[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.nquit.com/sounds/semperThou/BugsWineDemons/03semperThouSpiderbite.mp3″]Spiderbite, by semper Thou

I wonder what I said last time. Maybe I should go look. Screw it I’ll just type. It doesn’t really matter which song, when I hear this record, this is what I think:

“Why is it that with the same gear and methods, my records sound like fisher-price toy bullshit to me, but this sounds like a real record?” and then the answer comes “oh yeah because this wasn’t just one person’s isolated thing”.

There’s some kind of magic in that. They say don’t produce yourself, they say vocalists shouldn’t mix their own vocals, and of course there’s some obvious practical things about that like your perspective gets skewed when you listen to your own voice, your emotional responses get in the way, and of course having more brains involved improves something just by catching problems you wouldn’t have, etc.

But I don’t know. I think there’s something just magical, and by magical I mean real but intangible in the sense that we don’t quite have a way to explain it at this point, about something being an actual team effort that turns into something that sounds real. (And maybe also my isolated records don’t sound so fake to other people?).

It’s funny that I keep wanting to say that about this album, and right now as I type this, an IM conversation is going on in another window talking about sharing ideas, Gougain and the impressionist MOVEMENT (as opposed to gaugane’s personal individual impressionist deally bopper), and who GIVES A SHIT if you “steal my idea” and – well – basically:

THE MYTH OF THE SINGULAR GENIUS.

I had this thought while watching a movie once a couple years ago, being overwhelmed by the sheer number of credits rolling past…and…well let me basically just paste from the IM window:

“a lot of what we’re talking about is sort of coming from an anger place – like fuckers! there’s too many assholes that want to be rock stars and movie gods to the point where now everybody who actually made a movie is lost in a huge list of contributors on the credits, anonymous – it’s just this big team effort….wait a minute….maybe this is good….”

“…sometimes we get pissed seeing the beginnings of what is actually a beautiful thing…”

“what if it’s turning into a thing of movies and stuff are just created by a bunch of regular folks for regular folks. a totally sharing everybody gets to be involved thing? that seems awesome. but what’s got to be addressed is people making a living and being healthy and stuff – not disappointed and poor all the time”

I think that last part is where I can still get with the venom a bit, because really it’s the myth of singular genius thing, the whole mentality that the point of life is to do something totally “on your own” and have it be somehow better than everyone around. Have you been reading about the Winslet sisters refusing to audition for contacts their famous sister Kate gets them? I think that’s idiotic as hell. Who ever did anything “great” on their own? What’s this “I wanna make on my own” crap? If you extend that logic, then every time you get a job offer, you have to turn it down. Wouldn’t want to accept help from some already establish corporate person. Oh no, I wanna make money all by myself. Dude. You can’t make money by yourself. You have to sell something to another person. Then if you do have some money, and you’re on your own, what do you spend it on? What do you plant it in the fucking ground and grow spinach? This is STUPID.

And we’re being taught that this is what we should do, and we should feel guilty and lazy if we don’t? And we’re being taught this notion of singular exceptionalism which basically states that in a project the scope of a Hollywood blockbuster, which literally takes thousands of people to pull off, only one person can possibly deserve credit. Of course they list all the credits, so at some level, we do understand the reality.

But to someone like me, who grew up in this, and got on stage and started being told stuff like “you’re gonna be a star, you’re different, blah blah blah”, who began to think that the only way to make up for his shortcomings is to be somehow a star, a singular outstanding better than other people genius, the idea that the makers of a big budget film would all “languish” in anonymity was extremely depressing and even scary. I actually thought that the industry was crumbling because stardom seemed to be going away.

Wait what? Did I just say that? I thought the point of this blog was that stardom and the idea of wealth, glory and fame has run rampant, gotten out of control. Well it is, but a lot of times, what happens just at the cusp before something disintegrates entirely is it becomes a cancer. That is the nature of the world, especially if you’re very Taoist. Something that becomes too much soon disappears.

“…sometimes we get pissed seeing the beginnings of what is actually a beautiful thing…”

So I got depressed that day, but perhaps in reality, it will be a beautiful day soon. Lord knows we ALWAYS kick, scream and resist when the universe drags us into what we want.