You Ain't Special

I start a new job next week, which means my salary is about to soar into six-figure peanuts range.  However, in so doing, I will largely be leaving my musician/student life behind.  Of course, that isn't to say I won't be playing music.  On the contrary, I have the feeling that with my new-found financial semi-stability, I'll be able to afford all sorts of fun new gear and finally be able to build that perfect home studio.  And my Big Pretentious Blog will in no way suffer.  If anything, I'm about to get even MORE pretentious.

Case in point: this idea that my generation (mid-to-late 20's) and the subsequent generations seem to possess, namely that we are the most talented motherfuckers in history and that our paltry accomplishments should be taken more seriously than cancer, is ridiculously over-saturating the lives of nearly everyone with whom I come into contact.  When I told my friends that I got a new job, no one was excited.  Except for a select few, they all responded with some iteration of "Ugh, why?" 

Listen, if you're in your mid 20's and have to ask why someone would get a full-time job, then you have bigger problems than a blog, even this ridiculously amazing blog, can fix.  However, I'll try to explain things as best I can in the unlimited amount of space that I have.

The concept of "full-time musician" is sketchy at best.  Being able to eke out a living as a musician requires WAY more than 40 hours per week, and most of it is unpaid or actually costs money.  Sure, you're in business for yourself, but check out this breakdown: learning songs?  Unpaid.  Rehearsals?  Cost money.  Keeping up your chops?  Unpaid.  Recording?  Costs money.  Exactly which parts of that self-run business sound appealing or profitable to you?

Full-time musicians tend to make money in one of two ways: teaching or gigs, and neither is particularly lucrative unless you happen to score a professorship or an awesome gig with an established band or recording studio as either an engineer or contracted musician.  If none of those things occur, you can count on either struggling to make ends meet on your own as a teacher, or working for someone else anyway in a small local music school (splitting your teaching fees with the house), all the while fighting bar owners for a pittance after playing 3 full sets on Friday and Saturday nights.  Self-employed?  Not so much.

"But Uncle VerbalShred, my parents/boyfriend/girlfriend have/has lots of money!  Surely they'll support me until I hit it big!"

First off, you shut up when Uncle VerbalShred is talking.  Secondly, good for you.  I'm sure that your parents or significant others absolutely want to support a 25-year-old fully-functioning adult financially for the foreseeable future.  However, some of us actually want to make our own money, because we hear that that's how things used to work.  I wasn't making enough money as a musician to fund the lifestyle I want, therefore I decided to see what else was out there.  This whole paragraph, however, is just a symptom of a larger problem that pervades my generation: entitlement. 

Like a bunch of little three-year-old children, many people my age have massive entitlement issues.  The sense of entitlement that surrounds people in my peer group is actually simply astonishing, and I wholeheartedly believe it stems from incremental successes that, in the long run, are like giving out gold stars for reading a Dr. Seuss book.  I've seen people begging for money to record an album instead of getting second and third jobs, and then actually receiving donations instead of derision before bragging about their successful recordings.  I've known people whose parents paid for every single piece of gear they own (sometimes totaling over $20,000), none of which has ever been used on a gig, then heard them talk about how they've mastered guitar and need their parents to buy them other instruments.  I've seen people with less than two years of gigging experience proclaim themselves to be experts in the field of live performance because once they field-repaired an amp by screwing in a loose input.  I've had people with absolutely no recording experience tell me that they know exactly how to mic a drumset because they took a production class. 

All of this adds up to the fact that certain people feel they deserve special treatment because they believe they're already successful, while the fact of the matter is that if they were successful enough to warrant special treatment, they wouldn't be gigging on Staten Island every weekend or playing free shows at dingy coffee houses.  I implore my students who read this to NOT feel entitled to anything.  Be thankful for gigs while acknowledging your own talent.  If your parents or significant other buys you gear, make them proud and thank them by learning that gear and then USING it for lots of gigs and/or recordings. Work your asses off to record or build up your chops.  Don't take precious hours for granted.

While I'm sure I'll experience entitlement issues (2) in corporate America, I'm also sure I'll be getting paid enough to insure that I don't care (1).  See, no matter how hard I work at being a private music teacher, which is the aspect of musicianship I'm most in love with, I'll never be able to rise above a certain point unless I have solid financial backing behind me.  Because I harbor no illusions about what precisely I'm entitled to, I plan on earning that solid financial backing for myself, to eventually either go into business for myself or have enough of a savings to just coast on my earnings as a teacher. Otherwise, I can never complain again, and I simply won't have any of that.

So while I'm certainly nothing special, neither are the people who believe their little chunk of local success should result in their being handed the world on a silver platter.  And the sooner we stop believing in the hype (our own and that of our hardly-successful peers), the better off we'll all be.  As the wisest man I've ever met, Laine Thompson, once said, "When you're dead, you're a blurb on the back page of the newspaper."  More people need to remember that.
 

Too Cool for School

I just finished slogging through an 1130 page novel (Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson) about math in roughly two weeks (NOTE: page count added to indicate my reading speed in a book through which I'm "slogging").  Well, it wasn't really about math.  It was about World War II gold and the modern threat of the disintegration of traditional political and economic borders due to the encroaching inevitability of ubiquitous high-speed internet in southeast Asia the Philippines.  However, there was a staggeringly large amount of information on both number theory and cryptanalysis contained in the text.  Indeed, there was enough about it to cause a caesura in my reading of the novel, during which I read a bunch of free information about elementary number theory (available in your local library if you're a traditionalist, or on the internet if you're lazy).  It's been quite a long time since a novel has made me fundamentally question my worldview, and while I'm not sure if anyone else would accuse Stephenson of being an epiphany-inducing author, I am about to do so.

I've always loved stories, and whether those stories are contained in books, comics, video games, or films (pornographic or otherwise), I've been able to transport myself through time and space to really feel myself become part of the stories (especially the pornographic films).  Naturally, then, I majored in English Literature in college, where I learned that stories are both banal and a tool for white male imperialists desperately seeking to maintain their tenuous-yet-iron grip on the economic forces that keep them in power while holding down the rest of what could be modern society but is instead, thanks to those aforementioned stories, an ignorant mish-mash of uneducated wage slaves whose only function is to feed the maw of the white-male-ruled military-industrial complex. 

Right on, man, white males ruin everything.  Wait...what?

What I've realized, thanks in part to Stephenson's novel, is that the entire preceding sentence is, for lack of a better phrase, complete and utter horseshit (also see my humorously crossed-out phrase in the first paragraph).  Unfortunately, it's also completely and utterly the point of every literature class I've been a part of in the single undergraduate and two graduate institutions I've attended.  Assuming that the dominant discourse somehow pervades and greatly affects the quality of your daily life assumes that you have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about the which discourse(s) affect you and how you can somehow use them to facilitate financial gain.  This is the life of the social theorist, the cultural critic, and the English major, who, for all their theoretical smarts, still haven't figured out how to do anything that would be considered useful outside of academic circles.  If you think you're affected by the oppressiveness of a discourse, congratulations!  Your family was rich enough to send you to a college where they taught you about discourses. 

Thank god our discourse runs the world!

I wrote all that to write all this: I've spent the greater part of the past six years defending my decision to study literature, both to others and to the gnawing sense of regret that eats away at me when I try to make Photoshop work and it laughs at me.  I think now I'm finally man enough to admit I made a mistake when it comes to my chosen academic field, because I fell in with the crowd of story-haters.  After almost a decade of reading for academic gain, I'm  reading for pleasure again, and I've found the divine something that made me love stories in the first place.  This is why I crossed out the sentence in the first paragraph.  Neil Stephenson's book is certainly about the eroding of traditional concepts of border, but it's also just a really fucking cool story about war, smart people, computers, and Cap'n Crunch. 

I've realized that the absolute dumbest thing you can do is study something you love in college, unless that something is one of the sciences or mathematics, where you genuinely need the massive amounts of resources a university can place at your disposal in order to advance in the field.  If you like music, stay away from musicology.  If you like stories, stay away from literature.  If you like God, then absolutely stay away from theology courses. 

Of course, this won't be true for everyone.  If you genuinely believe the world operates on a sub-conscious level, that we are all controlled by philosophical ideas spinning in the vortex of our minds, then go become a cultural critic, and write a book about the dairy discourse perpetuated by entrenched power-farmers who seek to keep most of us in chains while offering us only delicious cheese to pay for the labor they steal from our very bones.  I, however, will go ask an evolutionary biologist why cheese is so fucking delicious, and where I can get some.

Same Old Song and Dance

I know at least one of you has asked yourself recently, "Hey, where's that jerk been?  You know, the guy who posts his opinions about things no one asked him about?"

Hi! Here I am!  I had been sullenly and silently debating with the only other individual who's opinions count as much as my own, and when I at last manned up and asked my reflection what he thought of overhauling Big Pretentious Words, he said that I should probably stop taking random hallucinogenic drugs handed to me by people on the street just stick to the what I know: everything.

Luckily for him, I agreed.  So today I bring you an introduction to the new original Big Pretentious Words.  No longer will I attempt to digest and regurgitate my experiences as a graduate student until I begin writing my thesis (t-minus 3 months).  Instead, I will be spewing superfluous opinions on Life, The Universe, and Everything, topics about which others (particularly Brits) have written far more concisely and cogently, but not nearly as arrogantly (except Brits).  I'd love to be known as the realest motherfucker on the face of the internet, but I'll probably only be thought of as the second half of that title when I'm thought of at all.  So be it.  Flying under your radar will allow me to sneak unseen into your brain avoid another class-action lawsuit.

To begin, I'd like to mention the rampant charades being paraded around that self-righteous time sink people call social media regarding the Japanese tsunami and ensuing nuclear crisis.  By the by, if you feel the need to mention the irony of me posting this blog to Facebook, first look up "irony", then look up "trite".

Back to the problem at hand: there is no problem, at least not for almost every single person on my admittedly, and understandably, scant list of Facebook friends.  Yet most of them saw fit to mention that they would be "keeping Japan" in their collective "prayers" while their "heart went out" to the Japanese people.  All of that is a lie.  Most of the people who were most vocal on Facebook probably spent their lunch break doing something like this:

"And then Charlie Sheen said his salad was winning!"

Meanwhile, on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, this was happening:

"What does the asshole from Men at Work have to do with this?!?"

If I learned nothing else from kindergarten (and I didn't), it's that actions speak louder (and hit harder) than words.  While it's wonderful that you say you're praying for the victims of the tsunami, that won't put clean water in their cups, or food in their stomachs.  It won't do anything except make you feel better about eating a $10 salad and let your friends know that you read/watch the news. 

And please remember that that being selfish doesn't make you a bad person.  It makes you a person, a member of the human species whose main goals are survival and reproduction.  But in the future, please spare the rest of us the guilt-ridden inner thoughts that drive you to update your status with "OMG Japan is fuuuucked...I feel so bad for them :(" when ten minutes later you're asking whether you should eat a grilled chicken salad or Indian food when you go to lunch.