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.
