Getting beyond the snare, tricking the trap and opening mine!

The above is me as a teenager (1986) being a 'pop siren' or attempting to be a desirable 'industrial product'. Everyone told me I looked 'so fabulous' on the day and assured me that fame and money were just around the corner! As they say one is born everyday and there is no fool like a young fool following her 'dream'.


However as confessions go a mad pulsating interest in the communal muse could be construed as a weakness, a symptom of my midlife crisis, pure folly and a form of insanity. However this word muncher and page devourer views things through a different glass lightly. As all the doom merchants and grey expressionists purge the music industry of all it's joy I stand firm on the rainbow. 


Just because the industrial model is producing mass market TV celebutantes that rise on a Christmas whim and fall on the rocks of the New Year, it does not mean we all have to throw our toys out of the pram. And before you ask celebutauntes is a word btw wikkipedia said so. For those of us that are in it 'for the love' then all this conditional discharging of "I release this sound into the world and expect this in return" will have to change. Cave people didn't expect royalties folks, they just enjoyed themselves and got down with the crushed bettles.


Most artists I speak to still measure their success by how much money they are making regardless of genre, wedge talks and poverty hurts because it means you are unsuccessful and then by extension that you are 'not any good' which is the hidden crippling fear of anyone brave enough to perform. In my other capacity as an A & R person for The Big Chill Label (www.bigchill.net/label) and generally from working with musicians  for the last few decades nothing gets the jollies going better than a nice big pay packet. It's a beautiful thing believe me when it happens but this latent desire for money is undermining us all. 


Michael Jackson didn't seem to me to benefit from the industry although he is technically on a 'product level' it's biggest 'success' story. I don't know anyone that could look at his life and envy the squalid and merciless way it ended. Even though he was thought to be on a ground breaking and high royalty of 25% that still meant the label was on 75%. Would anyone in normal day to day life stay in a job where they only got 25% of the income they generated. I think there would be riots but as artists we are so impoverished that if anyone waves a few hundred quid at as we are practically prepared to sign our lives away.


I remember as a teenage wipper snapper signing to Virgin 10 and thinking that at long last I was going to be a 'star'. It felt like my personal invisibility cloak was going to be washed away by the magical waves of acclaim. Now I know that was dumb, but I still see people tied up in that reasoning. Making music is a gift, if you are lucky enough to posses that gift sharing it is a necessity.


The fact that most talented people now have access to the tools that are needed to create music is not a tragedy, it is a fundamental revolution in the musical arts. It makes the 'cottage music business' a real possibility and with energy, commitment and above all patience, sustainable and psychologically healthy careers become possible. It may lack the dysfunctional immortal glitz of the 'superstar' but it does in some way free us all from a boring and culturally domineering cliche.


As far as I am concerned the more music the merrier.  I know media and industry types are perturbed by the random output of the masses but I love it. I rejoice because however good or bad at it you are making music makes people happy. It might be hard to brand, without leaders and clearly defined 'scenes' and 'trends' but out there in the ether, stories are being told and songs are being sung that will endure and will be born into and out of this patient and tolerant musical revolution.