Creativity Quote by Abbey Lincoln

“Substantial” is Abbey Lincoln’s polite way of refusing the marketplace’s favorite lie: that art is valuable because it’s new. She’s talking about work that outlives the news cycle, the trend report, the argument of the week. In a jazz world that often fetishizes innovation for its own sake, Lincoln stakes a different claim: permanence isn’t stasis, it’s durability. The best songs don’t stay relevant by chasing the moment; the moment catches up to them.

Her phrasing is deceptively plain, almost conversational, but it smuggles in a hard standard. “It’s the truth now and it was the truth then” suggests an ethics of performance as much as an aesthetic. Lincoln didn’t just sing; she testified. Coming up through mid-century jazz, then making overtly political records like Straight Ahead in the wake of civil rights upheaval, she treated the stage as a place where feeling becomes evidence. The “truth” she means isn’t trivia or biography; it’s the underlying human pressure that a great vocal can hold without cracking: desire, grief, dignity, rage.

There’s subtext, too, aimed at gatekeepers. Calling something “forever” pushes back against critics who treat Black artists’ work as period pieces, valuable mainly as documents of an era. Lincoln insists the work isn’t an artifact; it’s a living instrument. If it’s substantial, it won’t flatter its time. It will keep indicting it.