WE often see corporate types or CEOs showing off their musical hobbies as though the fact that they play guitar gives them “street cred”. 

It has become entrenched in our capitalist society and culture to laud this breed for having “creative” hobbies or pursuits as if it smoothens the square edges of their perceived (and oftentimes very real) “squareness”.

The opposite is hardly heard of – who has ever heard of the guitar god who also enjoys doing spreadsheets? Or the charismatic frontman who moonlights as a manager in his spare time?

Playing music or the ability to at least operate a musical instrument is a highly prized skill but ironically the lowest paying.

Don’t bring up our pop stars’ earnings – they are a super minority if you consider the broader ratio. To display a love for music is an act of humanising the self, to at least remind others that “Look at me! I’m also a normal human being! I have feelings too!”. 

But again, the opposite doesn’t work its charm as effectively. A musician with adept managerial skills or can balance accounts is most probably treated with disdain or suspicion, as if such abilities make him or her a calculative and inadvertently despicable character. Not a chilled out and cool sort of person you could hang out and spontaneously break into Freebird or Hotel California or Kau Ilham Ku with in a jam session.

I don’t have a particular leaning or answer to this phenomenon. I’m just raising it for the sake of conversation. Why not? Why don’t we like our musicians or artistes to have some “square” skills that are cherished in the nine-to-five world?

Why don’t we like musicians or artistes to have opinions on things? When was the last time you read a news article which had a singer’s or musician’s comment on the state of our national politics or the economy outside of the so-called music industry? 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is it only me who has noticed that the musicians and artistes – those in the record industry in particular – in this country have been stripped of their autonomy and agency in the preceding decades? Or maybe they have never been accorded it from the start?

One of the roots of this structural problem, I believe, lies in the semantics of what we think artistic endeavour entails in our society, which detracts from a more nuanced understanding of the music business.

Words like “passionate”, “talented”, “up-and-coming”, “future star” and the like are merely superficial garnishes by the industrial hierarchy on a vocation that serves a bigger purpose than to just merely entertain: artistes through the ages critique and comment on the powers-that-be of their time. Here in Malaysia, the silence is deafening.

Yes, it’s pure semantics at times, but this exploitation is very real and current – time and again, almost annually cyclical, we read news of former stars who are “discovered” (another overused word) to be leading destitute lives (although most are already in plain sight), ripped off by their record companies or managers who usually take the biggest slice of everything.

We now see artistes literally begging for money and financial aid from the government since their livelihood hardly gets them by (and I’m talking about pre-pandemic times here – it’s obviously more dire now).

The record industry has a responsibility to educate the artistes to have at least some form of financial literacy or roadmap to survive even though they may be talented in singing or playing an instrument.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime – this should have been the adage for the record industry from the start.

Who is responsible for the passionate, talented, and up-and-coming ones who were promised the keys to the kingdom only to realise that the kingdom is just a ransacked garden?

The music industry, which is bankrupt of ideas, can’t even resolve the music royalty issue (https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/highlight/2020/11/04/ministry-should-step-in-to-resolve-royalties-stalemate/) which has dragged on for decades. This will hardly benefit most artistes from the past for the industry also never encouraged nor nurtured singers or musicians to compose and perform their own songs.

Royalties only benefit composers and whomever owns the rights (which most starry-eyed newcomers eagerly sign away without reading the fine print). The record industry is bereft of ethics. Don’t get me started on music streaming and how that rips off artistes.

The real economics of life and living is not just about “passion” and “talent”. There is a serious lack in our society and it lies in education and life-long skills. Not necessarily a formal one as no additional subject or curriculum forced into a poor student’s life will sort that out overnight, but an intellectual one in order to change our collective attitudes that may lead to some paradigm shift.

But a hungry belly is more urgent than a hungry mind, and this Covid-19 crisis may be the reset we’ve been waiting for whether we like it or not.

A working musician partakes in labour because it is legit work but, as they say, the greats make it look easy. Do not assume that just because they make it seem effortless, it is worth less than something that looks “hard”, “serious” and “corporate”. – November 6, 2020.
 

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.