hardlyknower.net

Why the hell do we do it? Well . . .

“Because we want to,” we could say, and we’d be wrong.

Maybe you could stop there – maybe you can just say, “We want to get it out there,” and leave it at that.

Maybe we can say, “Well, we all want to be heard!,” and that would tell the totality of the story.

. . . But anyone who’s made music and put it out in a place accessible by large numbers of people, anyone who’s spent years honing the craft of making sound out of silence, anyone who’s lived their life to a constant beloved soundtrack to which they feel compelled to contribute – any true musician – knows there’s more to this.

Listen:

Releasing music is a batshit insane thing to do. And if you care about how many people listen to your music? Loony bin.¹ It’ll turn you into a helpless gremlin, a crazed subterranean creature at the mercy of algorithmic deities.

Here is the hidden truth:

Creating music is painful.

It hurts at every stage:

First you get the idea. How did you get the idea? Probably, something bad happened.

Then you dig into the thing that happened, and you find an emotional truth. Emotional truth is usually not fun.

Third, that truth transmutes itself² into a kernel of the idea, which pops into a piece of sound. The sound reflects the truth and the inciting incident, which brings you straight back to the emotional truth, but with more clarity, which hurts even more.

Now it’s time to turn this experience into a product.³ It’s time to record your truth. You spend hours or days capturing performances until you find the one that feels indicative of this immutable truth. (This then forces you to re-examine the truth once again.) You worry the entire time whether this is worth doing. Whether it’s actually good or you just think it’s good because you made it.

Next we mix and master. Either you do it or someone else does it.

1. If you do it, you’ll be spending the entire time fighting your performances.
2. If someone else does it, you’ll spend the entire wait time partially sure that the mix engineer hates your fucking songs.

Finally, we get to the release –

Actually, maybe not yet. We have to promote this shit,⁴ whether you like it or not, so that people will care when it comes out. Why would you want to throw your work into a void? And, as we all know, promoting something is the only way people will care about it. We have to find social media trends and revamp them for our own personalities and tastes. We have to sell it. And we all know that selling a piece of yourself fucking sucks.

. . .

Okay, now we can release it. Today’s the day. You feel a buzz. Maybe this thing isn’t perfect, but you’re done, it’s over, no more fretting, no more wondering if it’s right. It’s out of your hands now.

And at that moment, you become proud of it. You become a parent to an art baby. And that art baby can do no wrong. That baby came from you. You created this. Now it’s time to see what other people think about it. Hopefully it’ll spark conversation, it’ll maybe even polarize the public, someone will talk about the snare drum sounding bad and someone else will chime in that the mix is amazing and the comments go back and forth and –

Oh. No one’s commenting? You’ve got somewhere between zero and one hundred likes? Let’s see how many plays it has, how many of our friends and family have heard it. The counter says – wait, really?

You’ve made an artistic statement which you have now accepted s so cohesive, so awe-striking, so sonically perfect, so amazingly done that it will affect every person who encounters it, but the next thing you know, you’re crying on the kitchen floor because the counter says, “17 plays,” which is clearly not enough to offset the emotional energy you just expended, the time you sunk into creating this work, the social events you skipped to record guitars, the afternoons digging through crates to find the sample that tied your masterwork together in the most tasteful, expressive way that anyone, ever, could have done.

This is most of what being an artist is. The numbers may be higher or lower for you, but I’m guessing that for a large majority of artists, this is the basic experience. And it happens over, and over, and over, and over.

So why the hell do we do it?

Because, well . . .

Because Fuck it, dawg.

What the fuck else are you going to do? Are you going to just not try? Are you going to spend the rest of your life wondering, What if I had actually made that music? Are you going to sit there and say, “This is impossible,” and never even start? Is that the way you want to live your life?

And what exactly is impossible? Is it impossible to gain a following? Is it impossible for your song to blow up? Is it impossible to get traction in the industry?

All of those things are simply unlikely.

But I’ll tell you what is actually impossible: It’s impossible for The Artist to truly be fulfilled in any area of life unless she creates. The Artist will think about her work on bike rides, in subways, on first dates, while working her shitty job. The Artist will fixate on everyday sounds, pallets, single words, small sentences, her emotions, others’ emotions, the cover of a book – and in all these, she will see her own Art.

But she is not truly seeing her Art. She is seeing reflections and future ghosts of what she must make. And she must make it. There is no choice. Otherwise, her Art will well up inside of her and flood her arteries, clogging them, her windpipe will grow smaller until she won’t be able to speak at all, so stuffed is she with the unmade.

And so she creates her Art in order to see her Art. The Art must exist outside of her. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t exist at all.

Now, do you need to release Art for it to exist? That’s not my question to answer. I’m not qualified to speak on that, so I’ll refrain.

Just kidding: Yes. You do.

But “releasing” could mean playing a show, or it could mean sending a Dropbox link to a groupchat. It doesn’t have to come out on the ur-streaming services.

But then, why not? For many, “It’s not real until it’s on Sp*tify.”⁵ A song must be released commercially for it to be Real Music.

So is that why we do it? To make it real? Is it not real if it’s not available?

Well . . .

Here’s the real truth: Music has always been a method of connection. This goes back further than Homer singing along to a lute⁶, it existed thousands of years ago and it’ll exist until humanity blows itself up: Music is communication.

And we want to communicate. Everyone does. Even if you don’t want to see people, you still make comments. You still tell the cashier how your day’s going. You still talk to friends or family.⁷

And if you don’t do these things? Well, you eat food someone else has cooked. That’s them communicating to you. You listen to music. You watch movies. You look at birds. You read books. All of this is communication, and we choose to interface with communications that reflect ourselves back to us. To watch a film that reflects you is to communicate something yourself.

So when we pour our souls into music, we communicate to the music. And the music begs us to be communicated to others. We can’t help it. We want it. We don’t want to fade into obscurity. We want at least some people to care about it.

Maybe our music will fail at reaching a wide audience. Maybe no one will give a shit.

Probably.

But if we don’t release it, it communicates only with us. It exists only as a projection. It is still the idea. We can look at it, we can experience it, we can testify, but that’s not enough. No, if we ourselves cared enough about this Art to spend time and energy and stare at emotional truths and bare our souls in service of communication and transmutation, then other people may feel something important when they see it.

It doesn’t matter that you got 17 plays. This Art now exists for everyone. Even if no one out of that anyone sees it. Even if only 10 people hear it.

If we don’t release it, we can’t truly communicate what we needed so badly to get out of our arteries and into existence. If we don’t let it free, all the transmuting and emotional truth will have been for no one but ourselves. It will always be for us and no one else at all.

And that, to both The Artist and The Art, is the loneliest life of all.

And so we chase the unlikely in service of the doing the right thing for what we’ve made.

So put the fucking song out.

1. I have schizoaffective disorder, so I’m allowed to say these things. You? Thin ice, buddy. ↩︎
2. Usually with very little input from you. ↩︎
3. Not necessarily “product” in the capitalistic sense of the word – no, more in the sense of a “product” of multiplication: Something that comes from something else. ↩︎
4. Or you don’t promote it, and you feel bad about it. ↩︎
5. This author has been told this. To many, Songs for Cassette Tape and Cell Phone is not a real album. It’s only some files on a Bandcamp page. ↩︎
6. -or whatever the fuck – ↩︎
7. I’m speaking on the majority of humanity in history. ↩︎