Creativity Quote by Kim Deal

Kim Deal is puncturing a familiar rock-media myth: the idea that a “backlash” is some organic, spontaneous rejection rather than an artifact of attention. Her line lands because it reframes backlash as a kind of lighting effect. When a band is small, the only people bothering to talk are the ones who already care; the coverage is effectively curatorial, even evangelical. Success doesn’t just expand the audience, it expands the incentives around the band: critics hunting for a counter-narrative, editors needing a peg, tastemakers guarding their credibility, rival scenes policing the border between “ours” and “theirs.”

The joke in “the first 11 years” is doing real work. It’s hyperbole with a weary gigging-band math behind it: if you were “getting backlash” before you were broadly known, what you were really getting was the normal friction of existing in public. Deal collapses the timeline to show how the concept becomes meaningless once it’s treated as an inevitable career phase, like the sophomore slump. The subtext is also a quiet defense of artists against the whiplash of coverage cycles. You don’t necessarily change; the story around you changes.

Contextually, it’s a musician describing the media ecology that forms around indie-to-mainstream arcs: the moment a band stops being a private enthusiasm and becomes a public object, discourse turns from “isn’t this great?” to “is it overrated?” Backlash, in Deal’s framing, isn’t proof of failure. It’s proof that you’ve become worth arguing about.