Ok so some of you reading may or may not know that I recently graduated with a degree in English/Media & Communications/Creative Writing. My primary focus however, was on music journalism.
Overall, I spent the last 4 years of my life immersing myself in it all; heading concert planning for my college and booking bands to come and play live, finding myself in an internship at Blackheart Records, managing our radio station during my senior year, writing a music column for our campus paper, sitting down and having one-on-one's with artists at venues in and around Philly and doing phoners for this blog, etc. I'm a geek and wanted to experience it all from every angle. And I wanted to do it all at once.
Before I knew it had happened, graduation had popped up and that thing they all call, "the real world" hit me straight on. Like all of my friends, months before and right after graduation, I started hunting online for work related to all of the above areas and found myself taking a part-time position tour-managing for a local singer/songwriter. I'm not going to name names or anything because this would be extremely rude and likely karma would come back and bite me in the ass with some sort of life-threatening mosquito bite or hair-dye mishap that made me look like the Joker. Eek.
Anyway....Suffice it to say this person I was working for was the exact opposite of the experience I had at Blackheart. Everyone in their offices were incredibly welcoming and friendly, appreciative, easygoing, passionate about the work they did and believed in the label as a whole and backed the artists on it. I was interning for them for college credit and I basically traveled 5 hours from Philly-NYC to get there and stayed in a hostel two nights a week to be there for free. More than anything, I remember just being on the bus on the way out of the college town I live in and having that feeling of elation start to rise up in my chest, getting more excited week after week to be able to be a part of something so much bigger than myself and to have lived inside of this grand bubble of self-awareness while all around me these experiences were chipping away at an outer shell of myself and digging to expose who I really was at my core. The months there were gorgeous and revelatory.
And thennnnn after graduation this "artist" (loose quotes) came along and sort of threw me for a loop. I felt like they didn't care about the music at all and although they're only working on their sophomore album, there was a lack of soul to the work and a larger focus on money-making, so much so it began to be the only part of their personality that showed. Among this, other ridiculous things too; wanting to put pictures on their website of themselves with movie stars to gain notoriety through proximity, impatience with the team of their employees literally asking us what we were doing every 2 minutes online as we worked, a lack of knowledge about the business and jargon any musician should be familiar with, and little to no initiative or care to interact directly with fans, expectations higher than the alps for 9 dollars an hour and commentary about our work never encouraging or appreciative, and micro-managing like whoa. Beyond that there were dozens of other signs that this person wasn't one who you'd see bleeding their heart on a stage anytime soon, let alone willing to make the sacrifices it took hundreds of others to just make it there as an opener and it saddened me. As dramatic as it may sound, I could feel my soul dimming down working for them.
Thus the reason to rant to you, dear reader, whomever you may be, and explain how this all led to me sit pensively at my laptop late last night to send a resignation email out because I felt something inside of me dying out a bit; that same whimsical sense of wonder and newness and being immersed in a part of the business where there was nothing to do but learn from people who shared my own inspiration; people who understood how much one song can change things and how things like tattooed lyrics on someone's skin, or the fans that show up 5 hours early just to be barricade, or how music listeners will always be dying to fill up a room to hear lines they feel they themselves could have written...these things weren't even on the foreground of this person's mind nor did they understand why they happen.
These were only some of what I want to work for and this person wasn't showing me any of that. I had countless talks about it with friends and family and we all concluded it was for the best. I'm hoping though, that Blackheart wasn't that metaphorical diamond-in-the-rough and that these things I'm looking for (and will continue to hold out for) are more than few and far between.
I also feel that coming from the perspective of a fan, if you're in this industry it's not enough to just LOVE music. That word is too small for even half of what I feel. You have to be in touch with it on a deeper level (especially if you're a musician!)thrive around it, understand that it has the ability to be this purple-cloud moment in the middle of pit where hundreds of faces are titled up towards 4 strangers above, joining sometimes off-key voices in the same chorus and you all know why you're there together and the musicians on stage in front of you know better, and the lights in all of your eyes reflect that silver gleam of something intangible that can only be seen in rare moments like that. You have to perceive that although an artist is just a regular human being like anyone else, they still hold a torch of promise above so many listeners heads month in and month out on tour, and have the potential to be responsible for as much change as a political figurehead could have or as I really believe in most cases, more.
I honestly wish that people who know or have been given the chance to find out what they want out of life and can see their passions on a clear road ahead should just say "fuck it all" and go for it with everything they've got and take away from the bad experiences not regretting them, but using each one as a lesson to hone in deeper on what they want.
I grew up with a rare genetic disease and because of this, spent months in and out of the hospital in my childhood, teenage years, and currently at times I'll fall ill for weeks at a time and find myself back there again. If it's taught me anything it's that life really is fleeting and you only get this span of chunky and sorted decades to be who it is you want to be. Cliche as this may sound, albeit vaguely GoArmy.com, what you're passionate about is far too hard to ignore, far too important to your own personal growth to place on some bac-kburner and settle for something less. So I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be afraid to be that architect of your life and build a world around you filled with art, those who understand your desires and dreams, and a job that affords you the time and existence to be that version of who you are to the core and furthermore, inspire you towards becoming it.
Also, funny side note: I had originally planned on writing about how ridiculous it is that Justin Bieber is now working with Usher in music videos and how when I was his age, I was consumed with leisure activities like POGS, playing Manhunt with neighborhood kids, wondering which arcade game at the mall would be more beneficial in the long-run to my $5 dollar allowance, and watching too many episodes of Boy Meets World and Clarissa Explains it all. Just sayin'. Usher's great and all, but I wouldn't trade those Cory & Topanga memories for this:
I'll be blogging way more often about music related things so hopefully some readers will be gained and if not, no worries.
shout it out loud,
~Laurel
