By Mike Viola
There is a base human need to consume. We gotta eat. We do it with food, we do it with sex, we do it with raising our kids. We do it with movies, music, musicals, paintings, pictures, pictures of musicians in musicals who paint movie posters. The list goes on. What do we love more than lists? Crossing something off our lists. Consuming our lists.
Let’s walk right past the “I wanna be famous” stage of being an artist. Even though you tell yourself and everybody else around you that you “don’t want to be famous, I just want to be heard.” You’re kidding yourself. You’re hungry. I know very famous people at the top of their game. One guy is the only surviving member of his era. He’s the best. Everyone knows he’s the best. And it’s not enough for him. And that hunger has nothing to do with more fame. He’ll die starving, a very rich man.
Let’s see ourselves as a product (which you are unless you don’t want to sell your art at all, which is fine but has nothing to do with this idea at all. stop reading now. But listen to me, even Nick Drake wanted to be famous. Even Van Gogh). Try to see yourself as a service as well, then think about what services you are offering. The quality of customer care. But even before customer care, get inside your song, your art, and ask it: are you worth listening to? How many songs of yours just lay there unfinished? For me? Thousands. Just because you start something it doesn’t mean it’s worth finishing. Save yourself the anguish. So ask yourself, why did I finish THESE songs in my catalog? I was young…I was pumped about Nirvana that year…maybe that’s why. I was listening to Randy Newman that summer and came close to “Sail Away” so maybe that’s why this one survived to be on a record of mine. But what if you get as inside as the song as you can, and just collar it and make it face these hard questions:
“Hey song!
-Who are you?
-Who is gonna like you?
-Who is gonna pay to hear you?
-Are you for real?
-Should you be free?
-Will you mature or die young?”
Look at the charts. Listen to the charts. Everything on the charts is a popular product that’s not very good for you if you consume too much of it but in little doses is a sheer joy and affirmation of what it is to be alive and to be able to consume and shit the thing out the next morning. Rihanna, a bag of Doritos, the Black Eyed Peas, a can of Mountain Dew. Or maybe it’s Norah Jones and she’s a Dannon Yogurt with Activa added to fight off yeast infection. I’m not trying to be gnarly here, just trying to wrestle this idea to the ground and understand it on basic pop terms.
So say these chart toppers are all these correlated products, what are you? Are you a local coffee shop that gets slammed every morning, line out the door, cause you offer the best cup in the area? Or are you selling tortilla soup out of a cooler on Sunset and Echo Park Blvd for three bucks a pop to feed your family and extended family here for the summer? Or are you making and selling cookies around Christmas time for extra gift money? All of these are valid. Without which little worlds would stop turning. It’s the idea of fame…of riches… of more things to consume…the romance of consumption that brought you here to this place of feeling left behind, this place of feeling “I deserve more to consume so I can make more for others to consume.”
This whole concept gets dangerous when you test it against Baby Boomers. Stay away from them (not all of them but most of them). They lived through the ‘60s Renaissance and will never let you forget it. It will weigh you down and confuse you. Listen to all their music, ‘cause it’s mind blowing. But nothing comes close to Mozart. I’m sorry. The Beatles are my favorite, but can you really compare them to Bach? Absolutely not. It’s a different animal. A different section of the vast supermarket we’re all lost in.
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Mike Viola writes lots of songs. Sometimes with his band The Candy Butchers, sometimes with Dan Bern, sometimes with Mandy Moore, sometimes with Kelly Jones (that happened on last year’s Melon EP). Sometimes he even writes for Playback. Find out more about Mike and his supermarket navigations right here.
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