Heartbreak and Freedom…
Today my mom asked in so many words if I thought my “break” was coming anytime in the foreseeable future. The answer was ‘no’. Sometimes the heartbreak of being in this business is worse for the people who love an artist than for the artist his or herself. After all, I may drone on sometimes about sleeping five hours over the course of three days, but the work I was putting in rarely felt like work. Hell, for the most part it is my sanity, the pure and good thing that opens the door for me not to be just another shitty person looking to get over on whoever happens to be around. The conversation went on for another five minutes of Q&A before I think she just got depressed because I can’t say when I’m ditching the civilian job, when for me, the civilian job is what has given my art its autonomy.
The stuff I plan on putting out doesn’t fit into neat categories. It goes from heartbreaking innocence to life-shattering violence with a great deal of heavy and light emotional lifting in between leaving little of my life thus far unturned. Plus, I have grave reservations about using terms like Emotional Ghetto expressing one’s heart as an automatic weapon. Combined with the current music climate (i.e. culture of chart topping hip-hop and pop) and the types of lyrics and poetry I’m writing, I’m opening myself artistically to a variety of attacks and genre fringe walking that might lead instead, to irrelevance. I’m fairly high concept even when things seem on the surface to be simple. There is always at least one undercurrent moving in a different direction than the surface waters–especially with my music. If I had to depend on this to earn enough money for me to live and pay bills, I probably would be editing a whole hell of a lot of things out of the public eye and ear. Since I don’t have to earn a penny–whatever. I get to express whatever I feel like and see, rather than speculate how my ideas and my ear fares in the public arena. Will things go well? I can’t say for sure, but I’ve done well in the past, so maybe. Ultimately, the civilian job keeps my art free and keeps me from being just another hater, pissed off because I’m jealous of someone else’s ability to chart their own expressive path.
Let the words “what if?” apply only to the development of new ideas.
