On Playing Music
Ever since our distant ancestors first produced simple beats and melodies with their gross monkey people hands, music has become one of the most influential and diverse mediums of self expression in human culture. Fast forward to today and we’re still making rhythms and melodies with our equally gross human people hands. These auditory tapestries unfurl all around us, blanketing the world in a thick layer of car radios and assholes who don’t understand the concept of earbuds. After spending an admittedly short lifetime of consuming the sounds around me, I finally decided that I wanted to contribute sounds of my own. Though, at the time I just wanted to play music with the goal of impressing girls. My relationship with music has since become marginally more profound with impressing girls being relegated to a sub-goal (Which is a good thing as my success with girls has been in no way improved by my guitar playing).
When I first started getting serious about music I was fourteen years old. My ability was minimal and had the eloquence of several elephants in a bathtub. Needless to say this was highly discouraging, and I considered giving up. For an number of reasons this didn’t happen, and the following week I was sitting in another lesson. Surprisingly, I had improved, and my teacher was impressed. At first I wasn’t sure if my skill had caused this reaction, or if the money presented at the end of each lesson was swaying his professional opinion, but by the end of the first month I had improved enough to dispel that worry. By the same time the following year I began to feel as if I was coming into my own as a musician, shedding my shell of auditory ignorance, and for the first time seeing music as an attainable goal. This period of immense growth lasted only a short time and was quickly replaced by a wall.
The wall was a long period of time where I was uninspired and felt incapable of progressing in terms of skill and identity. I was terrified that the skills I had amassed would wither away and I would be left back at square one; much like a butterfly with its wings clipped. The wall led me to become somewhat depressed, and all I wanted was to break through to the other side. What finally fixed my issue was my discovery of Youtube music videos. Watching successful musicians live out the ideal musical life (with varying degrees of production quality) inspired me to reach for a DIY musical heaven clad in denim jackets and Chuck Taylors.
Breaking down the wall filled me with a potent mixture of inspiration and purpose that fueled my efforts for the next few months. What the wall also taught me was that there are more walls to run into, more walls than I could possibly imagine. The path to musician hood is a battle between inspiration and the harsh reality that anyone can be susceptible to being overwhelmed by apathy, and all I can do is constantly seek out the things in life that motivate me to pick up the guitar day after day after day.
It has been a couple years since that revelation and I’ve progressed further with music than I ever thought possible. I’m in a couple bands, I teach music lessons, and even write my own songs. While all of this is well and good, the biggest change is my reason for playing music. I have long since shifted away from by girl centric goals, and I now play because it gives me a chance to make both myself and the people around me happier. What I realised is that music is about sharing experiences and emotions with others. We may not all share the same tastes in musical artists, but we should all be able to respect that music is an art. So, dude on the bus who doesn’t understand earbuds: Fuck you and rock on.
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