What Is Success? Jonathan Richman, Robert Smith, Superman, and Peter Gabriel Weigh In
“Well the girls would turn the color of the avocado when he would drive down their street in his El Dorado. He could walk down your street and girls could not resist to stare. Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.”
-Jonathan Richman, “Pablo Picasso”
I’ve been thinking lately about why I make music, and particularly why I continue to make such hugely unsuccessful music.
Check out my Spotify stats; check out my Instagram followers; I’m not lying. I have been stupendously, completely, utterly unsuccessful, at least according to the metrics of how we normally define success in this late-stage capitalist dustbin, i.e. money made, influences had.
When I first convinced my parents to get me a guitar, I was 14, shocked that they would actually buy me one, and had my eyes set, clear as day, on becoming the next Robert Smith. I wanted to be dazzled by stage lights and moved to my soul by the righteous and melancholy sounds pulsating from the stadium speakers, all the while – equally important – being adored by super-hot goth girls, swooning and singing along from where they stood in the front row. Of course, I would also be deeply kind and gracious from my seat of incredible rockstar power too, obviously.
If you can’t already tell from my musical taste, back then, in the worst moments of my life, I was bullied pretty relentlessly. And at the best moments I was an outsider who felt very bad about himself. I needed a life raft. I was drowning.
When I was 9 or so I took up a comic book obsession. Superman was my favorite. I drew endless Supermans in my bedroom. I wanted to be a famous comic book artist, of course, but in my heart of hearts, really I just wanted to be Superman. I have a very clear memory of a fantasy I had: I was flying from high in the clouds down onto the black, hot playground macadam and saving my crush. She would be shocked and amazed and her hair would be flying in the wind and I would be seen as good, kind, and strong. I would be proud of who I was. And the girls would swoon and the bullies would back the fuck up.
Do you see it? The Robert Smith fantasy was just an extension of the Superman fantasy. A part of me held and still holds my musical ambitions as a way to heal and be triumphant and protected and safe and feel good about myself. No one would ever call me an “asshole,” right? It worked for Pablo Picasso, so why not me?
Problem: I have not gained the popularity of Pablo Picasso, or Robert Smith, or Jonathan Richman, for that matter.
I remember a therapist a long time ago asking what I wanted from my music. I said something like, “I want to be a brilliant and successful artist, obviously.” She looked at me, and smiled, and then for the rest of the session, we took that statement apart.
What does “brilliant” mean? Well, “brilliant”, for me, means full of light, full of brilliant illumination. Do I have moments like that in my musical process? Absolutely. Does that happen all the time? Absolutely not. But I’ll tell ya, when it does happen, I feel very joyful, and very clear. If you’re a songwriter or an artist, you know what I’m talking about. It feels very good. In its best moments, being creative feels somehow like shedding light on and bathing with love a long-neglected part of yourself, while simultaneously being visited by a spirit that is most-definitely not you. It’s like being a channel for healing energy.
What does “successful” mean? If I really think about it, for me “success” looks like a lot of things. It looks like a song just written that I really like, or a vocal take that feels really good and true to the character and tone of the song, or a mix that just sits so nicely, with warmth, balance, and clarity.
And all of these things I can control, sort of. I can at least put the time in and know that if I spend lots of moments doing all of these things, I will have more experiences that are “successful.”
I remember a quote from Peter Gabriel I read a while back. It went something like, “People say how much they admire my work, and that’s very flattering, but really, if you work really hard at something for a year, you will get good at it.”
It’s like success = time spent + more time spent.
Here’s something I can’t make happen: I cannot make more people like my music. This is the usual definition of success: lots of people liking what you do. And this lack of this particular kind of success is a problem for my childhood fantasy of becoming a musical Superman.
But here’s the thing: that fantasy got me through some hard fucking times. It was a life raft.
And here’s another thing: you have to leave the life raft behind when you reach the far shore. When you feel the warm sand on your feet, and you start to enter the jungle, it’s just an impediment to carry around a big, heavy raft.
In other words, like any fantasies, when we reach reality, it’s time to let the fantasies go, and thank them for how far they got you.
