We are 1 of 1.
Made uniquely and perfectly.
I have been doing some healthy battling with my conscience lately; concerning music and my creating of it. Specifically how to present it. I have this idea. It’s a beautiful idea, one that is cinematic and dreamy. It’s real life at its best (that makes more sense to me right now than anyone else… probably). It’s a work that transports me into something of a life inside a movie. It’s the album I’ve always wanted to create.
But then there’s fear.
Fear is a gentle giant that overtime can completely paralyze the hope for possibility. The desire to dream. Fear has been giving me unfair comparisons to the state of pop music today. It promises me nothing great will come out if it is not to the standards of what Tope 40 nominates as “cool.” It has taken several bedside monologues, a prescription of Johnny Depp movies, and some decent “you can do it!” books to come to this sensible conclusion.
JASON’S NOTE TO SELF FOR AT LEAST THE WEEK:
If you love it, do it. Simply that.
Don’t fall into the trap you let myself get in sometimes of, “Is this popular enough?” You were born to stand out. Start living by that standard. Someone telling you something is cool or not is entirely subjective. No record label or university or person can change the kind of person you’re born to be.
Most fear their creative works will be judged, so they give them no hope for surviving. Instead they take what little air of possibility it had, and let it shrivel up and die.
To love something is to be completely vulnerable to it.
What’s popular is defined by a certain type of people with bigger microphones than others. But popularity changes like days on a calendar. So if you are trying to live up to what’s popular, you will be forever stuck in game of chasing without a totem for you to know the difference. So instead, you will define what’s cool using standards of your own liking.
When we refuse to stop being governed by what’s cool at the moment, then we actually begin to start liking what we do.
This is not the tone of bitter writer spilling out. It is one of enlightened creator shining through. If I play this game now of pleasing everyone, then I will make decisions in that thinking, and be trapped in it for years. But I wouldn’t be doing it for me, I’d be doing it because it’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing.
WHO SAYS YOU NEED TO BE WHAT PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE?
Be yourself. And this message rings louder to me than potentially anyone perusing this page right now.
We are defined only by whom we are created by. It’s the only thing that lasts after all. Whether my moment of stardom comes or is just left in the midnight sky with the other galaxies, at least I am illuminating in what I love. Measuring up to others is wasted years. I am too unique to forfeit such a valuable thing.
-Jason O’Toole
(Source: memoir.jasonotoole.com)
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