Art & Creativity Quote by Alan Vega

Vega frames authorship as delayed comprehension, not instant ownership. The line sounds casual, even self-deprecating, but it’s really a philosophy of how art becomes legible: only after time has stripped away the noise of process, ego, and context. “Five years” isn’t a literal timetable so much as a buffer zone - long enough for the memory of struggle to fade, long enough for the world to move on, long enough for the maker to become, in effect, an audience.

The subtext is a refusal of the romantic myth that artists fully “know” what they’ve made the moment it’s finished. Vega’s work with Suicide thrived on abrasion, repetition, and provocation - music built to feel immediate and unsafe. Yet he’s saying the true listening comes later, when it stops being a weapon you’re holding and becomes an object you can examine. There’s a quiet acknowledgement, too, of how recording fixes something that, in the moment, felt like a moving target. Time turns the messy present into a document.

Context matters: Vega came up in a scene that was always being misheard - dismissed as noise, treated as a threat, later canonized as proto-everything (punk, industrial, synth-pop). His “five years” reads like a survival tactic against both failure and hype. If you can’t even hear your own music yet, you’re less tempted to chase immediate validation. You keep making the next thing, and let history do the listening.