So the '80s were the enemy, the '90s were supposed to be your revenge, and now the '00s are you feeling like you've lost a ton of time somewhere and are scrambling to catch up. Let's start chipping away at this, shall we?
Ready whenever you are.
Okay, first of all, wrong, wrong, and wrong. But that's not my job as a psychoanalyst. I'm supposed to ask questions that gently lead
you to that conclusion.
Well that's why you're a hack and not a pro. And why I'm not paying you.
How would you know you're not? We both have the same bank account. Anyway ... now, it's okay to say irrational things here, so speak from your feelings on this instead of thinking it out too much. I understand you feel that somehow the 80's ripped you off by turning music into sterile, plastic-sounding Hallmark cards (with gargantuan snare drums).
Okay, part of that is definitely the world's growing pains as it adapted to the availability of digital technology for use in music. But what bothered me was that hardly anyone was speaking out against the inertia of fashion. If you thought you wanted to bring something organic and warm back in, you were outcast. It was very clear that anything other than the "now sound" of the 80s was not okay. Maybe it's because I was a teenager, and was mainly interacting with other teenagers, who generally aren't looking for anything with a history to it. But teens play a very important role in the direction of popular music. They're the gatekeepers. (And the major labels are the keymasters.)
What I don't get is, when I ask you to open up, throw dignity to the wind, and just tell me how you feel, you become funny and entertaining. But if I had asked you to be reasonable and realistic, you would have responded with anger and paranoia. Why do you always have to give people the opposite of what they ask you for?
I don't know.
Okay, back to the 80s. How did these trends in popular music "rip you off"? What
should have happened in the 80s? Should the industry have been laying some kind of fertile ground for the kind of music
you made, so that your own songwriting would have been embraced with open arms, and you would have gotten the girl, ridden off into the sunset, and lived happily ever after?
A better question would have been, why do I try to fit in by being superior in some way? Why did I believe that if I had no social skills, no muscles, no tan, no athletic ability, I could make up for it by being discovered by a major label at 16 or 17 to put out songs like
Insomnic Hallucinations,
A Moment Before Cosmic Death and
Qualified For Suicide in a nice yellow-toned 12"x12" shrinkwrapped package that would shock the bullies into dumbfounded impotence, win the respect of my friends, and get me the whole package with the girl and the sunset?
I think, being you, I can speak for you when I say you didn't really think that.
Maybe to some degree I did. After all, I did temporarily relenquish geekdom -- or try to -- which I regret. I had contact lenses (i.e. not glasses). I said things like "hey man". I said things like "I used to be good at math before I started smoking pot". I denied my inner geek to the extent that I could.
But that geek you hid was totally you. Sure, you were embarrassed about the 8th grade days with the plaid button-up shirt (always with a white t-shirt visible underneath), the corduroy pants and the "bowl" haircut. But that was the you that started listening to records. That was the you that set up multiple tape recorders in your bedroom so you could overdub yourself on yourself, and rigged the capstan so you could experiment with tape speed, and took cassettes apart to wind the tape inside-out so you could hear them backwards. That was the you that programmed the Commodore 64 to function as a synthesizer and sequencer. (Oh, and by the way, this all took place in THE EIGHTIES.) These don't sound like activities motivated by fame, fortune, or pussy.
Maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe my
lack of the usual motivations is a hindrance to my work's success on those levels.
Maybe so. The flip side is that a lack of fame and fortune won't stop you from pressing on with the creativity itself. Your arena is not Van Halen's arena. You can infer from this either that Van Halen are more successful than you (and why not, since most people would conclude this), that
you're more successful than
them (in that your music goes into a lot of "deep places" while theirs is more superficial and just-for-fun), or that you're on two entirely different planes, to be measured on two entirely different scales.
Okay, so if I didn't
start off thinking I wanted to "be that guy" ...?
You already
were that guy. You fancied yourself a celebrity because you were accustomed to people fawning over your talent. And as long as you live, every so often you get a "fix" of this.
So I don't get it. What exactly did I fail at?
"Failure", I think, is a meaningless concept. There are three things you can do -- you can try, and get it right -- try, and get it wrong -- or not try at all. The first one is great, the second is even better because it makes the first one all the better when you do nail it. Concept beaten into ground by many wise people long before us. And of course, all of this needs a frame to be defined by, known as the "goal". You have a tendency to avoid defining these. The closest you came to setting a goal for the 1990s was that you would somehow emerge as a successful songwriter. This was too vague. You did successfully
write songs, so you can't say you failed at that goal. But did you establish a real goal for what you were going to do with all that music? Okay, so now it's another decade. You're 35, and some of your musician friends seem to have bought into the idea that if you've hit your mid thirties and haven't gotten anywhere, that your future is pretty much unchangeable by this point. Are you buying this idea too?
Probably, a bit. Emotionally.
Yes, that's what I mean. How are you letting those kinds of ideas fester in your subconscious? How are you letting them impact your conscious choices? Did your musical and creative heroes succeed on the basis of
being young? And even if they did, so what?
I just don't want it to even be about age. I don't want that to even come up. It's irrelevant. I shouldn't have to use affirmations to empower myself. It should be a non-issue. I never thought about age before, and I thought it was stupid when people in their 30s brought it up as a reason to give up. There's a huge difference in the landscape now than in the late sixties when record companies were just glorified distributors. And the internet adds another layer of complication to it; you can't just be out there playing music and being neutral, you have to actually take sides, because it is a war. The role of the majors makes less and less practical sense. As their legitimate purpose becomes obsolete, all that's left is the illegitimate -- and the legacy artists, who probably never wanted to be on the anti-indie side, but have too much to lose by defecting.
Okay, suppose there were no internet, no CD burners, and so on. You would need a record label, and there would be no practical or ethical gray areas about pursuing one. Would you be knocking their doors down in that case? Did you knock down their doors back in the early 1990s? What was your
goal?
You hear different stuff, you read different stuff, even back then, even further back in the 80s. Books. Books about the
dark secrets about the music industry, and how you should never want a contract with a major, and how the best thing to do is put out your own record on your own label. The internet didn't create those gray areas. They were already there. So it was hard to say, "yes, getting this contract is my goal". Half of me felt I should focus on circumventing the need for such a contract.
Label lust is a powerful force, though. I was, not once, but
twice taken in by those stupid "labels" that ask you to chip in a "small" amount of money for the "privelege" of being on their samplers that they would "promote". Yes, twice. In the immortal words of George W. Bush, "fool me once, shame on you... fool me twice... uh... won't get fooled again..."
So that conflict was a sufficient reason for you to
not set a goal?
It caused me to teeter between two goals and commit to neither. I want to be involved in the making of the future, and this probably requires me to think past the obvious and well-worn paths. But I wouldn't spit in the face of the CEO of EMI if he walked into my living room.
