5.12.15

The Dream is Dead

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I'm not particularly active on here, seeing how my audience is me there's no real point in trying.

So, stuff that happened since the last post on here. I got my PhD. Well, not formally, I'll get my PhD while dressed as an assclown in some massively overblown joke of a ceremony in January. But I did pass my viva and dealt with the minor stylistic corrections. I have entered the realm of employment, sticking around the same department for the start of my postdoctoral trek. Live the Poland life, never move, stay in the same place forever. I already breached the rule by shifting to the UK for my PhD, I can't possibly breach it further. I grew some semblance of self esteem for the first time in years as I realised I actually have a use. Don't get me wrong, on the whole I still think I'm a freaking joke of a human being, but a little less so than previously, making day to day life more bearable. I ate lots of food, including developing some cool recipe ideas which I might put on here, might put on a separate culinary blog which will inevitably get no traffic, or might not put anywhere because why bother.

Also, crucially for the perspective of the blog, I let the dream die.

Without sugar coating it, the music existence I dream of just doesn't exist. In the end, in order to survive, you need money. You acquire money through shifting units. You shift units by playing what people want to hear you play. Barely anybody would show up to Electric Six gigs if they didn't have Gay Bar in their repertoire ready to go, certainly not enough to survive from being a band. As is, they're probably not living massively exuberant lives, as they churn out records and tour like clockwork in order to make ends meet. You can see this starting to take a toll on them, as the past five years have been a relatively steady decline in record quality, which is even mirrored in their recent set lists. The very band who I viewed as the against-all-odds example of making it on your own terms is actually a slave of the system.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have Kabanos. The guys have started making money off music and are well underway to being a household name among kinderrebels of all ages in Poland. All it took was embracing writing about haters, being beautiful and meaningless kinderlove for it to happen. I'm sure that the 30-something year old frontman is loving every second of this exactly as much as the 15 year old "THIS IS ME NOW" dyed hair chicas in the front row of the gigs. Don't get me started on Biffy Clyro either.

And there's also the issue of even the greats not having a particularly fulfilling time either. You might have heard of a certain Scott Weiland. You know, the guy who was the singer for Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, that one. Out of both bands, having to tour with nameless stand-ins, having to cash in on former glories night after night because of some insane alimony settlement or whatever. No wonder he relapsed, if he relapsed. He died earlier today.

As such, the plethora of different examples just go to show that there is no valid approach to dreaming of music. "Making it" is hard enough by itself, and a sufficient crapshoot to make for a dream closer to the unrealistic side of the spectrum for those of us not named Tom Hess, and when you start tossing in elements such as artistic integrity, creative fulfilment and happiness to the rider then you're gonna have a bad time. My aspirations were misplaced, the thing I wanted just doesn't exist. As such, the music dream is officially dead. That doesn't stop me making music, mind you, as I can do that freely on my own terms in my own time. Just that I can stop feeling like some misspent artiste who's wasting away, and become reasonably content with the surrounding reality when compared to, say, selling parsnips at a local market.

Since it's been so long, a brief mention on current band/music state of things would be nice. Nakpat was, in all honesty, a flop. We got some guy who was super popular in the Battle of the Bands society circlejerk to be our singer, and he carried us to fourth place in the event. In the end, nobody cared about the music at all, singer guy included. Then he moved, and the drummer moved, and the bassist-turned-drummer found some insanely good bassist who speaks and thinks musical theory and schematics a bit too much. But when we let loose and just jam everything works out fine. It's probably going to be a good time.

Other than that? Well, not all that much. Another reason for me finding some more inner peace is moving. I now lack my own personal shower, but I have gained two enormous roof windows which offer me what might well be Britain's highest amount of sunlight in a single room ever. The slanted attic walls of the room, combined with the sunlight, make me feel the most comfortable I have felt in this country. Every now and then I find women attractive. Sometimes I try to act on the impulse, usually I don't. Thank heavens for Facebook letting me reasonably easily assess whether there's any point to storming the gates whatsoever. The most recent damsel in Rumpy distress doesn't appear to have pictures with male companionship outside of larger scale group shots, so I'm going to send her a cowardly email which she'll probably ignore. The norm, really.

So, uh, a-year-in-a-wall-of-text more less done. I probably missed some important stuff. Ah yes, I have had gaming under control since that massively preachy post into nothing, so there's that. This post can double as a massively preachy post for letting the music dream die. Off to... I don't know really. Guess I'll eat some cookies and watch the third Hunger Games movie. Peace!