‘Only five people know I make tunes’

One of my ongoing issues of discussion with friends and self is what makes up a person’s identity. More distinctly, how much of what you are is your own innate personality, your “true face” as Buddhists put it, and how much of it is the influence, pernicious or not, of your friends, family, society, or the world as a whole. It’s one of those big overarching questions that ties into pretty much everything you do. Really, who can think about their life thus far and the decisions they’ve made that have brought them to this point and say, with complete certainty, that the choices were really their own? You may have decided to rebel against society in some way or another, but deep down was that really your choosing, or was your act of opposition just a polarized response? To put into more salient and personal terms, when, in 8th grade, your friends showed you the picture of Johnny Rotten wearing his handmade “I hate Pink Floyd” shirt and presented this as evidence that, since you liked Pink Floyd, you couldn’t be punk, you decided to force yourself to continue to like Pink Floyd. This despite the fact that you realized that a lot of their later material was kind of lame – was that you asserting your actual musical tastes, or were you just being a contrarian?

See? Serious business, there. There’s something about being older and ‘wiser’ that kind of makes you philosophical about the foolish antics of the Young You, and interested in just what the eff we were thinking when we did the dumb things that we did. That naturally leads to an examination of Current You, and if the things you’re doing now are going to be looked back upon with much groaning and excuse-making. Usually, as with most human endeavors, there’s some kind of base advantage in behaving the way that we do, in believing in the things that we participate in. We believe in traditional marriages because we want the security and stability that comes with a formalized relationship. We write and play music because we enjoy it, and because we want people to pat us on the back and tell us we’re talented or creative or at least pay attention to us for brief periods of time. We go on internet message boards and start fights with strangers because we want to feel important without having to suffer the consequences or be punched. We do these things because they make us feel good, for some reason or another, even though we may at some point feel very differently about all of them, and chalk it up to being caught in the moment or whatever.

Anyway, back to the buddhism. One of the ideas of zen that sticks with me the most is the idea that one of the purposes of life is to break away from and conquer “dualistic” thinking. Dualism in this context means defining something as being the opposite of something else – you’re a punk or a hippy/cop. You’re progressive or you’re a fascist. You’re a winner or a loser. While those examples may be examples of subjective concepts, dualism is a lot harder to escape – for instance, try to describe the concept of darkness without mentioning the absence of light. This is why most of the essential zen dialogs are expressed as nonsense – how else can you express ideas without resorting to dualism? So, unless you’re going to spend the time mediating or whatever to the point where your transcend rational thought and achieve satori, you’re stuck in the middle, trying to figure out where the world stops and where you begin, trying to see the reality of existence without going out of your mind.

Part of me admires monks who can go years without speaking to anyone to keep their minds free of outside ideas, or hermits who intentionally avoid all contact with other people. The other part of me thinks that they’re trying way too hard. Sure, it would be nice to know what your inner nature really is, but what does it really matter in the scheme of things if you ‘find yourself’ but then spend your life in a hut not talking to anyone? I guess it’s rife with personal fulfillment, but yet it reeks of ego; if you’re unwilling to interact with the world at all, on some level you might as well not exist, which kind of defeats the purpose of finding your true face in the first place.

Some people manage to find a happy medium within their lives. Dubstep ‘producer’ (that’s what you call people who make electronic music these days, I guess) Burial was recently profiled in London’s Guardian newspaper, and unbeknownst to me until now, it turns out that he’s a Thomas Pynchon-esque recluse (except that of course, people know Thomas Pynchon’s real name). He never DJs, has only been photographed when disguised, and even his closest friends don’t know that he has a secret life as a musician. I guess it isn’t hermit-tude in its most basic sense – after all, he could be some well known musical impresario in his day life, like it is offered rumored that the members of the Residents. However, it’s a way of sidestepping the usual annoyance and schmoozery which comes hand in hand with being a well respected musician in an up-and-coming genre, as well as the glory and social rewards. It reminds me of an interview with Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton, talking about a long period in which he lived on a farm with no contact with the music world – when he had completed an album, he sent the tapes and art off to the label. During this period he saw no reviews, received no feedback, no nothing, and later described this period as the most “pure” of his musical career.

It seems like a pretty interesting way to maximize your creative process, but with one problem: I really don’t think I like most of the aforementioned artists. I haven’t heard a lot of Burial, but what I have heard has lacked a certain something that his contemporaries have. It’s certainly not bad, but for all his mystery, the end result doesn’t sound particularly mindblowing. The same with the Residents or Nurse With Wound – it’s definitely out there, and the ideas are neat, but, like sitting in a cave until your legs fall off, the end result isn’t really all that appealing to me. There’s a kind of self-defeating rejection of normal musical convention; it’s cool stuff, but has anyone ever gotten a Residents song stuck in their head? I sure haven’t. I’ve gotten gamelon music stuck in my head, which is at least as ‘alien’ to North Smerican ears as the Residents are, yet it’s a form of music dating back the the 3rd century AD, and everyone playing it now much have just been roped into the tradition like we’re roped into thinking that we have to hate Pink Floyd if we like the Sex Pistols.

In other news, Hardtravelin’ Records, long running Pittsburgh hardcore / punk / whatever indie label, is closing its doors or taping shut the cardboard box or whatever the appropriate metaphor for the tiny label that’s run out of one’s spare room ending is. Hardtravelin’ put out or helped with the putting out of releases of musical endeavors of mine, for which I’m eternally thankful, as well as a putting out couple of great releases by a bunch of excellent local bands that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise. While it’s understandable for owner/operator Q to want to bow out after a very long period being a very small label boss, a position that involves all the hard work and stress of a real capitalistic venture without any hope of the usual rewards of capitalism, hopefully someone will step up and provide for the city what Hardtravelin’ once did. Respec.

Filed by d at October 31st, 2007 under music, philosophy