It's the 18th of January, and I'm sitting in my front lounge room listening to Justin Timberlake's new song like two weeks after it was released and wondering how we're already three weeks into 2018.
I sent off a new song to get mixed two nights ago, called I Don't Know. It's about Ben (my youngest brother's) AVM rupture and subsequent coma in 2014... About how angry and confused and scared it made me that I couldn't (and still can't) see why that would happen to him. And ruing the fact that I still indulged in such excessive self pity when he provided me an example of someone whom life had dealt an objectively worse hand, yet refused to concede his ceaseless optimism. In terms of finishing the EP, I now just have to change some lines on the end a 12 min song I've written, then send that off to be mixed. I'm not going to bother with a launch I think, as I am too convinced of the futility of such an aim.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the Australian music scene and my own songwriting. There's obviously a big push within the alternative scene to increase the number of women that are entering the music world, and this is being accomplished through gender-quotas etc. I'm totally onboard with it for the most part. I just think it's interesting to sit in this era, as someone who longs to express himself and to have that validated by other people, and to feel that there isn't really an audience that wants to hear anything I've got to say. Don't get me wrong, I recognise that white men have had the lions share of the public's attention for the last fifty years, and that the push to bring different voices to the fore is far from something I should be complaining about. But it's impossible for me to accept that I am not unique. I don't mean that because I legitimately believe it in my brain, but I am the hero of my own story, and as much as I try to achieve some semblance of an ego death, I don't think I can escape the sense of self-preservation which my heart maintains. I will always believe in my own importance.
So I'm lead to wonder if, in some way, this push will aid in the death of my musical aspirations? I don't have the exterior self-confidence that benefits so many other men in pursuing music as their aspiration. I waver between self-belief and self-loathing like a spinning top on the brink of toppling over. I don't drink and nor can I ever quite overcome the lingering vestiges of a social anxiety whose origins I can't trace, so I will never truly be capable of ingratiating myself into the social scene and procuring more gigs. And there's always a part of me that thinks "Perhaps I am just saying things that other white men have said before me". I'm so caught up in myself that I've no way of seeing things objectively. White men have written about death and existentialism for an eternity, and I think white men could write well about it again, but now seems to be an era to aid in the uplifting of women at the expense of the male voice. I wonder if my creative malaise will be both just and unjust. Just on a structural level, and unjust on a purely artistic level? After all, everyone deserves a voice - but perhaps my voice will be a necessary sacrifice in the quest to give a voice to others? Maybe I will learn to live comfortably in that reality with time.