DALL E-2 INPUT: “A former musician, surrounded by destroyed instruments, under a pink sky, photographed by William Eggleston” (2022)
Someone randomly came into one of my feeds today with “former musician” in their bio, so the notion sent me, well, riffing…
What, exactly, constitutes a “former” musician?
Did they never “make it?”
Did they forget how to play?
Did their instrument walk out on them?
Did they build a bonfire of their well-worn lead sheets?
“Former” is often reserved for describing states of being you’re happy to have escaped.
“Former member of [Boy Band]”?
“Former Survivor contestant”
“Former smoker”
“Former drinker”
“Former New York Giants season ticket holder”
For some states of being you’re never a “former,” but rather, a “retired” or an “-ex.”
“Gary? He’s a retired doctor,” for instance, is a common refrain in Florida HOA pickle ball court bleacher seats. You’d only hear “He’s a former doctor,” if Gary had lost his license and turned in his stethoscope, never to practice again.
Once you earn that degree, you are always a doctor.
In the same vein, you may have been “the former principal ballerina for X Company,” but you’re always a ballerina.
Then again, this is dinosaur thinking. With the internet, it’s now next to impossible to become a “former” anything. Every phase of your life exists contemporaneous with the present.
Your past lives in real-time now.
All those past lives, in real-time, now.
Imagine that.
There’s no such thing as a “former YouTuber.” You can take down all your vids and delete your profile, and there will still be a record of your absence - if only a post-paper paper-trail of invoices and payments between you and them, and whatever other services you shut off.
Do we really think, that when someone hits that “Delete Me?” button on that Facebook account, the fine folks at Meta hit your Master Delete button, too?
We need to accept that a “deleted” (read: “former”) online self will be invisible, but never erased. Every cookie and authorization placed in your name all around the net will not get yanked back to HQ when you decide to kill your avatars.
Hell, most people’s social profiles are today re-engineerable from 3rd-party data. Online, your habits are the gold. Everything else is the dirt that’s washed away to find the valuable stuff. Most people will pass away with their data trail having made more scratch for others than they ever made for themselves.
A future app will offer fully-live past versions of the internet. For better or worse, your Geocities persona is still out there, waiting to be pinged anew.
There’s no “former” or “future” on the internet. There’s only “on” and “off.” As long as the internet stays on, you’re never off.
In any event, in a related story, everyone is a former drinker at an AA meeting. But the introduction is always, “My name is [insert yourself here]. I am an alcoholic,” not “I was an alcoholic.”
Drinking is downstream from the alcoholic.
The Recovered keep constant watch over (and so also, company with) their addict-self as a means to protect the soul. Disallowing the alcoholic in you control over you is the test.
Every one of us walks astride our darkest self. Trick is to let it inform, rather than destroy you.
If there was, say, a “Musicians Anonymous,” where I might exorcise myself of the demon of creativity, I still couldn’t intro myself as a “former musician.” It would have to be, “My name’s Westy, and I am a musician.”
As to the “anonymous” part, it’s weird now how the opposite of anonymity became fame, when it’s really just celebrity. Everybody’s famous to at least 1 person. The internet cemented “anonymous” as a pejorative as it flipped “No one’s listening because your suck!” into “You suck because no one’s listening!”
“There but for the grace of hype go I, an unknown in an influencer’s world.”
- Psalm 39, The Book of the Rando
In the end, you’re never a “former” musician, because once you learn to play an instrument (this includes your own voice, sound software, silence, etc.), you change the way you listen to life. Once your acoustic POV on the world shifts to experiencing not only sound outputs, but sound inputs, you can’t erase the musician created inside you.
As John Cage says, “Everything we do is music.”
If the musician you makes you feel like The Creature instead of his creator Dr Frankenstein, that’s an acidic place. The POV to see yourself as a “former” requires drawing a line between some then and now, where there was a “not-musician to musician back to not-musician” transformation. That’s a lot of sonic whiplash.
I’m no closer to an answer here, unfortunately, as to why bill himself as a “former musician.” Is the declaration designed to flatter, or worse, dis “active” musicians? Is it to distance himself from the dirty art of song? However it goes, it rings apologetic and defensive - a dash of bitters in a neat drink. As if music broke his heart.
“Never ask me to play again.”
Maybe calling yourself a “former musician” makes you feel better about yourself than your music ever did. That’s a tough gig as a composer, indeed. Maybe the toughest. You take the POV of your worst critic.
You can never be your worst critic, however, only your loudest.
Revealing insecurities and doubts about yourself via art is a time-honored, and every once in a blue moon, audience-honored pursuit. The paradox is that revealing vulnerabilities, even to no one but yourself, takes a ton of courage.
The most insecure people are often the ones who have the most trouble communicating their doubt. Confidence comes with not GAF what anyone thinks of your flaws.
In this way, “former musician” just comes across as “insecure musician.” Who knows to what standard this guy held himself that he never attained, or what hi-fidelity expectations of life went unfulfilled in his former state.
I’ve never known my creativity to be a zero sum game. My dreams of writing in a state of pure flow, for example, are often interrupted by a laundry buzzer. But when the folding’s done, again I write.
Water always takes the shape of its vessel.
Creativity conforms to life.
lol, almost no one ever is a “former laundry folder.” The messiest people start out a mess, never start folding, and never change. Those that come to appreciate a well-organized sock drawer, by contrast, never look back.
Maybe it’s just best not to admit at all if you hold your music in such contempt and shame. If so, do yourself a favor, close your ears and soul to your base acoustic impulses, and live the sinless life. Or at least the sound-less life.
:^D
I’m a musician and writer living in New York City. Find me at https://westyreflector.net, and @westyreflector on all the popular platforms.