Creativity Quote by Santiago Durango

That one sentence reads like a door slamming on the myth of the “next stop: California” success story. Coming from Santiago Durango, it’s not just geography, it’s ideology: a refusal to treat the West Coast as the mandatory finishing school for serious music. California, in the American pop imagination, is where bands go to get polished, packaged, and absorbed into an industry machine that promises exposure while quietly sanding down the edges that made the work matter.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Never really” is a softener that still lands as a dare. It suggests they flirted with the idea, felt the gravitational pull, then decided the cost was too high - or that the benefits were mostly fantasy. And “play in California” isn’t “tour the West Coast.” It’s a shorthand for entering a particular ecosystem: label meetings, tastemaker culture, scene politics, the subtle pressure to become legible to outsiders with money.

There’s also a defensiveness that doubles as pride. In underground music, turning down the obvious ladder is a way of proving your autonomy - not just where you play, but who you play for. The subtext is: we weren’t chasing your version of arrival. We had our own map.

In a wider cultural context, it’s a neat little correction to coastal centrism. Not every band is trying to be discovered; some are trying to stay unconverted.