The Light of Day

Confronting my arch-nemesis: “fame”
KeithHandy posted in Business, Your Soul on June 13th, 2007

I have mixed feelings about posting this. I know how it could come across. That’s all I’ll say for now…

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Hello, “fame”. (Asshole.) Stop pretending to be an innocent lamp post. I know you’re there. And I know that you know I’m here. There’s some extremely dysfunctional relationship between you and me, some heavy long-unresolved issue. The very fact that you exist fills me with rage. It disgusts me that I have to write about it, which I hope I only have to do once — and it will disgust me again every time I re-read this.

So according to you, not only will I never be in a league with the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, which is fine, but… here, let’s scale this down gradually: never in a league with King Crimson. Scale down a bit more: never as well known as the late Kevin Gilbert. No, scale down further: never as well known as The Shaggs, or my ex-girlfriend’s husband, or any musician that covers any of the above. Never as famous as Numa Numa kid, Nora the piano-playing cat, or any random person between the ages of 18 and 24 that lights a fart or flashes a tit, however unremarkable said tit (or fart) is. On YouTube, my wild mouse Ralphie gets twice as many hits as any of my original songs, and all he does is twitches his ear and scoots off. (That said, if you go by the total for all four songs, I do whoop his tiny rodent ass. You know what they say about “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.) Here on this site, it’s a good day when I get double-digit page views. If you’re reading this, consider yourself elite.

Several years ago, when mp3.com was the place to promote original music, I received special mention for being in their “bottom ten”. A writer for Spin contacted me to do a short email interview as a result of this, aghast that everyone wasn’t downloading Have You Heard The Good News?, but when I tried to follow up to see if anything became of that, I never heard back from him. You can’t blame me for feeling like there’s a conspiracy.

My claim to fame is my immaculate lack of it.

There’s something psychological going on here. It’s not just the world — it’s me too. On some level, in some way, I am unconsciously doing everything possible to avoid the tiniest shred of exposure. Sure, I make a ton of music available to y’all (though maybe not in a consistent way), including this “open source” blogging, where I take the screws off the bottom of my muse to show you the gears inside. But in some way I sabotage it from there.

It’s not that I do mediocre work. Sure, I’ve been raised to be pessimistic, and told over and over again to disregard my own opinions because everybody thinks they’re good. (To give you some background here, my father doesn’t like attention — he doesn’t even want people to sing “happy birthday” to him — and I think he projects that onto me, or I project it onto myself.) So let’s say for shits and giggles that they’re right, and that only outside opinions matter. Again, confusing, bewildering… when there is feedback, it’s gushingly positive. (Great direct response, just no viral spread.) Other musicians even come to me for help and advice. So, unless that feedback is part of my hallucination, I don’t think I’m delusional about the music being good.

When I look at naturally charismatic rock stars like Paul McCartney or Robert Plant, it seems that part of their talent is the capacity to love complete strangers. They’re not afraid of people, or even annoyed by people — they bask in people. I suppose I could, hypothetically, walk out to the front entrance of my building and somehow form connections with all the people walking by on the street, but that mental image doesn’t click for me.

Then again, you don’t have to love people to become famous. When I look at truly creative acts who managed to pull it off (I hate the phrase “make it” — too much erroneous subtext packed into two little words) without the charisma, like Pink Floyd, I see that there’s a disconnect between what they’re famous for and what they actually did. In Pink Floyd’s case, they may have broken ground in presenting rock as a form of art, but they wouldn’t sell nearly as many records if they weren’t perceived as a “drug band”. So their unwanted association with getting high is their charisma to a lot of people. In a way, this applies to the more charismatic acts too: In Led Zeppelin’s case, the mythological association with Satanism, as well as the romanticizing of substance abuse and sexual recklessness, didn’t hurt. It’s as if you have to be equated with a vice before masses of people will latch on, even if what you do is great.

You could say the Beatles cheated by securing fame first and then pulling out the creative stops — had they kickstarted their career with Strawberry Fields Forever, they would have died a quick death right out of the starting gate — but I don’t think that was planned. Radiohead seemed to follow a similar path, but in a more condensed time frame. Commercial success isn’t always so helpful in facilitating creative growth, but it can happen.

An unhealthy aspect of over-thinking all this, without truly dealing with it, is that I have not truly made peace with the reality of my life, and what seems to be a disproportionate degree of obscurity. A part of me is saying this is unacceptable, and that once it is completely turned around, and I’m “on the map”, I can breathe easy. That part of me is absolutely terrified of the idea that THIS IS JUST HOW IT IS… the end.

By most standards, my life should be more than acceptable to me. I have nice toys, a nice family, I eat every day, I’m not crippled, I’m not homeless, I’m not a hostage, I’m not getting beat up or shot at (although some people tremble with concern that I don’t have or want a television). I should be up to my eyeballs in gratitude.

So there are a lot of questions I need to ask myself:

• What do you really want? Having a vague feeling that your work should be “out there” and “a valid part of what’s going on in the world” is not a clear goal. Would you rather have a million people tossing your stuff on in the background, or five people getting shivers down their backs? Do you have to choose one or the other?
• Do you actually deserve recognition? Just because you do something well does not mean you’re contributing something to the world that it needs. There’s already a ton of good stuff out there, and maybe all you’re doing is funneling it down to fit your personal taste.
• Besides the above, why do you instinctively feel like you just plain should be famous? Why does it feel weird to you when anyone makes you repeat your name? Do you imagine that you were a famous person in a previous life, and are now being punished for abusing your fortune?
• Would anonymity be fine as long as the music was being heard? What about posthumous fame — creating for the audience of the future?
• Since you often say it’s not you-the-person that you want recognition for, but rather the fruits of your labor, is there an aspect of your work that you’re holding back on, something that you haven’t done yet that will make it suddenly “make sense” to everyone? If your music is the marshmallow you’re working too hard on, and you’re neglecting the rest of the s’more, what would the chocolate represent? What about the graham cracker? (Don’t ask.)
• Is there a reason you avoid exposure? Is there a symbolic link between your agoraphobia — fear of going out, literally translated to “fear of the marketplace” — and a fear of marketing? Are you afraid that other people will contaminate your work? It certainly is luxurious that you can still revise your old stuff in privacy — but even if everyone out there had old versions of your songs, would that stop you?
• Do you feel ethical confusion about the deliberate pursuit of an audience? Is it that you want to have one, but insist that “just sort of happen”, because you’re afraid that to make it a priority would force you to compromise some other principle?

If it’s any consolation, even the most famous people are unknown to the majority. A double platinum record reaches less than a third of a tenth of a percent of the global population — for every album sold, at least three thousand people did not buy the album (of course, this comforting rationale backfires if I do the same math on my own stats). Most of my coworkers at my former workplace would never have picked up on any music references I could have made, so I didn’t bother. Likewise, when I’m oblivious to their favorite television shows, I know I’m not the only one. When I was in high school, I felt compelled to evangelize the music I liked, and actually turned quite a few people on to it (and was grateful for other people who did the same for me with their favorite artists). So I felt a responsibility to the already-famous people, keeping their music alive and propagating it. This is not the earmark of a jealous person.

The best I can do at deciphering what my crackly, static-y, early days of radio-ish voice of reason tells me is: “okay, good, you’ve said it, you’ve gotten it out of your system — now quiet your mind and focus on enjoying what you do.” I guess that’s all I can do, because thinking about it just makes me feel immensely powerless and frustrated, just as it would if it were any other topic I had no control over. And while I don’t know exactly what I need, I know that something will make me feel genuinely better about things.

Maybe I’m not alone in this. I’d like to meet more people who have this “problem”. Perhaps we could form a support group — People Who Are Addicted To The Fame They’ve Never Had — with the overt purpose of “getting over it”…

…and the covert purpose of sneaking off from the meeting one day to pull some outrageous publicity stunt.

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So let’s just say I owe you one neatly wrapped-up ending.