AKA THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH ADVICE

Forget good songs. Forget savvy business strategy. Forget the internet and all other media. Forget your training and your practise. Forget anthems and hard wrung passion. Forget your heart. Forget your enemies, lovers and memories. But remember this: what the best music does is deliver us from the mundanity of everyday life. That’s what music is. It’s boundary work. It’s the testing of our limits, always pushing at something. Music that doesn’t push at something doesn’t deliver us from the boring repetition of our lives. Music that doesn’t deliver us from that pit is just sound. It’s not even noise. It’s no different from the chime of an elevator, only infinitely less useful. It’s garbage.

This avenue to escape ourselves is the sustenance that music can give us. We all need this sustenance and some of us can only find it in music. Everything beyond and around that sustenance is a condiment, that’s all. You can forget all the rest of it and still save a person with music. You can forget all the rest of it and still save yourself.

And that’s it.

The rest is banal instruction.

‘Just do it for the love of it, maaaan.’

‘Just do it because it’s your calling, maaaan.’

‘Never give up, maaaan.’

Fuck all of it.

You don’t need instruction. None of us do. Not if we all keep in mind how and why music works. Not if we always steer ourselves to those unknown places that music opens up. Not if we strive – always, to the point of exhaustion – to find the edges of our lives. And when we’re there we get the one golden reward there is in music: company. And we learn the most comforting lesson there is: you are not alone.

So my advice is to honour this over all of music’s condiments and distractions. As such you don’t need to be a professional or a celebrity to change the world around you. You only need to do as Kurt Vonnegut once suggested, to ‘create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.’ Who would want anything more beautiful out of life than that?

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Originally published in ‘The 360 Deal’ edited by Andrew Dubber.

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