The Scroll Is Hungry, and It Wants Everything Fast
Last night I was working with a seven-minute song.
Seven minutes is not unusual to me. If a song needs seven minutes, then it needs seven minutes. Some songs unfold slowly. Some songs need room to breathe, room to build, room to drift before they land where they are supposed to land.
But in today’s world, seven minutes feels almost rebellious.
I needed to make short videos out of it for YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. I cut it down. The shortest version I could make at first was three minutes. That already felt like cutting away part of the body just to make it fit through a smaller door.
Overnight it pulled only forty-one views.
So this morning I cut again.
Then again.
Eventually I ended up with thirty-seven seconds.
Thirty-seven seconds from something that originally lived across seven full minutes.
And even then, I sat there wondering what exactly anyone is supposed to understand from thirty-seven seconds of something built to unfold over time.
That is one of the strangest frustrations of creating now. The scroll never stops. It moves before meaning has time to settle.
People do not wait for context anymore. They do not wait for atmosphere. They do not wait for tension to build. They want the punchline immediately, the loudest second first, the sharpest image first, the payoff before the setup.
But not everything is built that way.
Especially music.
Especially lyric-driven music.
For me, lyrics matter. I want to hear what is being said. I want to know why a line lands where it lands. I want metaphor, atmosphere, strange turns, hidden meaning, surreal texture. I like songs that feel like entering a room where the walls are moving a little, where the words reveal themselves slowly.
Some listeners hear rhythm first.
Some hear beat first.
Some want instant energy.
I understand that.
But when you write in layers, especially psychedelic or surreal writing, the meaning often does not happen in the first fifteen seconds.
Sometimes the first fifteen seconds are only the doorway.
And now we live in a time where many people scroll past the doorway because they want the entire house shown instantly.
Humor has the same problem.
Even a funny line often needs setup.
Without setup, sometimes the joke is just noise.
Without context, meaning collapses.
Maybe some of us are built differently. Maybe some minds still want detail, pacing, atmosphere, and unfolding thought instead of constant immediate reward.
Or maybe this is simply what artists now wrestle with every day:
How do you keep depth alive in a world trained to move before depth arrives?
Because sometimes cutting a piece shorter does not sharpen it.
Sometimes it just removes the very thing that made it worth hearing.
Here is my 37-second song short. Did I create enough attention for it to be seen? Less than an hour later, it has 156 views, no comments, no likes, and no shares. But that is only after one hour. I will follow up on this article. Leave a comment below Sign up.
