Letter to an angry young writer
Hi ____,
You know, a lot of the best conversations I've ever had have started with email fights!
When I think about it, I stopped believing in music criticism because of an email fight that turned into this sort of dare with myself and a thought exercise where I wound up touring with a band I thought I hated, and I wound up really believing in them. Every music writer should be forced to tour with a bad band, just to see how much passion there is there. Bad artists care just as much as the good artists do, for the most part. No one wants to say that, because then it hurts too much to criticize them.
I work at a rock camp for kids for a week every summer, it's free for them and for some of the families it's like free daycare. We get kids who come to camp having never picked up an instrument before. Which is awesome. Every year, at least one kid with no real talent or experience writes a song that moves me really deeply. How should I account for that? It's because I get to see them interact with other kids all day long; I see how hard it is for them. If they can walk up on a stage after that and trust their bodies and their voices to work on cue and off-key, I feel nothing but joy for them. Bad music sounds beautiful in that context, and everything else is sort of a sliding scale.
I think I have felt like you feel now on a number of occasions, and obviously I'm also prone to emotional emails. But now I'm old and it's harder to access all that stuff, which is a blessing and a curse. Cuz sometimes I'll be at a show like "I know this should feel amazing and I just want to go to sleep," and sometimes I see a loaded email and I'm jealous. (But only to the degree that you're able to access all these hard and complicated feelings. I don't want to feel that way all the time, I know how miserable it is. It would come in handy, though, on those days when I feel like nothing in the world is bettered by my writing about it, and like we're all just going to die and what's the fucking point?).
I shouldn't give you a hard time about thinking you're great at what you do, that's stupid. If you're great, be great. Breathe fire, man! If you care enough about it to get that angry, you probably do care about it enough to be great at it. It's just a really collaborative trade, that was my belabored point. I think of it as a trade, and not an art, because it's a lot easier to convince yourself that you're learning a trade when you go through brutal edits or have your ideas shot down than it is to convince yourself that your art is not being compromised. And eventually you start to feel like a worker bee clocking in at the plant. There are transcendent moments, for sure, but the most incredible jobs still become routine after a while. You're not really working at Disneyland until you've got to clean up some puke. Most days I'm glad I went through that stuff. I'm glad I had my work whittled down a bit, tamed, structured so people could read it and I could consider myself competent. And sometimes I wonder what I'd write like if I'd never had an editor. If I just did it because I had to do it? Maybe I'd be great. Maybe I'd be insufferable.
The thing is that if it's art and you're an artist, then the last thing you want is some trained professional tidying it up for you. Which means you're just signing up for purgatory forever; either you're starving for your art or doing work that you're sure is not your calling. Or you just get used to it. Or you do something else, and keep writing special somehow. Which would be my advice to anyone who wants writing to feel special: keep it for yourself. When I want to feel special now I watch some old foreign film, because no one expects me to know anything about it and I get to just BE THERE with it. I don't have to ask myself how I feel. It's a beautiful thing.
A few months ago an old friend I hadn't seen a years got shitfaced drunk with me. I had to carry him down the street to get him home. He kept saying, "I'm a great writer! I'm a great writer! You're an alright writer! I'm a fucking great writer!" And I told him that I'm sure he was. He apologized up and down and said he didn't remember any of it. He felt awful. But I still believe that he is a great writer. He doesn't ever publish anything. And he shouldn't publish anything, because then he'll always get to be a great writer. I'll never read his stuff, because I like the idea that just maybe he's really a great writer, and I'm the only person who knows it.
I'm sure that you're a great writer. I'll never read your stuff, probably, because I like the idea that you're a great writer! I want you to take over the world, insomuch as a music writer can take over the world, and I want you to get all the way to the top of your profession, where I fear you will realize how empty that feels. That's the satisfaction that the rest of us get, right? We get knowing that there's no gold star, anyway, and fuck it if I didn't try hard enough. That's my bread and butter on a bad day. I did some other shit while you were being great. I had some big karaoke nights, I told a friend I loved them and it was weird. I got high and played Phantasy Star Online for 500 hours. So who really took advantage of this fleeting, accidental consciousness, huh? You or me? Surely it was me! Surely I lived best!
The only thought that ever saves me is that no one is really an artist. We are all having the same totally uncomfortable human experience. "Artist" is a container that has to fit inside of "human," and we all know how fucked things get when it won't fit right. Nobody wants to be Nick Drake, nobody wants to be Kanye. We all battle with confidence and purpose, unless the tightrope is so high that we can't—which is the saddest way to live, I think.
We all dream about the same shit: being unencumbered by all of this, swimming out too far, running without losing our breath, a freedom we can't even feel even when we're alone with no deadlines, because we're not becoming great. I've been alone with no deadlines. It's like you don't exist. Not existing might just be the ultimate freedom, but we're not wired to think like that. We're wired for faith, not for letting go. Seems like a real cruel trick to me, one I keep trying to get my head around. It's a skip on a record. So easy to push the needle too far, I think. Better to just find the loop and settle down into it.
It's okay if none of this is helpful to you, I won't take it personally. It's been helpful for me.
-Casey