It isn’t like that.
Folks are under the impression that if you make a decent song and spend a bunch of time on social media, pay a marketer, and play shows, you can earn a decent living. I think they’re delusional. The numbers don’t support their theories.
First off, there’s lots of us making music and not many folks who want to hear it. Value proposition sucks from the get go.
If you’re lucky, more power to you.
Look if you’re making moolah doing music, more power to you. Most of us don’t. But I contend most of us just make music because it’s what we do.
I like teaching and learning.
What we should do is teach music somehow. Frankly a lot of folks don’t like us because they’re stuck in a classic rock phase or something similar. They have playlists full of 50 year old songs! What do you do except teach them that new stuff is actually cool?
It’s not a moment to ridicule. It’s not time to show off. It’s not a money-making venture. It’s just education. America is bad at that, if you didn’t know. Hell, I dropped out of high school and have a blog with thousands of readers! America is also full of opportunities, even now! Let’s make learning one of them.
I got to grow in a safe environment for a while.
What happened for me was I used to like those 50 year old songs a lot too. But I learned from them and needed more. I wound up here in modernity. If you’re not learning anything, you’re probably stuck on the same fix for a lot of jobs.
Key:
What makes us not learn? For me in my life it’s been trauma. I only learn when I’m feeling safe enough to let my guard down.
Russell Vought helped me see it.
Russell Vought said he wanted to traumatize. Do you realize how cruel that is? But he wasn’t the first. Slave owners indulged in traumatizing too. Why? Because the learning. A slave didn’t need to know much to know more than them. The slave owners could not let that happen. They’d lose slaves. And not to put too fine a point on it, they’d feel stupid.
Folks like Russell don’t mind us feeling stupid. It’s job security for them.
Safety, then music.
If you’re like me and you want to teach folks, you gotta’ do something about the trauma. Learning feels like reading instructions on a sinking ship right now. We have to address that.
Make learning safe again. Once that’s finished you can bitch about your music “career.” (I’ll be right there with you if we make it through this shit.)
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