I Hate Music

The best musician I ever met never recorded anything for the public that I know of.

He was a left-handed guitarist, and he was missing a piece of one of his fingers, so that it was sorta shaped like a claw.

He grew up surfing in florida, but he was the opposite of what you would expect, he was deep and thoughtful and sorta dark and gloomy and quiet, kinda skate-or-die looking, an artist, he knew way more than the rest of us about art history and all sorts of music and philosophy, he was always teaching us stuff.

He had a sense of humor, he could make people laugh whenever he wanted to, but at least half the reason he was funny was that you just didn't expect a whacky outburst coming from a guy like him.

He was the guy that was always telling me that every band I liked was homosexual, until I finally had to admit that homosexuals where pretty awesome at music.

"Freddy Mercury is gay? No way, man!"

Anyways, whenever he would start to play, from the moment he started tuning up his guitar, there was a tendency for everyone in the room to just totally space out and get completely sucked into his music, including him.

It didn't matter what we had been doing up to that point, sometimes it happened in mid-conversation, it'd start in the background of our consciousness and suddenly it'd take over the foreground, and it wasn't just some drug-induced musical stupor thing, either, 'cause we were all cold sober, we were always cold sober when we hung out with him, 'cause he didn't even drink coffee or smoke cigarettes or anything.

And he would go on for hours, playing this thick mixture of clean notes and total distortion, I don't have the skill to explain it really, it was like alien coal miner music or something, but it had these moments of epiphany, and familiar bits that were repeated, like a million different little songs that were all mixed together into this one humongous never-ending song, and each little piece took you somewhere you'd never been before, and it was all like nothing we'd ever heard before, there was never a single moment where it seemed derivative of anything else, and I know that's true, because if there would've been anything like that, it would've broken the spell, and it would've been easier to describe.

Eventually he'd stop playing, and look up (he always played looking down at the ground), and a goofy smile would break across his face when he saw that the rest of us had been sucked into his music with him, and we'd all laugh and applaud and then we'd have to try to pick up the pieces of whatever we had been doing an hour ago.

That was the best music I've ever heard.

The thing was, even though he loved music, he had zero-interest in performing, well, no, that's not completely accurate, see, actually, he totally hated the very idea of performing in front of strange people he didn't know and didn't care about, and he totally hated smarmy band garbage like shaking hands and talking with fans and making faces and dancing around and shaking your ass while you played and shit.

Meanwhile, I absolutely loved all that performance shit, being totally insincere and making faces and dancing around shaking my ass in somebody face was the best fucking part of the whole being-in-a-band thing, if you asked me, I mean, c'mon, that junk is what its all about, that's the whole fun of going out on a stage with a chair and a whip in yer hand and kicking some musical ass.

I think that's why he liked having me around, why he put up with all the junk I did that musta drove him half-crazy, I was sorta like him on the inside, deeply appreciative of the art, but I never could convince him to just shrug it off and go with the flow and try to enjoy the comedy-carnival of the whole thing so that other people could hear his stuff.

I tried to persuade him, I really did, y'know, 'cause I hate seeing potential go to waste, just like most folks, but in the end, I failed, and so everybody except a few people in a room missed out on something that was pretty amazing.

My own music was crap, I always say that the only music I totally hate is anything I ever had anything to do with, so you definitely didn't miss out on anything there heh.

And as cheesy as I was, I don't understand how anybody except a total robot or a japanese animator can stand playing the same stupid songs over and over again, that's what eventually made me give up on the whole music thing, its fun to do the first couple of times, maybe, but then that's it, man, jeeze.

Plus, while its nice to be appreciated and stuff, I never wanted to be rich and famous, I wanna be rich and not famous so I can still sneak around and do stuff and get away with it heh.

So that's pretty much why I say I hate music, its not 'cause I actually hate music, it's 'cause I know that almost all the junk on the radio is like mcdonald's hamburgers made by a bunch of robots, and the good stuff is like the best wine, only a few lucky people near a vinyard are ever gonna get to taste it.