Creativity Quote by Paul Butterfield

There is a weary triumph baked into Butterfield's line: not the swagger of a star, but the stubborn satisfaction of a working musician who outlasted the industry's churn. "I guess" is doing real labor here. It softens the statement into something tossed off, almost accidental, as if survival wasn't a strategy so much as a reflex. That shrugging cadence reads like blues talk: humor as armor, understatement as confession.

The subtext is half practical, half bruised. "They" is the whole machine in one pronoun: labels, promoters, critics, trends, band politics, even audiences chasing the next wave. Butterfield came up in a scene that prized authenticity, then watched rock turn into an economy of reinvention. In that world, to "get rid of you" isn't just being fired; it's being rendered irrelevant. The sentence frames endurance as the one leverage ordinary artists can claim when taste and gatekeepers are fickle.

It also hints at the cost. Staying around long enough can sound like hanging on, not necessarily flourishing. Butterfield's career sits in that tension: revered for his Chicago-blues credibility and early cross-racial band at a moment when that mattered, later less comfortably marketable as the spotlight moved. The line lands because it refuses the tidy myth of genius rewarded. It offers a different romance: persistence as a quiet act of defiance, a way to make the culture acknowledge you, if only because it runs out of ways to erase you.