music

So. music. I write. I wrote in high school here and there. 3,4 songs. A bit of poetry. My boyfriend at the time, G, teased me about it. It was the last time I wrote during the seven and a half years we were together. I didn’t like to sing because I had gotten one too many comments that my speaking voice squeaked like a childs'. To this day I think I cap the highs in my voice which, tellingly, also restrains the emotional texture of it. Fuck.( that’s fuck as in I wish I didn’t give a shit, was true to my own expression and could just free myself up.)
Fuck.

My mom had sent me to Eurhythmics as a child, and I struggled through some piano lessons when I was five or six. She had wisely decided not to war with me but still bought a piano. We tried again with lessons later at twelve or thirteen but I never got past grade one. But when I improvised I was always happy with what I would come up with. Never written, never recorded but I could listen to a silence and find a melody in it. When I moved away to university I would walk in the city at night down the emptier streets so I could create songs to the beat of my footfalls. I would jazz scat for hours easily.
I started writing again in university. The more time I spent with dancers the more it made sense to spontaneously start contact improv sessions in the kitchen, dining room, whatever. The more time I spent with performers and singers as they crafted their musical lives the more sense it made to write and eventually to perform. I watched and learnt. I took courage for myself from their apparent confidence at doing what I was not doing in my life or in my visual art: putting emotions out there where they could be seen.
In Azania one of the threads of discussion that Dark Daughta had needed to introduce was inspiration as a cover for competition. That, depending on the power and privilege dynamics at work, “inspired by” easily becomes “stolen from” with an eventual destroying of the source of “inspiration” as the grande finale . Obscuring where one has taken from is how the wheel is set in motion. She personally had no interest in being destroyed by our ambitions, her community members who all claimed being “inspired” by her in some form or another. With the conversations we had (and so many more I didn’t participate in (see “How Taz Destroyed Azania”) by the time I left Azania I had gotten to the point where I could wrap my mouth around saying “Yes, I am competitive.” but I was years away from being able to identify the wheres and hows in my daily life. I can look back now at the days at university where I immersed myself in the other people’s creative worlds and soaked in what they did like a sponge. My commitment now is not to turn it into thievery as I begin to actualize my own creative potential as shaped, unbeknownst to them, by their work.

My first times writing were a definite middle finger to my ex. I was very aware that I had allowed his laughter to silence me and now that I lived in creatively supportive environments, I had some catching up to do.
Ironically it was in his living room that I jammed out those new songs with his housemate on guitar. G explained that when we were seventeen the problem he had had with my songs were that they weren’t about him.
Of course.

I wish I had understood that at the time.

Anyway, forgiving was good.

I have maybe forty or fifty songs from that three year period. Most were incomplete in some way. Only four ever saw the light of a stage.

I am musically undercover.
The singing at night, borrowing other people’s guitars, writing but not seeing the songs through to a place where they could be sung for an audience. I have not committed to being a musical person.

Or rather I have not admitted to myself what I know. That fear is a signpost for me that says: Afraid? Good! Proceed.
And make no mistake, I am terrified.
Drawing and painting and sculpture don’t scare me. The skills involved are no problem for me. The emotional expression is non- verbal.
But singing? Guitar? Holleeeee!
I wish in those moments where I do open my mouth and sing that I wasn’t so consistently critical of the work of others- those are the times when I could do without my own hypercritical ear and could use a little wiggle room to learn and fuck up.
To fuck up in public.
To fuck up in front of friends and fellow artists.
ARGH!
Rationally I know there is an important trade off here: Exposing my process, my fear, my vulnerabilities, allows the people who love me insight and access. It’s the only way I can receive the support I need. Ultimately I relieve myself of huge pressure when I am not striving to present perfection.
But boy do I try. Cause fucking up in public is the learning process and boy do I hate it.
I would love to be able to say something that sounds more enlightened. I’d love to be ahead of where I am in my growth and be seen in a better light for vanity’s sake. But really that’s what this blog is for. Self- exposure and while I’m at it exposing the fact that I hate exposure of any kind, thanks.
So I’m going to post this right now before I try to buff my words to a higher shine.
More coming.