Julien Aklei

The music industry has perverted the relationship between musicians and people with ears. Either the musician is a star and you must approach them as a grovelling fan or they are an ‘aspiring’ musician to whom you should drop a few coins as an act of charity. Both scenarios are false and repulsive.

I’ve known tragic cases where musicians died of loneliness despite having plenty of ‘fans’ because all these fans assumed the musician must be swimming in a sea of adulation & wouldn’t want to be bothered by them. Meanwhile the musician was actually living in isolation and abject poverty until they went insane and offed themselves. Unless a musician is super famous, odds are you have more money and friends than they do. So why be a fan when you could be a friend instead?

I know some people don’t want to know the people behind the songs because they feel it would ruin the songs for them. And yeah it probably would but isn’t that what life is about? Popping fantasy bubbles and replacing them with realities which you eventually decide are even tastier?

There are probably many men who would enjoy sex more if it could just be about the hole and they never had to meet the person behind the hole. But we train them to meet the person anyway because otherwise the thrill of the hole fades and they end up empty and bitter. In some cases they are even shot to death then hung upside down in the town square to be jeered at by their neighbors.* So just because it is simpler to see songs as divorced from their creators does not ultimately make it the way to go. If music is bread, musicians are the bread’s crust. Learning to eat your crust is a big part of life.

In fact I think the ultimate model for funding music would be an informal patronage system where music is free but those who like it fund the artist in some way big or small. But this can’t happen until musicians and listeners first become friends because I doubt many humans want to patronize a stranger or a star who is hovering above them.

It repulses me when artists are raising funds and say things like “If you donate 50 dollars you get to have lunch with me.” That is like paying for sex. Most humans aren’t into it. We don’t want to lunch with someone who considers it an honor for us to lunch with them. Once we reach maturity we don’t want to be no one’s fan no more.

So the first step in considering how musicians can earn a living is really to take money off the table altogether & heal the corrupted relationship between artist & listener. Place them on the same level and connect them.

And drop the “Support Local Artists” nonsense as well. Barf. It makes musicians sound like pathetic beggars with no inherent value who must be kept on life support out of the goodness of our hearts. If you don’t like a musician, please don’t support them. Would you take someone on a date because you felt sorry for them? It is cruel because it bonds them to someone who secretly finds them worthless. Set these losers free to find people who actually love them or else to find a new profession altogether. But prolong not their suffering through false friendom.

ON THE OTHER HAND…. if you believe the musicians you know suck, consider if this is really true or if you have actually become a brain dead zombie through watching too much American Idol. Did you know that if you use a vibrator on a regular basis you stop being able to enjoy sex? The same principle applies to music, food and everything really. When we become used to unnaturally stimulating products free of roughage that provide quick dopamine fixes we lose our taste for things which are more complex, fibrous & wholesome. Perhaps when you hear a local musician they miss chords, sing off key or use clunky lyrics. THE HORROR!!! But really, why does it matter?

Music is not a talent show. It’s about what touches the heart and something rough and awkward is as likely to do so as an overblown symphonic barf bag. Forget taste & critics & Shakespeare. It is just humans expressing feeling. Put yourself on the same level as the music and try to open up to it. Don’t hover above it like a disembodied brain trying to decide if it is worthy of you. Humble yourself and see if you get something from it. If you do, hit on the musician afterwards. Or at least say hi.

Cause one cool thing about being friends with a musician is that your spirit will certainly work its way into their music. Every song I’ve written was inspired by at least one person I know, although in some songs multiple souls overlap. I never tell the people cause this would seem super fucking creepy. Sometimes I don’t even realize who the song is for until later. It isn’t an intentional process, just an unavoidable organic reality. Pieces of other people enter your heart and come out as sounds.

So please. A Christmas Plea. Consider that music could be something other than an impersonal commodity to be purchased from our overlords. It is a living spirit and by befriending the musicians you become a part of it.

And in this way you shall enter the realm of the Immortals and through Paradise forever and ever shall your soul fly free.

The End.

* This is a reference to famous man ho Mussolini, not the figment of a sick imagination.