When I left Tennessee, I’d originally planned to go to New York City, to seek work in the entertainment business. Or maybe L.A. Most of the music business in
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Nashville was country, which, although I’d developed a respect for, I didn’t wish to work in.
My plan was to infiltrate a record label, establish connections, either through interning, or working at a label, and then form a group, have that group be signed to a deal, and hopefully become famous, be a star.
But by the time I finished college, while I still loved music, I’d stopped writing, playing. I don’t know why. I’d spread my music around online, had over a million page hits to my website, hundreds of thousands of downloads, and gotten major label interest, though my demo was rejected, regarded as “too experimental, edgy” for the label, but a senior record executive had told me he liked me, that he’d wanted to hear more, told me to do something more commercial, and had asked me to send another demo…
I’d planned to start another group, do something different, something more dance-pop. I’d gotten into Alice Deejay, trance, wanted to try more electronic music. But I wasn’t able to make anything pop enough or commercial enough…
Everything I produced wound up too weird or edgy for radio…
I enjoyed it, though. I liked what I was doing. And I liked the freedom of doing weird, fucked up and crazy music. I didn’t want to conform, make my music into solely a product, make music only for money. And I started to have new dreams.
My focus started to shift from producing music to other pursuits, namely, business and entrepreneurship.
For a short time, I’d become more interested in purely the business side of music, had thought of forming a music label, signing groups, singers, developing, producing talent. I did produce a group or two, a few demos, with a couple local rappers, and a Christian rock group, of all things, but nothing took off.
This was around the time, however, that downloading, file-sharing became a thing.
I was becoming disillusioned with the direction the music business was headed. It was always shady, but I’d envisioned working for or starting a label with fair splits of revenue for artists, doing things in a more ethical, musician friendly manner.
Then, though, the business was diverging even farther from that, and I was
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent especially grossed out by the emergence of “360 deals” where music labels were siphoning every stream of an artist’s income (shows, merch, etc.) to recoup lost income from file sharing.
(I’d also found I didn’t like the schmoozy aspect of the music business, the ass-kissing I’d seen, the plastic people, plastic smiles and forced laughs. So many of the record label executives I’d seen or met were scumbags, and I was having second and third thoughts of working with such slime…) Having taken a few business and accounting classes for my major, I was becoming more interested in going into business, not the music business, but finance. The business of business. The business of money.
I’d become fascinated by stocks, financial markets and had become intrigued in working in financial services or accounting.
(In reflection, I really wish I had changed my major to accounting or a finance related field. Especially on a practical level, when I entered the “real world” and found out how useless my “music business” diploma was, especially in the age of record label consolidation, downloading and rampant piracy.) I’d had an existential reckoning the night of September 10th and morning of September 11th, 2001. On 9/10/2001, I’d attended a lecture about finding a “job”
after graduation, how to do it, writing a resume, alternate routes to take. It was my sophomore year, and I’d not given much thought to life after graduation. I left the lecture dreading what might happen after I took off that cap and gown…
Then, the next morning I woke up late because I didn’t have class until 11 a.m.
and had been working online into the small hours of night. This was pre-smartphone, and I didn’t turn on the TV or computer. I listened to music as I showered, ate breakfast. I even jerked off in the shower, fantasizing about a girl in my class’s fantastically hot, tight and round ass.
Leaving, walking to class, there was an eerie feeling in the air. It was a beautiful late summer day, warm, blue skies. But there weren’t many people around campus. I’d wondered if it was a holiday or there was something I’d missed. I passed by a couple attractive girls sitting in the shade under a pine tree next to the building my class was in, and they looked distraught, and so I smiled at them, which made them look back at me, eyebrows raised, as if I were nuts.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent On the door to my class, there was a simple handwritten note, left by my professor, saying that “class was cancelled.” There was no explanation why. So I went home, turned on the computer, and saw the news online, flicked on the TV, watched the planes flying into the buildings on continual loop.
I phoned people I knew in NYC; everyone was shaken up, obviously. A lady from my old neighborhood, who I didn’t know personally, but knew of, was aboard the plane that struck the Pentagon.
Going from thinking of my future for the first time, what I’d do after graduation, to the entire world changing, in one day, in one morning, taught me a valuable lesson on how fast things can change. It made me realize how futile plans can be.
No matter how well we think them out. It really made me ponder my future in an entirely different light. Of course, many of my classmates had similar thoughts.
One telling our professor that at least he didn’t have to worry about “being drafted.”
(As for one positive side note, people in America, even down there in Tennessee, at that time, were so united. I’d never seen that sort of camaraderie, togetherness, and haven’t seen it since. Particularly in this day and age of hyper-partisanship, Twitter Wars, and polarized Red v. Blue politics...) Maybe it was 9/11 that changed my focus. I don’t know. I’d become far more interested, anyway, in financial markets than in the music business. I’d come very close to changing my major, and really wish I did, but I decided to stay the course I’d chosen, partially because I’d come so far, and also due to financial reasons, not wanting to have to spend additional years in school and have to burden myself financially.
I figured, too, that I’d have a college degree. Being a college grad would open doors. And I could easily change career paths…
So I stuck it out. I stayed the course.
It was another in my long list of mistakes.