Do what you love, the mindf*ck will follow.

If money is the only measure of value, "working musician" is just another shitty service-industry job.

As we learn more every day about how our grifter-in-chief 2017-2021 betrayed the country to line his pockets and has continued to do so out of office, here are some thoughts on an ideology that has infected us all, from the greedy wealthy all the way down to the needy creatives.

1.

The other day I scrolled past a social media post from a code developer complaining that his “actual market value” was $101,000 annually but now, because of an influx of less qualified younger programmers being hired to do the same kind of work, he was only getting paid $84,000.

I didn’t bother reading what his many commenters had to say; I’d wager that not a single one of them bothered to point out the fundamental nonsense of his statement.

He seems to have forgotten that we live in a capitalist society. If the forces of supply and demand deem that his job can be accomplished by a person willing to do it for $84,000, then that is its “actual market value.” Not his market value. That makes no sense. He’s not a mere input, a computer chip, a bag of flour, a pallet of drywall nails, or 5,000 barrels of crude. He is a human being working a job that now pays $84,000.

It doesn’t matter at all that five years ago, the job paid much more. Welcome to the so-called “free” market. A terribly misleading term for an economic system now rigged at every level—from the factory floor to the C-suite—to favor a small number of owners and investors over vast populations laboring to accomplish the actual work. And labor is a cost to be minimized, remember.

But man, there’s that word “free” in there! That must be a good thing, right? What an excellent bit of ideological marketing. Too bad it’s also become a perverse source of people’s identity. This is the kind of thing philosopher Michael Sandel’s talking about when he notes we have been transformed from a culture that has a market economy into a thoroughly market culture. The poor man really thinks there’s such a thing as his…actual…market…value.

2.

For a brief while about ten years ago, I played piano in a little big band (about ten players total) led by a bassist and composer struggling to make something happen: positive cash flow, significant tour dates, a big reputation among peers, composing commissions for the movies, long-term career profitability, etc. But he couldn’t even hold down a teaching job due to general orneriness, self-centeredness, and irresponsibility.

He once said to me that God wouldn’t have given me all this talent for it only to be a hobby. 

Interiorly I scoffed and thought, That’s not how the real world works. 

But in my own way, I had also been seduced by this special application of the prosperity gospel. I was also a creature of the times, in which the greatest faith was not so much in the divine unseen as in the Invisible Hand. I had also spent many years trying to prove the worth of my music, and my entire being, by pressing into the pre-existing contours of the gig economy.

I’d been musical as a child and young adult but was very late-blooming as a pianist and singer with any kind of professional prospects. So in my mid-30s, the very first paying “society jazz” gigs I played for a couple of hundred bucks—often alongside musicians who’d been working such jobs since they were teenagers—felt like a dream come true. I didn’t have any kind of a business plan—certainly nothing that could make my skeptical then-husband happy—but I harbored a naive faith that if I did what I loved, the money would follow¹.

I had yet to identify that concept for what it was: an insidiously bourgeois delusion propagated by people who thought they were clever and enlightened but were really just the lucky beneficiaries of our post-WWII booming economy.

It’s not that I wasn’t willing to work hard and try things and develop some marketing savvy and all that. But despite my fancy Ivy League degree in the combined discipline of Philosophy & Economics, I allowed myself to be pretty obtuse about the money side of things, about the basic bookkeeping of it all, about what it would take to be truly self-sustaining let alone profitable as a non-famous middle-aged working musician.

I had discovered a profound sense of vocation in creative, improvisational music, so I needed it to be a job, needed it to pay me a living wage, in order to justify pursuing it. In retrospect, this was just plain crazy, but a common enough type of craziness. My surgeon parents had made it clear in so many implicit and explicit ways that the only worthy work, in their value system, either made money, or saved lives, or preferably both. Rebel though I’d been my whole life, I still must have believed them.

3.

My current part-time job is the only day gig I’ve ever truly loved. I’m in sales for a boutique music PR agency; I was a client and friendly acquaintance of the founder for more than a decade before she brought me on board last December.

I now respond to inquiries from fellow independent musicians seeking help with branding, marketing, social media, and publicity; I speak with them about their immediate projects as well as their long-term goals and dreams; then, if I think they’re a good fit for our very small team, I put together custom packages to match their needs and budgets.

What’s great is that I am under no pressure to lie. Our prospects are my peers: I can commiserate with their challenges and offer real advice and support at a reasonable cost. But I can also turn away the delusional ones (I want 300 million Spotify listeners in the next 6 months) and be blunt about what is and isn’t possible.

Frankly, a lot of what we indie artists want is simply not possible, not today, not in this country, and maybe not anywhere or ever again. (The reasons for this are vast and complex, but that’s not my focus here.) Most musicians—no matter how good they are, how much their fans love them, or how savvily they employ the hottest new promotional techniques—will never make their entire full-time living from producing and performing original music. Some will. But most won’t.

More to the point, even artists in the “big” music business aren’t making much money, compared with their counterparts decades ago—nor are the traditional record executives, from what I’ve read. No, the people making significant profits are the AI builders, the coder/founders, the ones figuring out how to charge more for “content” without passing along that money to the content producers. With the advent of AI-composed music, soon they might not even need human musicians to succeed with their business model.²

But then again—and this is an often overlooked point—most indie musicians today wouldn’t be musicians of any kind before the digital revolution made it possible to create high-quality recorded music, or even low-quality recorded music, for relatively cheap. I’m one of them. I made my first album at age 41 for less than ten grand and eventually earned that back in sales and gigs. Without the low-barrier-to-entry indie music scene, I would never have risen above local hobbyist, nor would many of my peers and clients.

Today there are an estimated 60,000 new tracks going out on Spotify every day. The idea of somehow “rising above” that number is a fantasy held by a shocking percentage of otherwise rational adults. A large part of my job and our agency’s role is disabusing perfectly wonderful, talented, hardworking artists of such innumerate nonsense. Instead, we help them develop small but loyal fanbases who’ll buy everything they make, subscribe to their Patreons, tip generously to their live-streamed concerts, crowdfund their major projects, and so forth. This is essentially the “nurture your superfans” strategy that’s been around for at least 25 years, and that recapitulates a basic, traditional understanding in sales: it’s easier and less expensive to sell more things to existing customers than to acquire new ones.

In music and all the other arts, even that rational/entrepreneurial pursuit for “high lifetime value” customers becomes more challenging with each passing month and each new tech development. But at least it has the benefit of being a genuine business model, not just a leftover youthful delusion.

Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash

4.

Who on earth decided it was a good idea to try to do what you love and love what you do and also get paid for it and also derive your identity from it and also calculate the value of that identity in cash money? Gotta have a talk with that guy.

At some point in the mid-2000s, I was on a gig at the National Building Museum, where a women’s professional association was hosting a dinner dance with U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao as the guest speaker.³ Throughout the massive, four-story, Corinthian-columned central ballroom and its annexes, there were caterers, party planners with walkie-talkies, chefs, and several hundred guests. The band had to arrive in the mid-afternoon to get set up several hours in advance. We played briefly during dinner, then waited again for ninety minutes after all the speeches before doing a second dance-music set. Our lineup included a ringer, the great vibraphonist Chuck Redd. It was a pleasure to share the stage with someone many notches above my experience level. While we played and people danced, there was an excitement in the room, a celebratory reverberation reaching a hundred feet into the open air of the Great Hall. I felt light, happy, and full of energy while onstage, but overall the job involved far more ass-sitting than music-playing, which made me antsy. There was no more efficient way to have done it. We were service providers just like the caterers; my comfort or happiness was unimportant. Yet I couldn’t stop from being vaguely annoyed. I recognized my unearned sense of entitlement here but I couldn't fight it entirely.

Professional musician should have been the perfect part-time job for me as a new mother. It took me out of the toy-strewn house and into the diaper-free world, giving my husband a chance to bond solo with his son four or five times a month. I was an eager new player on the Baltimore/DC regional circuit: several bandleaders had begun calling me for swing dances, weddings, anniversary parties, and restaurant gigs. I even returned to my NJ/NYC roots as an honorary Jew, working bar/bas mitzvahs and Jewish weddings with a klezmer band. We did a marketable mix of traditional Yiddish dance music, Great American Songbook standards, and light jazz. (It’s a big world and all, but I imagine it’s possible I’m the only Indian-American woman who’s ever gotten paid for playing “Havah Nagila” and “A Nakht in Gan Eydn.”)

People don’t actually like jazz, my husband would sometimes remind me. They just think of it as classy background music. He wasn’t wrong, although it irked me every time he felt some reason to bring it up. What difference did it make? It did not matter whether our clients could distinguish Tadd Dameron from Thad Jones, whether they could hear the language of fourths versus the language of thirds, whether they occasionally made ignorant requests, like coming up to the bandstand and asking to hear something jazzy or swingy when we had just finished an entire set of swinging jazz tunes. I was getting paid to play music. It was joyous, challenging, exhilarating. It was art music. It was something righteous true.

But little by little I started noticing the cracks in my own story. Trivial things bugged me—things my compatriots simply accepted as part of the job. I played a fundraiser in the second-floor lobby area of the Meyerhoff  Symphony Hall, a building filled with real pianos on caster wheels, but I was not given access to any of those instruments and had to bring my keyboard and amp. The inefficiency and illogic irked me.

Being a “working artist” involved lugging equipment, providing a generic atmosphere, and kissing clients’ butts. Low pay, bad hours, rude listeners, exploitative clients—none of that seemed to bother my colleagues much. I respected them for being flexible, professional, and driven. I admired their equanimity…but couldn’t muster enough of it myself.

Bizarre little indignities abounded. Sometimes a client would request a favorite pop song from their youth, then complain when our five-piece acoustic band sounded nothing like the twenty-track studio-produced original. Sometimes people would approach while I was singing, park themselves right in front of me, ask a question—then stand there awaiting an answer. Did they think my mouth worked independently of my mouth? At a wedding in Columbia, Maryland, a preteen and his grandmother thought it would be funny to take turns banging the low end of my keyboard—again, while I was playing. At a winery in northern Virginia, an elderly white man in a beribboned straw boater hat approached my (male) bandleader standing right next to me and said, Does the girl know how to sing Girl From Ipanema? This was during a break when I wasn’t singing or playing, so what kept him from asking me directly? Some weird horse-country chivalry, I suppose.

There were plenty of opposite encounters with grateful, gracious people who treated us like minor royalty. At a wedding at Fort Andrews Air Force Base, the best man and his date came skipping up to the piano between sets and gushed with gratitude and compliments. You’re our American Idol!

Many others lacked basic manners. Once, an elderly white gentleman hovered behind me during “Moonglow.” He leaned over my shoulder, peered into my gig book, then reached out and, while making some attempt to keep my page open, started riffling through the lead sheets behind it. Could you please stop? I said, as politely as I could. He look startled, as if only just realizing I was not a piano-playing robot.

My daytimes, in sharp contrast, were exhausting but filled with deep purpose. Feed the baby. Get the baby down for a nap. Wipe the baby’s ass. Next, next, next. I was interminably bored and perpetually enchanted. I walked to two different parks every day, met other parents for coffee and Legos, played on playgrounds and in the Maryland Science Center, and shopped for and cooked simple, healthy meals. Luxuries that should have been available to all parents of young children, if there were any justice in this world.

One weekend the baby was horribly sick, vomiting for the first time in his life, each upchuck followed by a look of utter bewilderment on his little face. My husband was ill, too. I felt guilty leaving them both to go play a wedding at the nearby Peabody Hotel. The bandleader was very accommodating: he picked up my gear from our house and took it early to the gig so that I could wait another hour or two before arriving to set up. 

Then a few months later something else happened. My father-in-law was in Florida, on the threshold of dying, having slowly destroyed himself with alcohol. K needed to fly down and help him move into assisted living. While he’d be out of town, I was scheduled for a gig in northern Virginia. The job and round-trip drive would keep me away from home for seven hours. I couldn’t find an available sitter or even a friend upon whom to impose. 

I contacted the bandleader—same one who’d been so kind and helpful at that Peabody Hotel wedding—three weeks in advance to tell him I couldn’t do the job but would help him find a sub. 

He was pissed off. Said I was being unprofessional. He went on, condescendingly, about how music is not like any other kind of job, it’s special, we’re being hired not just for our skills but for our unique personalities, and so on. 

Maybe he was right about my lack of professionalism. If I were truly committed, I would have compiled a three-page-long list of babysitters and backups before the boy had even arrived. So I accepted what he said, but I was also secretly thinking, What the fuck? I with my “unique personality” have somehow become absolutely irreplaceable on YOUR GIG, for a lousy hundred and fifty bucks? Is it really my “unique personality” or just because there aren’t many other pianist-singers around, and now you may have to hire two people to replace my one dual-purpose self? 

I began to believe that my discomfort in professional music would disappear if I became my own bandleader. This way, at least I would be making my unique personality indispensable on my own behalf. A new steakhouse in Ellicott City wanted to hire an act for Saturday nights. The owner heard my demo but asked for a live audition. It was an unusual and maybe even infantilizing request, but I wanted the job. I arrived on a Thursday to play a few solo tunes on the house equipment. The steakhouse owner was a former New Yorker, petite and pale-skinned, well made-up, wearing a sequined black cocktail dress. As a young woman, she’d worked in Manhattan jazz clubs. I thought we might bond.

While I played she sat at the very first table with a delighted smile on her face, whooping and applauding after every tune. Among my three or four audition numbers, I’d decided to do “New York State of Mind,” a slow, mournful, slightly ironic version that I’d developed in the weeks after 9/11. The owner seemed to appreciate the gesture, although later she told me that a customer of hers at the next table had rolled her eyes. Billy Joel? Really? That bruised me. Couldn’t they hear the way I’d taken this old song and made something new and thoughtful out of it? Couldn’t they hear the artistic impulse behind my dark interpretation?

The owner herself was pleased enough but concerned that I’d sat behind the keyboard the entire time. When you come in with your trio, you’ll stand up and work the crowd a little bit, right? Hunh. She seemed to think I was a Vegas dinner act. I nodded at her without committing yes or no. I guess she didn’t understand: I was part of a band, not an ornamental female. Even when I sang, what had become most fun for me was nestling my vocal performance among the instruments, burrowing into the groove, and improvising in conversation with my sidemen. This was the juice. This was why I’d found my way back to my childhood love of performance via jazz piano in particular. Sitting behind the keyboard with the band relieved me of the ambivalent burden of diva-hood.

She insisted on booking me with my trio for the first Saturday in January 2006. I worried about the date. Don’t you think it would be safer to wait a few weeks until well past the holidays? It’s the slow season, right? She didn’t think it would be a problem. Then Friday night before the gig, less than 24 hours before downbeat, she called to say they had only a handful of dinner reservations booked and she was canceling the trio.

A smarter, savvier, or at least humbler musician would have accepted this situation for what it was. A smarter, savvier, humbler musician would have expressed some mild disappointment at most. But I was me. By training and cultural presumption, I was a member of the managerial/owner class; I did not have the job-protecting reflexes of a powerless laborer. I was my poor-girl mother’s daughter, my rich-boy father’s daughter, and a product of elite education: insecure but haughty. I’d never learned to be tactful, or even tactical. 

See, Karen, this is EXACTLY why I told you we should wait a while! 

Immediately she took umbrage. Over the phone line, I could hear what was happening and it was now too late to stop it. She was the client, and I was an uppity service provider, telling her I told you so, addressing her snippily as if we were actually equal partners in a venture. The nerve of me, really.

We spoke for a bit longer, or rather, she spoke at me, with an edge of embittered sarcasm. I tried to suggest we put a date down for February. She said We’ll have to see about that. Then she never called me back again.

5.

I didn’t seek out or accept any restaurant or embassy or wedding gigs that winter and spring after getting dinged by the steakhouse. I had wanted it so badly and now I was forced to admit I hated it. Absolutely hated being a professional musician because it seemed to have nothing to do with being an artist.

And yet being paid to play music, whatever the limitations and indignities of the business, seemed the only way to justify the time and effort I put toward becoming a better musical artist. On some deep level, I’d fallen prey to this stupid American category error, this notion that the only activities of real value were the ones compensated in dollars—thereby excluding art for art’s sake, art made only because the artist is compelled to make it. Then again, it was inaccurate to call this strictly American: it had also been the bottom-line thinking of my immigrant parents—my poverty-fearing mother and status-conscious shopaholic father. Maybe it was just the whole world that had gone askew with this belief, that nothing outside the almighty marketplace really mattered. 

Here’s the good thing that came out of that moment, though. I began to ask myself: What kind of music would I make if I never got paid again? A couple of months later I fell into a prolific period of writing original songs⁴, quirky, unique, and not quite categorizable by genre, as if to answer my own question. I’d had to quit my professional musician job in order to become a genuine creator.

6.

A few years ago in an article in The Baffler magazine, I learned that billionaire Ayn Rand acolyte and unbridled capitalist Charles Koch—whose vast fortune came in large part via theft from native oil fields and later on from government subsidies—was now funding a philosophy institute. Its flagship course was “Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship.” Its textbook introduction offered the following sneakily poisonous premise: 

“The human condition is that we each arrive as newborn babies to a world that does not need us. The greatest and most joyful challenge of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around you better off with you than without you. It is within your power to show up at the marketplace with something to offer that will make others glad to know you.” 

There it was. Showing up in the marketplace. Making people glad to know you. Otherwise, you’re nobody, you’re nothing, you’re deadweight, a taker not a maker. If you end up poor or uneducated or laid off from the industry that sustained your father and grandfather, well, it was likely your own damn fault. 

I could be disgusted by this line of thought—by its denial of any intrinsic value of a human being, if not to some divine being, at the very least to her parents, friends, neighborhood, community, bosses, clients, et. al. It is exactly this belief system that is killing us with crony capitalist excesses and fascistic adoration of greedy oligarchs.

But have I not also been seduced, at some points in my life, by its fundamentally perverse conflation of personal worth with profitability? Have I not also occasionally trapped myself with this lie, first subtly propagated by my “foreign” Mom and Dad, then resonating through the entire US of A?

Do what makes money, they were telling us. The love will follow. 

Raise your hand if you’re ready to detox from this poison.

###

READING RECOMMENDATIONS

• Great article about similar economic circumstances in Hollywood. “The Money Is In The Wrong Hands” by Kelsey McKinney writing for THE DEFECTOR.

1. There’s a terrific short book by Miya Tokumitsu examining, among other things, the class bias inherent in the idea of turning passions into your living—DO WHAT YOU LOVE: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness.

2. “A New AI Can Write Music As Well As A Human” by Bartu Kaleagasi at FUTURISM, way back in 2017. There’ve been many new developments and breakthroughs in this field now, including some “collaborations” between musicians and AI.

3. Years later I’m thoroughly ashamed to have participated in anything having to do with the wife of Mitch McConnell, one of the most corrupt, damaging, and dangerous politicians of our lifetimes, a primary handmaiden to our current state of oligarchy.

4. Last December I wrote a bit more about my first prolific songwriting moment about twenty years ago, in a remembrance called “Children Ruin Everything.”