Success Quote by Roy Ayers

Roy Ayers frames fame as a drug you can take or refuse, and the punchline is that he chose a different high: deeds, not applause. The phrase "trip on" does double work. It nods to the psychedelic slang that hangs around funk and jazz culture, while also calling out a very real industry hazard: success turns into its own hallucination, a feedback loop of ego, entourage, and bad decisions. Ayers makes it sound almost quaint that his friends had to warn him, which is exactly the point. He positions himself as someone who saw the trap clearly enough to redirect the rush into something boring on purpose.

The subtext is survival. For Black musicians coming up in the postwar recording economy, popularity rarely translated into lasting security; labels owned masters, touring wore bodies down, and trends moved faster than royalty statements. Buying property is the anti-glamorous flex: a hedge against the volatility of a music career and the historical reality of exclusion from wealth-building. He isn’t just talking about "being responsible". He’s quietly claiming agency in a system designed to extract it.

It also reframes what counts as "tripping". If the culture expects the artist to splurge, self-destruct, or perform excess as part of the brand, Ayers’ twist is that investment is its own thrill - a private, compounding rebellion. Popularity fades; real estate sits there, stubbornly unromantic, paying rent long after the crowd moves on.