This is written on a post-it note at my mixing desk. I can't remember if I read the line somewhere from someone else, or if it just popped into my head one day.
It's one of those cryptic koans that can either be depressing or thrilling, depending on the time, day and mood it's read. Shades of Ozymandias and this too shall pass.
All of this will be forgotten.
Sure, some things won't be. The Beatles and Taylor Swift will stick around in collective human memory simply because of the massive pop culture phenomenon that they are, or were (and maybe Chuck Berry because "Johnny B. Goode" is on the Voyager satellite and the aliens will eventually know of a country boy down in New Orleans).
But every hundred years, there's all new people. Remember Wendell Hall? The pineapple picador? No? Exactly one hundred years ago, his tune "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo" was the number one song in America. Remember that banger? Or maybe you've heard of Isham Jones and His Orchestra, or Ted Weems and His Orchestra, or any of the other Bryl-creemed troubadours and their orchestras of the 1920s. Still no?
Forgotten.
Unless you're the Sound of a Generation or have somehow tapped deep into humanity's collective soul like the Nirvanas and Beethovens and John Coltrane's odes to the Supreme Love, chances are you'll be forgotten, too.
It's not an admission of defeat. Rather, it's freeing. No one will remember the inside joke you made in your lyrics, or the genius way you overlaid one genre with another. No one will remember the EQ you used on the kick drum or the mic you used on your cab. But the notion of being forgotten takes the pressure off. It kills, or at least handicaps, the vicious inner critic.
So, why build things that will be forgotten? Why spend hours and days and weeks and years capturing and organizing thoughts and sounds that only you can hear? Working on your dream thesis in the attic, basement, or garage. Putting things in the right sound and color, embarking on a daily hero's journey with second-hand drums and the guitar you bought in college.
The sick sheen of ambition and star-chasing wears off after a certain age, and the urge to create settles into the same reason I go to the gym. The same reason I take my vitamins with lemon water in the morning, the same reason I mow the lawn every Sunday, and the same reason people build things like Carhenge and massive rock sculptures in their backyard.
I do the work because it's there, asking to be done. The way my body asks to move, the way it asks to be fed and hydrated. The way my mind asks to bring order to my own slice of chaos among the 400 million terabytes of data created every single day. I do it because I have to, to tell a story only I know, and because I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't.
All of it will be forgotten. And I'm ok with that.
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What I’m reading: The Work of Art (Adam Moss)
What I'm listening to: Gentlemen (The Afghan Whigs)
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