Creativity Quote by Arto Lindsay

It lands like a throwaway line, but it’s doing the downtown-New York thing: making a whole scene sound casual enough to fit in your pocket. Arto Lindsay isn’t name-dropping Mars to flex; he’s signaling proximity to a moment when “band” didn’t mean career path so much as an art tactic. The sentence is almost aggressively unglamorous: “friends,” “this band,” “used to,” “a lot.” No mythology, no capital-H History. That’s the point.

Mars, of course, sits in that late-70s No Wave constellation where abrasion was a philosophy and competence was suspicious. Saying they “used to play a lot” reframes what’s often treated as a rarefied avant-garde artifact into something closer to a habit: they were around, they were loud, they were constantly testing the room. The subtext is about density and access. Scenes aren’t built on one legendary night; they’re built on repetition, cheap bills, and friends showing up.

Lindsay’s phrasing also slips past the usual archive-making impulse. He’s an artist who understands how quickly subcultures get embalmed into trivia. By refusing a dramatic anecdote, he highlights the more interesting truth: the radical thing wasn’t a single performance, it was the frequency. “A lot” implies a community with enough venues, patience, and shared appetite for risk to sustain constant playing - and enough indifference to mainstream validation that no one bothered narrating it as destiny.