Tuesday, January 28, 2014

All The King's Men

You get hard for too long you'll get brittle. Then you'll break easily. Everyone will be on eggshells because picking up pieces is a tedious job reserved for only the best of friends.

If you're brittle the anger seeps out. The anger is what made you hard in the first place.

Nature is vicious.

A man you've never met in a city you'll never visit on a side of the globe visible to you only via Google Earth – that man has written five hundred hit songs, and there's nothing you can do about it.

“You're good enough!” you tell yourself as you schlep your aging body and instrument through another winter of tepid open mic audiences.

You want to believe in raw talent, because you've probably got a lot of it. Rationally, you understand there's more to economic longevity than just skill – you need a support network, too – but something about that process feels “icky” so it's been stuck far back in your mind.

You want to believe in magic – that the system is not rigged against you.

But it is rigged. Big time.

If we can agree The Matrix is the world that's been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth, then when the Matrix tells us Max so and so is the biggest hit songwriter of all time... it's blinding us from a truth. The truth is The Matrix made Max successful.

But you don't want to believe that Music, your precious special domain, has been poisoned by power. Except that it has. Long ago. There was never an Eden, and that means there's no Adam for you, Eve. 

Time to grow up.