Hi, I wanted to write a blog post but I decided to try speaking in video again because the fact is that I have to switch things up in this way or else I will get exploded by Uranus since he is currently passing through my house of work…. he is opposing my sun too which means I need to get a nose ring or something….
If anyone is reading this, please say hi. I have been isolating myself in an attempt to get more work done & stay out of trouble but it is really getting to me…
Tag: charity
The music industry has perverted the relationship between musicians and people with ears. Either the musician is a star and you must approach them as a grovelling fan or they are an ‘aspiring’ musician to whom you should drop a few coins as an act of charity. Both scenarios are false and repulsive.
I’ve known tragic cases where musicians died of loneliness despite having plenty of ‘fans’ because all these fans assumed the musician must be swimming in a sea of adulation & wouldn’t want to be bothered by them. Meanwhile the musician was actually living in isolation and abject poverty until they went insane and offed themselves. Unless a musician is super famous, odds are you have more money and friends than they do. So why be a fan when you could be a friend instead?
I know some people don’t want to know the people behind the songs because they feel it would ruin the songs for them. And yeah it probably would but isn’t that what life is about? Popping fantasy bubbles and replacing them with realities which you eventually decide are even tastier?
There are probably many men who would enjoy sex more if it could just be about the hole and they never had to meet the person behind the hole. But we train them to meet the person anyway because otherwise the thrill of the hole fades and they end up empty and bitter. In some cases they are even shot to death then hung upside down in the town square to be jeered at by their neighbors.* So just because it is simpler to see songs as divorced from their creators does not ultimately make it the way to go. If music is bread, musicians are the bread’s crust. Learning to eat your crust is a big part of life.
In fact I think the ultimate model for funding music would be an informal patronage system where music is free but those who like it fund the artist in some way big or small. But this can’t happen until musicians and listeners first become friends because I doubt many humans want to patronize a stranger or a star who is hovering above them.
It repulses me when artists are raising funds and say things like “If you donate 50 dollars you get to have lunch with me.” That is like paying for sex. Most humans aren’t into it. We don’t want to lunch with someone who considers it an honor for us to lunch with them. Once we reach maturity we don’t want to be no one’s fan no more.
So the first step in considering how musicians can earn a living is really to take money off the table altogether & heal the corrupted relationship between artist & listener. Place them on the same level and connect them.
And drop the “Support Local Artists” nonsense as well. Barf. It makes musicians sound like pathetic beggars with no inherent value who must be kept on life support out of the goodness of our hearts. If you don’t like a musician, please don’t support them. Would you take someone on a date because you felt sorry for them? It is cruel because it bonds them to someone who secretly finds them worthless. Set these losers free to find people who actually love them or else to find a new profession altogether. But prolong not their suffering through false friendom.
ON THE OTHER HAND…. if you believe the musicians you know suck, consider if this is really true or if you have actually become a brain dead zombie through watching too much American Idol. Did you know that if you use a vibrator on a regular basis you stop being able to enjoy sex? The same principle applies to music, food and everything really. When we become used to unnaturally stimulating products free of roughage that provide quick dopamine fixes we lose our taste for things which are more complex, fibrous & wholesome. Perhaps when you hear a local musician they miss chords, sing off key or use clunky lyrics. THE HORROR!!! But really, why does it matter?
Music is not a talent show. It’s about what touches the heart and something rough and awkward is as likely to do so as an overblown symphonic barf bag. Forget taste & critics & Shakespeare. It is just humans expressing feeling. Put yourself on the same level as the music and try to open up to it. Don’t hover above it like a disembodied brain trying to decide if it is worthy of you. Humble yourself and see if you get something from it. If you do, hit on the musician afterwards. Or at least say hi.
Cause one cool thing about being friends with a musician is that your spirit will certainly work its way into their music. Every song I’ve written was inspired by at least one person I know, although in some songs multiple souls overlap. I never tell the people cause this would seem super fucking creepy. Sometimes I don’t even realize who the song is for until later. It isn’t an intentional process, just an unavoidable organic reality. Pieces of other people enter your heart and come out as sounds.
So please. A Christmas Plea. Consider that music could be something other than an impersonal commodity to be purchased from our overlords. It is a living spirit and by befriending the musicians you become a part of it.
And in this way you shall enter the realm of the Immortals and through Paradise forever and ever shall your soul fly free.
The End.
* This is a reference to famous man ho Mussolini, not the figment of a sick imagination.
Communism cannot be defeated. It represents important truths and until capitalism wrestles with these and incorporates them into a broader capitalist vision the desire for communism will not go away. These truths include interdependence and the realization that power does not equal value. In other words, survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the best.
Supporters of capitalism champion values such as self-reliance and competition. Both beautiful things. But this frequently morphs into the naive view that whoever wins a competition was in fact superior and has more to offer society than those he vanquished.
A 60 second reflection on life will show this is not the case. Those who survive may be best at surviving, but this does not mean they contribute more to society. If baby Jesus were to be defeated by the AIDS virus, that is natural selection, but can we truly say the cream has risen to the top? Likewise, the winner of a business competition may have been best at winning the competition, but that is no guarantee they offer more value or a better product than those they beat out. Were the Mongols inherantly superior to those they destroyed? No. Might does not make right and might has little correlation to value.
But those with a religious belief in capitalism frequently cling to the notion that that which does survive and thrive is that which SHOULD survive and thrive, conveniently blocking from their minds the truth that evil is frequently well versed in survival. But this naive capitalist dogma relieves us of the human responsibility to ENSURE the survival of the good by throwing our weight behind it. We can sit on our hands and watch gladiators behead children while mumbling something about Darwin under our breaths. If people do not feel a moral responsibility to see that good triumphs, capitalism will create nothing more than a cesspool of oppression.
Allowing life to take its course is not evolution. Evolution is taking responsibility for what happens in our world. Might makes right leads to de-evolution.
The principle of self-reliance can also be troubling. On the one hand, it is a beautiful thing when people take responsibility for their own survival. On the other hand, most people who consider themselves ‘self-reliant’ pay little attention to all the people and systems which make their self-reliance possible. Then, when they see someone else struggling to survive, they make the naive assumption that a lack of self-reliance must be the problem.
Yet again, a 60 second reflection easily reveals the complicated truth that many (most?) human problems are external in nature. Slavery and systems which create functional enslavement being just two examples. As far as we know, the animals in the zoo are every bit as self-reliant- or would be anyways- as animals in the wild. To attribute the struggles of others to their inferior moral characters is simply a fantasy which relieves us of guilt as we prioritize the most trivial pleasures for ourselves over the basic needs of others. Because if we were to help them, they would never learn self-reliance, now would they?
There is also the brain-dead conflation of poverty with laziness. While this may be true in some cases, the reality is simple. Our wealth is determined by a single factor- how much money we have received from others. Lazy people frequently position themselves to receive quite a bit of money. Hardworking people can also position themselves to receive good money from their labor. Or hardworking people can find themselves in situations where they receive little or no rewards- in some cases even ending up in debt from nonstop work.
But it is always the case that wealth is simply a measure of what we have received. Never a measure of what we have given. Hardworking people all over the world can barely feed their children. In many cases the poor are the most hardworking segment of society. We call them the labor class. They are contributing but aren’t positioned to receive wealth- either through their own lack of skill in RECEIVING or an actual lack of options. In astrology, for example, the sign that rules work- Virgo- is associated with poverty. Virgo focuses constantly on solving the problems of those around him and is rewarded with scorn. A pattern we have all witnessed.
So this is yet another problem with religious capitalism- we measure people’s value by how much they have received from society, not how much they have given to it. We convince ourselves that these are one and the same. This relieves us of guilt & casts our fawning admiration towards the rich in a more flattering light. We admire their contributions. We aren’t sniveling syncophants drawn to power like a moth to hell.
So while I am fully team capitalism, I embrace it as an economic system- NOT a religious philosophy. Capitalism will never ensure the cream rises to the top. It is does not magically cause good to triumph over evil. That is OUR job. If we sit on our fat asses and watch humanity slug it out in a gladiator pit just waiting to suck the dick of the winner we will create a hell on earth. Cause you know who the winner will be. Satan. When capitalism is used as an excuse to free ourselves of moral responsibility, that is just the way things go.