i guess it was never really hard to do once.
starting a rap artist brand and taking it high. the first name never works but the second one? Cracking extreme numbers and selling out a hometown headline… That seems to be a normal progression for the overachievers in Ontario. Some on my template, some not.
Dealing with that fall from grace, with grace, is just as rare. I’ve seen arrests, drugs, social media crashouts, and the ole cancellation. On the other side, I’ve seen reintegration into regular life by moving the fuck away, and the simple assimilation into family life plus another all-encompassing hobby or job. Some never come back, some are stuck in the forever state of posting old songs, or recording & never releasing a bunch of stuff that rots on Google Drive. The unlucky ones try to relaunch and fail to gain any traction.
I think there’s a few factors at play to a failed return. First being the obvious one, starting from zero when you were at a decent height prior can feel like too big of a step back and be very discouraging, especially when you expect the old dopamine hit of number go up but it never does. Next, being out of the scene so long, whether or not you’ve remained ear to the ground, you’ll undoubtedly be stuck in some of your old ways promotional and sonically that just don’t hit the same, and there’s probably a lot of nuances in the modern approaches that you don’t see unless you’ve been in it like the algorithm or microscopic cultural expectations. Finally, the network you built suddenly shows its face that you’re in showbiz and all of your two faced friends only give a fuck bout the benefits when it benefits them. They’ll drop some fire emojis for the first few posts but unless you magically pop off overnight and gain some clout they can suckle back off of you, you’re going to be left behind again. You’re crazy if you think they’ll spend some of their time couch hopping in LA to pull up someone they road the coattails of for half a decade. Your couch isn’t in LA.
As you see with reddd.net, I’ve cultivated my reintegration by creating a platform where I can incubate my content in my own way, with enough friction that only people who really want it will continuously engage with it. I get to watch from the VIP section while I prepare to return to the rat race (and bounce back and forth on if I really even want to)
//a short aside on where I’m at regarding that.. I kind of love the site & this method of engaging with the hobby more than I’ve loved Spotify or social media. I reap the same creativity hits (in cooler ways for me, like designing pages instead of cover art). It feels like the trade off is audience size and monetization, which tend to bastardize the content anyways.
The responsibility I feel leans less from the artist perspective now (which is great) and more towards the concept of the community. When I break it down to individuals, I hate every single one of you, but when I put you all together in this little bucket of sludge we call a culture or a scene, I want to sacrifice my time and energy to grow this ugly little symbiote into a place for all of us to have fun and grow.
This responsibility resulted in me relaunching Evrvdav.com over the weekend. So the site is back up, the history is there for reference, and the idea has been put out into the world. What does Evrvdav look like in 2026? (or much more likely 2027 lol). We’re now in a world where I hate dealing with artists, I can’t handle the stress of show promotion, and I no longer want or need to spend my time doing the parts of the business that I don’t find fun. This asks me to break it down on both sides and find out how I can do the fun parts and offload the annoying ones. The inkling showerthought this morning was partnering with larger promotion companies to let me curate the opening acts, content service providers, and the routing. I don’t think that’s hella useful for other established routes, but I could hire and/or train other people to handle the talent relations & show operations. Hmm… Food for thought.
Short aside was longer than the rest of the article lmfao. I guess I’ve been avoiding trying to conclude this point, because there isn’t a conclusion. I haven’t made it back into the world yet. I have 1 post on my artist IG, and I fight myself on whether to be the 9th Cetti on Spotify or manufacture a new nickname for myself that I’ll hate in a year. I don’t have the physical requirements for a stage set, nor do I have the mental requirements to balance my new life I’ve built with the bullshit that comes with the rat race.
Some questions don’t have answers the first 30 times you ask. I’m sure some never get answered. The questions asked in this article could even be incorrect. A lot of these “How?”s should maybe be “Can”s, to which the answer would be no. Should you come back? If the answer in your soul is yes, I’m sure there’s a few more binary decisions to pop through before you start asking what font to use on the cover art.
You know what they say about comebacks… If I really wanted a comeback, I’d… yeah, you know.
Good morning y’all.
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