So tell me, do you see the discrepancy in the type of reasoning that runs the business of music and entertainment today?I mean from the outside?
For almost 20 years this is the attitude I keep meeting; "Yes, wow. OK Peter. That sounds great. But you know, I make business decisions, so why don't you just stick to making shit up ok?".
I'm a bona fide test-certified genious, peculiar and strange at times but never the less, my brain really works. Still that is the same attitude I've continously run across ever since I was a kid. The "Dude, you may be smart but my wallet/billy bat's bigger than you".
In an enviroment like that, I've come to believe very much in determination and just plain being stubborn. So far I've seen two generations of assholes and bullys rise to power, and slowly dissipate to be replaced by new assholes and bullys. While the old assholes and bullys still keep being assholes and bullys, just with less clout.
I'm not saying I'm more worth than anyone, because I know I'm not, but I once believed there would be an interest in the talents of people like me. That my kind of skill and capacity would be something worth investing in.
It's been a painful journey over the last 15 years. One that has never seized to amaze me.
I really hope I'm wrong, but I'm beginning to believe that people with money and power just dislike people like me.
Noam Chomsky has the balls to say it straight out; People with talent that speak frankly about what they see and understand don't stand a chance. Mr. Chomsky claims that the only reason he made it to the position where he could start making his own voice heard is the fact that he kept his mouth shut for long enough.
I had an interesting experience this spring. A friend of mine happened to know someone who pitches songs for Sony Music Publishing and suggested I send him material. I put together a little portfolio of 15 songs that represented a good
range of some of the 200 something songs I've written. If it hadn't been for the fact that I know that I am good at what I do and very content as well, I would have been affected by this in much different manner: The Sony-guy, as he came to be
known among my friends, failed to show up at 3 different occassions, for meetings he claimed wanting to have, and eventuallly presented me with a condescending mail stating that certainly my songs where sure-fire hits, but that this business was all about social skills and that establishing takes years etc. etc. Well, since I have in fact done this for 20 years I know that time of course is the magically overlooked factor in well, everything. However, to have someone like that write me in the tone of someone speaking to a retard was just sad.
I am slowly accepting that I might not like the type of person the Sony-guy has come to represent to me.
However, in one way I feel priviliged to understand just how little impact I have
to most people, and just how much of a complete nobody I am in the eyes of people like the Sony-guy. Because it means there are so many possibilities and so much freedom in flying below the radar, so to speak.
This kind of stuff used to piss me off to no end, and yes I would find it amusing spending a night locked in an elevator with someone like this. They break easy you know.
There is a sense of sadness to all of this. How strangely illusive the world of money and power really is. How we rush around in a world built on, and kept together by mostly will-power and good intentions. How in spite all the goodness, abstract notions of power and glory has restless fools chasing the rainbow, playing games that were never even really meant to be, on behalf of everyone around them. To me, it explains what I could never understand and always fueled a sorrowful rage; How a world with so many incredibly intelligent, talented and sensible people could be so stuck in time and how strange it seemed to me that there could be such a thing as disease and poverty in a world as beautiful and profound. Now I think it's a miracle that we are not worse off than we are.
I feel profoundly for the Sony-guy. I feel his pain. And I'm not being ironic either. August Strindberg once wrote; "Pity the humans". I finally know what he meant.
On the other hand. Watching a group of chinese kids playing in the waiting-lounge at the airport, forgetting their teen-age attitudes for a little while, being just... kids. Puts things in perspective.
You know, a cup o coffee goes a long way.
Peace / Peter