i was inspired by an article written by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker (here) about the process of enjoying the music that you love and to pay what you want for music you love. i didn't read the article before getting this spark of thought. so the article itself might just be a dissertation on the industry of the music business.
what i'm going to talk about here is the process of sharing and enjoying what you love. whether it's an opinion about a song or a record or if it's the song or video itself, just love what you love. just get behind it. you can't find music that you're going to love from the most obvious of places all the time. sometimes you have to be that person that takes the risk and post a song that no one cares about just to get someone else's brain thinking. it's an important process of life. and the biggest thing to come to grips with is you might never understand or hear or witness the fact that you were the person that inspired that creative spark.
you're not always going to read a new novel and check the back and find a footnote that says, "this entire story and interaction between my main characters was inspired by Steve Cuocci, a guy i know on facebook from a show i went to once. Thank you for posting that HEALTH song that time and thank you for the brief comment you left above the video. It became my everything." a lot of times, catalysts are the furthest from the foreground, the things that come in this little subversive and pervasive ways, they enslave you in your dreams and they delay you in your walk to brew your tea or pour your coffee. they come to you in a doodle or you think you hear someone say a line from the song you thought you forgot on line at the post office.
share everything.
always feel good about the things that you want to share. you like it, you want it to represent you on social media at that moment, so put it out into the world. don't base whether or not it was a good idea on how many likes or comments or shares you get. don't share it for anyone but you. share it like a banner you're waving from your porch.
FACT. i don't know how many people read this blog. i don't know if ANYONE reads this blog. i write poems and thoughts and dreams for myself here. sometimes i share things i'm proud of with the people i care about. sometimes i don't. i trust that at some point, someone will uncover this and read through some of it sometime. it's no big deal if no one does.
"the value of music is the value you extract from it"
listening to a record that i've heard no opinion on used to stress me out. it used to give me the feeling that i was walking down a pathway without any level of trust or any sense of direction. i've grown to understand that that very concept is what i've learned to love about music. sometimes i'll carry down the entire path and feel that a massive journey has been undergone. like i've crossed a desert or a tundra. i've recreated a whole new landscape of thought. and my virgin eyes and that path has been so clean that i feel that i've made my own impact on the place itself. other times i'll go through it without taking a single thing from it or feeling anything.
if it's something that i've received a recommendation from, so many different factors come into play. if they told me things to look for i might spend far too long in one position trying to translate their message into what's before my eyes or found in my ears. sometimes if someone has really torn something asunder, i'll be wondering and distracted why they found such a beautiful thing so terrible. ever worse, sometimes i'll take the time to agree with them on so many different things that they flagged for me that i won't explore the universes that sit behind them. or within them.
in the state of social media that we're in i think that we start to assign quality and value to our thoughts and ideas based on the amount of response that we get as opposed to the internal process that brought us there and the breakthrough that it took to arrive. i think we need to avoid allowing that value system to invade all of the things that we do. to a degree, we become addicted to that approval or that feedback. that's how so much of our output leaves our notebooks and our journals and our conversations and end up OUT THERE on the walls and in the big places for all the eyes to see. we want to be heard, and in those little micromoments, we want to be famous. we want to think that when someone likes our post, we have their attention and we're becoming that footnote in the novel.
you will never be the footnote in the novel.
even when you are.
you have to be the author.
i'm super caffeinated, man. so i'm running from thought to thought and i may not be making cohesive sense. but i'm not writing an essay for you. i'm capturing these thoughts to throw into the ocean in some kind of sealed bottle. i might tell people where to find the bottle and i might not. it just doesn't matter. assign the kind of love and the amount of love you feel only based on how you feel it. not how much you feel like you're allowed to or how much is appropriate to.
just be rad. have dope conversations. share your interests. share what you love. when you find someone with similar interests, don't compare just inspire. get behind it. your whole goddamn energy is going to disintegrate if you keep it in compartments and you dole it out in these regulated time frames.
No comments:
Post a Comment