Keep singing
KeithHandy posted in Personal Favorites, Your Soul on July 31st, 2007
Before I can write anything with a clear head, let me exorcise myself of the residual anger at some recent youtube comments. It seems like these jerks only target the cover songs, because they idolize their rock stars and get offended when you don’t sound exactly like them. It took me decades to get over my own mother telling me I probably shouldn’t sing (when I was 15). There’s something fundamentally wrong with telling anyone they shouldn’t do something, and singing (or anything you do that reveals some incredibly personal aspect of yourself, including the limitations of your own physical body) takes a lot of courage, period. I want to tell these jerks I sure hope they’re not parents or teachers.
What could be more creatively inhibiting than this rule: don’t open your mouth unless you’re sure something beautiful will come out. Don’t put your paintbrush to the canvas unless you can promise to not make something ugly. Don’t touch, try, or do anything unless you’re guaranteed not to fail. Modern society does not encourage creativity, because it does not encourage screwing up, missing a note, making a mistake, inviting criticism. (Actually, criticism, when it really is criticism, is fine. But this is rare.)
(Above screenshot illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect)
I need to remind myself that when they tell me “you suck, you shouldn’t sing”, etc. — yes, there is some concrete basis for it, as they are responding to some strain in my voice that really is there, which in fact a lot of people will resonate with and hear as passion — what they’re predominantly doing is projecting their own repression onto me. They’re afraid to sing. They’re afraid to try. No truly talented singer who has put a lot of work into developing their skill would use such destructive put-downs.
Knowing this intellectually doesn’t change the fact that immediately after reading such a comment, when I pick up a guitar and try to “sing it off”, I feel some paranoia about the kinds of similarly rotten thoughts people just outside my window must be having about what they can hear of me. Some people outside the window are repressed and will have those thoughts. So fuck them, right? Intellectually, no problem. Emotionally it always requires a re-aligning of self esteem before I can be “in my game” again.
I’ve often told people that a defining moment in my life was listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the first time when I was about eleven years old… but possibly even more defining was listening to Ummagumma. To this day I think it’s a pretty awful album, and all the more awful by Dark Side standards. But instead of thinking of it as a finished product, I now think of it as a sneak peek into the process, the raw material, the stuff under the hood, the grotesquely imperfect underbelly of a band figuring themselves out. It’s “crap” like Ummagumma that reminds you that you can start with this and get to that. A friend once told me he thought bands should never put stuff like that out. None of the musicians themselves are particularly proud of it, for that matter. But it’s this kind of unwitting open-sourcing of process that helps us to break down the invisible force-field between ourselves and our own potential. Would you go back in time and tell them “don’t put out Ummagumma — in fact, don’t put out anything until you’re good — just sit there for three years until your masterpiece appears”?
A lot of people don’t want to break down that force field. They believe that it’s good to maintain a clear dividing line between entertainers and consumers. CDs are things that magically appear in the store, all shiny and shrink-wrapped, and regular people don’t make them. They’re afraid that if they humanize the people who created those CDs, or de-mystify the process, they will spoil the magic of the music. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, because the more you study and examine everything that goes into making music, the more magical and mysterious it actually becomes.
Anyway, singing in particular is a hard horse to get back onto when somebody knocks you off. You’ve just let somebody kick you where you’re extremely vulnerable. But you have to take it — you have to get back on the horse. Their envy that you can sing at all is more painful (and lasting) than the brief sting of being told something you know isn’t true.
July 31st, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Aw, bummer, you’ve attracted a youtube troll. I don’t know if you saw any of the nasty, totally un-called-for, not at all resembling constructive criticism comments I got awhile ago. It was basically a couple of real assholes, who I almost pity because they must utterly SUCK in all of their relationships, and thus must have a pretty sucky existence.
I can totally relate to what you’re saying here. Even when you know the person is full of shit, even when you’ve got 50 positive comments to that one nasty one, it’s the nasty one that is hardest to shake. But you do, and in the process of having to deal with it it makes you stronger and more confident in the long run.
Once again you’ve added some real good insight and perspective to something I don’t see talked about much, and it’s needed, for a lot of people I imagine. Thanks Keithster!
btw, you sing good. Any criticism you get (I haven’t read these comments you speak of but I don’t think I need to) is likely based on a difference of stylistic preference, and that’s irrelevant. Like you say, what one person hears as vocal strain - in a negative sense - another person hears as raw emotion, as character, whatever - in a positive sense. Not that there isn’t always room for improvement or that you can chalk everything up to “that’s just my style, man”… but you gets what I’m saying.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I generally tell people, “I play guitars, keyboards… and I sing when necessary.” It’s bizarre how wide of a range of comments you’ll get when you know you’re somewhere in the middle.
As for other people’s abilities, if they seem to be on the right path, I’ll try to offer helpful ideas and suggestions (by helpful I mean not using language like “lose the…” or “drop the…” or “you’re not a…”) — if, on the other hand, they seem to be completely incompetent, I consider them to be someone else’s problem and keep my mouth shut.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:11 am
Yeah, Keith, I think you’ve started talking about something that, as Brooke says, isn’t talked about much. We talked about this some in my Philosophy of Aesthetics class in college, and this is a fairly Western phenomenon. And as you mention, it is a direct result of putting our heroes on pedestals.
• • • • •
Thinking about this (or a variety of other topics) really starts to get under my skin. I have this visceral reaction to it and it makes me (for very brief flashes) angry. Another one that gets me going (and is just another variation on the same theme) is when people can’t tolerate something that isn’t exactly what they want. They say, “but in X in wasn’t like that.” That really drives me nuts.
I’m getting angry about it right now, in fact, which means that my ability to describe it is failing because I’m just fired up.
• • • • •
However, this is always followed by a depression just as brief and intense as I realize that I’m doing the exact same thing against them and that I’m not in any position to have such feelings, etc.
• • • • •
Blech.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Jeremy: yeah, it’s easy to write ignorant comments off as “just ignore them, they’re jealous and stupid”, but it is symptomatic of some deeper philosophical Thing That Is Not Right in our culture.
I took the bait (I admit it) and looked at his youtube page to see where I really do stand in his universe, and his “band” was even worse than I anticipated, so now I just feel sorry for him. He probably gets a lot of nasty comments from other people and needs to take it out on someone.
How do you do the row of five dots like that? That’s l33t.
August 1st, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Yeah. Way back in high school I was in a cover band and we won some battle of the bands and got in this huge fight with a really crap band that we defeated (they just screamed and had lots of feedback… I mean, some people are in to that… but…). In retrospect, the whole thing was just silly, but it all took place over message boards. I think that’s the other thing that is going on. It is so easy to put someone down when you don’t have to do it face to face.
• • • • •
Oh, and I *am* l33t. :-)
August 1st, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I wonder if Dunning & Kruger were to follow up their Nobel prize-fetching study, with one that rounded up the same group of unfortunate, incompetent individuals, and asked each mistakenly confident guinea pig if they ever watched Sesame Street (or similarly-themed show) as a child, exhaustively testing their memory recall of fundamentally key episodes from The Street, what the results might tell us about these deeply embittered fellow earthfolk? Perhaps that their particular heady formative wonderyears were dedicated to visciously criticizing their Barbie’s choice of outfits (usually behind her back), or casually attempting to shoot toads from the gully in the eye with their daisy rifles, until it was time for Starsky & Hutch or The Incredible Hulk to come on.
ok. not entirely fair to point The Big Finger at bad tv as the #1 culprit. Just suggesting, not saying. Though certainly it rates a quick flick of The Little Pinky of Unduckable Admonishment.
Sorry to hear you recently had a little hate sent your way, Keith. One of the hardest things to do, or remember, when you get some on ya, is to resist the urge to fling it right back…or perhaps more importantly, not to let the resulting stain seep so deep into your fibre that you begin to see your sticks & stones throwers’ point, and give up.
The horse, Keith! The horse!
Of course, one’s own inner non/un/anti/de- constructive critic can prove itself a tough old bastard to get even a simple civil please or thank you out of, even in its more charitable moments. I suppose a person can either assume the debatably unenviable role of being their own worst critic, smugly laughing off all the little snivelling, amateurish, unimaginative underachieving critics that scuttle around our heavily-guarded perimeter making feeble potshots with their plastic frenchfry fork arrows in an attempt to pierce our armour and make us cry.
or.
totally relinquish the One’s Own Worst Critic throne to the mud-flinging rabble. Because really, who better qualified to hurl the slings & arrows of outrageous fortune than the career hecklers amongst us? We wouldn’t want to take jobs away from anyone now would we? Besides, think of all that free time you just saved, not wasting hours, weeks, weekends, months, perhaps decades of your life, habitually devoted to self-dissage.
Enjoy your process, Keith.
”don’t worry if it’s not good enough
for anyone else to hear
just sing.
sing a song.”
-the late great Joe Raposo-
August 1st, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Boo is back!
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:26 am
p.s. ”La la-la, la-laaa
La-laa la-la, la-laaa
La laa laa la-la-la-laaa…”
(repeat until inner shine is fully recharged)