act becomes iconic, there’s also a sentence to forever be entwined with that legacy. Vega suggests this is not something one can simply shed or reinvent. The very sound, vision, and ethos of Suicide, transgressive, minimalist, and raw, became the blueprint for punk, synth-pop, and avant-garde movements, cementing their fingerprints onto everything that followed, whether acknowledged or not. Even as artists evolve or attempt reinvention, there is an unmistakable DNA woven into their output, composed of past risks and defining moments.

Vega seems to understand that one’s artistic essence is not a burden to resent but a reality to accept. The fingerprints are proof of existence, creativity, and risk. To try to “get rid of that” would be futile, perhaps even dishonest. Instead, recognizing and embracing the inevitability of those marks becomes a form of liberation, free to move forward not as someone erased and remade, but as a complete person whose past continues to reverberate through every new gesture. In the end, the “Suicide” fingerprint is both legacy and testament, an intimate graffiti etched on time’s wall, inerasable and true.