Beyond My Paygrade
There is an interesting origin to this idea that music has an industry. I was fishing around online this morning and saw yet another “X amount of things you should know once you enter the music industry” article, and the word ‘industry’ sounded like it didn’t belong next to the word ‘music’. It sounds like such a crass and unpoetic concept to be paired with. There is a whole history associated with how musicians started to blur the lines between being artists or laborers. As the industrial revolution gained more momentum, population shifts, city demographics, and working conditions made a whole new demand for entertainment. Musicians began taking on jobs in dense urban areas playing for silent movies, ball rooms, and dance halls as people had more leisure time and dispensable income than an any point in history. Unions cropped up, as they had already in many other labor institutions, to bargain collectively for the demand for living wages and leverage pay scales. This becomes a long and windy road of how musicians have learned how to earn money in the modern age.
I am a bad negotiator. I understand that if I don’t earn an income playing music, then I’ll have to earn a living doing something else, which will keep me from working as a musician. I love making music, sharing music, talking, and writing about music though, often to the point where things like shelter and food seem wildly unimportant by comparison. It’s a tangled web, it seems, and there are all sorts of hierarchies within it. For instance, the musician’s unions were hardly united on the onset. There was a pretty clear distinction from the orchestral musicians and the folk singers, jazz artists, and anyone who wasn’t privileged enough to get a formal education. There were deep racial divides, often to the point where in some cases, white unions would admit black artists into their ranks for the sole purpose of preventing them from working by inventing restrictive policies that prioritized white musicians over them. Black musicians in Chicago actively demanded a segregated union as it was the only way they could gain leverage. Musicians, on the whole, have always had a struggle making ends meet, and often fought within their own ranks trying to get enough food in their bellies and rain off their heads just to ply their trade.
Personally, I have found that worrying about money never helped my artistry. It may have lit a fire under me to go hunt for more work, but I have always felt more connected with music the less I think about the industry of it. If I just shut up and play, then people generally help me keep doing that. You get the drill, and if I don’t worry about it too much, so will I.
I’ve been posting a lot of poetry lately. I’ve written poetry throughout my life and recently compiled as much of it as I could find to work on a book. There’s a scene in Pink Floyd’s, The Wall when Pinky’s teacher finds his little black book with his poems in it, and the music in the background says as much. The best part of the whole scene is when the teacher reads the lyrics to the song “Money” out of the little black book. I live for scenes like that.
There’s always a side of our lives that we’d rather not look at, but often needs our attention, regardless. When I shed all that nonsense, and just sing, there’s usually nothing left to say, but listen. I was reminded by what the gift of music gave me, and what I hope to keep sharing with all of you. The industry of it is not my department. It’s out of my pay grade, and hopefully, will remain that way. Here’s Joe, telling us what we really need: