Creativity Quote by Desmond Dekker

"Things will get better if you just hold out long enough" carries the plainspoken voltage of a musician who understood survival as both mood and method. Desmond Dekker came out of Kingston’s rude boy era, when ska and rocksteady weren’t just dance music but street reportage: unemployment, policing, migration, and the grind of making dignity out of scarcity. In that context, “hold out” isn’t a pastel self-help slogan. It’s a strategy for getting through the week without losing your nerve, your community, or your sense of tomorrow.

The intent is deceptively simple: offer hope without pretending the struggle is imaginary. Dekker’s best records often balance swagger with vulnerability, and this line does the same. It doesn’t promise justice, or quick change, or a savior. It promises time. That’s a smaller pledge, but it’s one that can actually be kept. The subtext is almost transactional: endure now, because history has a way of turning, because scenes shift, because the beat changes, because your luck might, too.

There’s also a sharper edge: “if” places responsibility on the listener. Better is conditional, not guaranteed. That ambiguity mirrors the immigrant story tied to Jamaican music’s global rise, where persistence can be rewarded but is never safe. The line works because it meets listeners where they live: in the long middle stretch between wanting change and seeing it, when holding out is its own kind of victory.