the elusive Cool Kids Music Club
or how I realized that we all stuck in our own unique way and nobody will ever know how uniquely we criticize ourselves
Sometimes, I am extremely jealous.
Since I was a kid, I always had trouble fitting in. I was socially anxious at a very young age, and always struggled to find the things I was interested in. If people said theatre wasn’t cool, I wouldn’t do theatre (even if I did secretly think it was cool). If there was a band people liked, I liked that band, and yes that does mean I got my parents to buy me an mp3 copy of the entire Black Eyed Peas album despite the reality that the music low-key kinda sucked. Yet, I was never actively happy about any of this. I wanted to fit in, and I never could because it was obvious I was faking it.
Now, this sounds like the start of a self-congratulatory monologue where at the end I proudly proclaim how different and interesting I am, and I am only so different because I have broken the burdensome chains of society, but that’s not where I’m going. I am still just a regular person with interests. I still exist within society. I choose to do so, because I want to fit in and feel like I’m a part of the conversation.
For the longest time, though, I’ve been feeling this creative frustration. I’ve written about it before, but I felt this immense gulf between my work and the end result I wanted to achieve. Slowly that gulf has become smaller as I’ve gotten better at making music, but even at this point where I feel comfortable enough with my work that I am regularly thinking that a song might be worth publishing, I still feel frustrated.
Oddly enough, though, I’m relatively proud of my music! I go back and forth on whether I think it’s good or if other people will like it, but for the most part I am proud of the work I’ve put in and the final result. It’s better than the music I was making when I first started over a decade ago, that’s for sure.
So what’s the deal?
I was talking with a couple friends recently and thinking about feedback I’ve received from random folks online about how they liked my music. They were all from very online communities, usually interested in video games and media, and while those folks also had a clear appreciation for more mainstream music, they were really in love with what I was making. Someone even made a track-by-track breakdown of the entire album that ended up being like a short essay. They really enjoyed it that much. I kept asking myself why do they love it and why don’t I?
I realized the answer while listening to Porter Robinson’s new album, “SMILE :D”. On a lot of the songs, I kept thinking to myself, “Wow, this sounds like something I would make!”. And then I held that thought for a moment, and went back to compare the new album to a track I was working on. A lot of the elements in my track were good, but they were incomparably different. So how could I really enjoy what I was writing, but still feel this was not what I wanted?
The two ends of the gulf weren’t what I imagined.
The gulf I think about so often isn’t actually between me and my creative aspirations. It’s between me and the style of music that garners love and support from both me and millions of other people. It’s between me and a mythological “Cool Kids” club of musicians - the people that appear to be doing the groundbreaking stuff that mixes their weirdness with a mainstream appeal that enables new genres to spring up, and new artists to embrace a flavor totally distinct but comfortably familiar. The Cool Kids are the artists I love.
I so desperately want to be part of that Cool Kids club, and will regularly attempt to make music that fits me in there. It’s this middle-school era attachment that I haven’t been able to break down. And don’t get me wrong, I want to break it down, because god damn would I be so much happier if I could just exist on my own and be comfortable with my own creative work.
Every time I’ve attempted to make something close to that Cool Kids club, though, I inevitably allow my autopilot to take control and end up doing something weird or silly, something definitively NOT-COOL-KIDS-CLUB. Whether it’s a crazy melody that goes all over the place just for the sake of it, a weird production choice, or just being bored and not bothering with the minutia of EQing exactly the right Hz up 3dB.
All of these choices I make when I’m in the creative zen are very me-coded, I believe, because I just make strange inclusions and choices simply off of gut feeling. I cannot tell you how to make an Alex Roman type beat, because I don’t know how to define that myself. Everything is very scrappy - I try to leave a lot bare and out in the open because it sounds better to me that way. I just like it more. It feels right.
So the problem is where to put the knob.
On one hand, I can put it all the way to the left, and just make normal music that sounds like what anyone might expect normal music to sound like. It would be more difficult because I’d have to actively betray my instincts, but I could effectively fit into an industry without having to coherently define my style or encourage other people to join me for the ride. But why bother? That sounds like it would just be work, and the creative energy would be gone. I might as well just download AI music.
On the other hand, I could put the knob all the way to the right, and allow my most powerful creative inhibitions to leave me in favor of just doing everything in my own bizarre way. It would be incredibly fun and enjoyable in the moment, but as soon as I step out of that creative zone I would have to discover that once again, I am not part of the Cool Kids Music Club. If I want to make music a career, I would have to do a TON of marketing to key segments of people who think like me or have my interests.
Maybe the best option is to go down the middle. Pick things from both sides that make sense. Get that sense of comfortable professionalism that a lot of mainstream music works with, but still infuse my weird personality choices into it. That could be an avenue, but I might run into the same problem that option A provided, where my work could either be derivative or explicitly bland.
I wish I had a definitive answer, but more than that I wish there was a definitive person who could tell me that what I’m doing makes sense, is good, and can lead to something greater. I want that reassurance. I’m jealous of those who have it. I envy the people with an established audience who will tell them when they did right or wrong. I am jealous of people who have figured out their creative problems. I’m jealous of the Cool Kids Music Club.
In a previous version of this post, I concluded with that. I was jealous, and that’s what made life suck. Just today though, I was listening to an interview with Porter Robinson that happened to pop up on my YouTube recommended page, and there was a portion where Porter mentions that this “alternative form of imposter syndrome” where he describes a feeling not dissimilar to what this whole post describes.
It’s funny to realize, but I think that moment completely invalidated my entire thought process related to this topic, because ultimately, as I have written in journals and even this blog many times before, it doesn’t actually matter.
The Cool Kids Music Club isn’t a secretive group that you enter once you attain some special skillset, it’s just the perception we have of the artists we love. We feel they must have done something truly spectacular and unique that grants them access to the creative rewards of being truly great. Even when we try to emulate the work that someone else has done because we admire it, there’s no escaping the feeling that you are inseparably tied to that piece of work.
Furthermore, the thing people love about the work that an artist creates is exactly that piece of you that gets imprinted on the work when it gets made. The reason AI music doesn’t sound unique or interesting is because it is purely devoid of that unique flavor of a specific artist or group of artists. A composer is credited with music an orchestra plays because the composer’s personal taste is inseparably tied to it.
Now, this presents a terrible conundrum. It means that we will literally never be able to make the art that matches our inspirations and gives us that feeling. No matter what we do, our own sensibilities will be involved. Even if I were to follow an artist’s strategy for making music to the letter, ultimately the way I interpret that strategy will be unique to me.
Does this mean generic music cannot exist? No. Generic music will always exist and really should exist. It’s a perfect baseline. Not every song can or should be the weird bizarre mess that exists on the right side of the knob. Sometimes we just need background audio, and that’s perfect. (We should pay the people that make background music fairly too, but that’s a different conversation.)
It’s very easy to take the doomer route with this one, but I think there’s a much better and more comforting takeaway - we’re all on our own journey. We’re all climbing an endless mountain of progress, and so every step of creativity we take is another inch up that mountain. Our mountain is purposely ours, it’s specifically shaped and contoured to our circumstances, and much like we grew to love the achievements others made climbing their mountain, so too will others grow to love the achievements we make climbing our mountain.
