Time & Perspective Quote by Arto Lindsay

Nostalgia can be a quiet flex, and Arto Lindsay’s version lands like a backhanded love letter to an old New York. He’s not romanticizing hardship for sport; he’s drawing a line between two eras of artistic life: one where making a scene required actual friction, and another where visibility arrives prepackaged. The key phrase is “apart from a lot of attention.” It’s less about purity than about conditions. If you’re building a band, a language, a community with no spotlight, you’re forced into invention. You can’t outsource momentum to algorithms, press cycles, or a market already hunting for “the next thing.”

The subtext is a critique of attention as both currency and contaminant. “They had to really struggle” frames struggle as formative, not merely miserable. It’s an ethic of self-making: you earned your identity through constraints, through cheap rent, precarious jobs, and the strange freedom of being ignored. That “really exciting time” isn’t just sentimentality; it’s the thrill of a city that functioned as an incubator because it hadn’t yet been optimized.

Context matters: Lindsay comes out of downtown’s late-70s/80s art-music ecosystem, where cross-pollination (no wave, punk, experimental art) thrived in the gaps left by mainstream culture. When he says “moved here,” he’s describing migration as creative ambition, but also hinting at a closed chapter: the kind of city that lets outsiders arrive broke, stay weird, and still have time to become themselves.