Yooo peace fam!
I been thinking a lot about what COVID actually did to the creative landscape.
Before 2020, content creation felt more like a secondary window into an artist’s craft. Comedians used it to show clips of their stand-up, musicians posted studio jams, and painters shared their process. It was actually pretty dope. Content was just a vehicle for a medium you spent years mastering.
Then the lockdowns hit, America got hooked on TikTok, and content creation stopped being a window…it became the art form itself. The metrics became the measure of how good you were. Suddenly, the culture looked at years of deep, intentional discipline and said: “Iight, cool. Now how fast can you bottle that up into a vertical video for the gram?”
If you could pivot your craft to that wavelength….you broke through. But if you were navigating real, heavy life in the background… that shift might’ve felt brutal.
For me?? Well, right when the world locked down, I was dealing with a heavy loss. In December, right before the pandemic hit and right before my wife and I had our baby girl, I lost my bro to suicide. He was a groomsman in my wedding and a huge part of my life’s mission. I barely had space to process that grief before the entire world flipped upside down.
COVID basically bullied my grief. SMH. It shoved it into a locker, stole its lunch money, and told it: Not now, chump. The world is on fire.
Funerals were masked. We couldn’t hold each other. Human connection…the main thing we need to heal from loss…was paused. And as a creative, trying to force myself to make “content” while bleeding inside … just burnt a brotha out.
The algorithm demands constant output. It don’t care if you’re grieving. But a broken spirit doesn’t need metrics; it needs grace. Trying to be a content creator was just me trying to play God with my own healing, and I collapsed under that pressure.
Throughout all of that chaos, while I was trying to make sense of the noise, I kept returning to the physical work of making and hand-dipping incense with Good Vibes Dealer (shameless plug: those are actually on sale now if you need to clear your space). Working with scent has always been grounding to me, but looking back, God was using it to show me something deeper about the art. There’s a scripture that talks about how we are like a pleasing aroma to God, spreading the fragrance of His knowledge everywhere we go. Your life, your work, your clumsy, broken attempts at expression…they aren’t just content for a feed. They are supposed to be an offering floating up to an altar.
My 2022 album, Knight Bro, was built around a verse my brother recorded. It was raw, chaotic, and full of problems because I was still in the thick of survival. I didn’t have the answers yet. But over time, after stripping away all the noise, I realized I had to stop relying on my own strength and just return to God.
That return didn’t feel like a punishment tho… it felt like walking back into your childhood home. Warm, familiar, cozy, but a mirror to who you really are.
After that surrender, I entered a season of quietness. I’m still in that stillness today, learning what it means to make music as true devotion rather than algorithmic performance. That journey is woven straight into my new single, “This Rocky Boat,” which is out right now as the first taste of my upcoming album, 2morrow Knight. It’s not about having a picture-perfect, clean-cut story. It’s just about having faith in where God is carrying you when the water gets rough and you can’t see the shore.
The algorithm demands you perform your pain for the crowd. Grace just asks you to bring it to the altar, light the incense, and sit still.
Peace,
-Gold
PS. If you made it this far, I’ma need my true homies to…