A Portrait of the Artist

Socrates was famous for saying that "the unexamined life is not worth living," but the nature of capitalism discourages self-reflection beyond what products one needs to buy to be happy. To counter that, I've made a habit of looking back on my life to evaluate choices, assumptions, outcomes, et cetera. One of my most significant life choices was to deliberately avoid a career as an artist, and I was just thinking about that choice again as Filthy Records closes in on its one-year anniversary. I was 20 years old and had dropped out of college in favor of artistic and creative pursuits, but felt I wasn't achieving enough progress toward my goals. My belief at the time was that I just wasn't "serious" or "committed" enough to make meaningful headway, so I set the goal of pressing a vinyl single before I turned 21. It was a straightforward, realistic, and attainable goal with a clear, binary outcome; If I met it, I'd continue pursuing a career as an artist; if not, I would keep music as a hobby, however beloved.

Needless to say, I didn't put the record out. My chief reason at the time was that I didn't believe it would be successful enough to recoup the investment, and hindsight had done nothing to change that conclusion. However, the intervening years have taught me much about "business," for better or for worse, and what I regarded as a dirty necessity back then, I now regard as... a dirty necessity that is important to understand if you want your art to find an audience. Though I've stuck to my music-as-a-hobby plan, last year I made a deliberate choice to roll the dice and start Filthy Records as a way to personally fight all of the awful market and tech forces messing up music. I have no idea how 20-year-old me would take that - whether my present self is a "sell-out" for deliberately engaging with commerce, or an enlightened shepherd guiding and protecting art through the perils of capitalism. Probably a little of both. Either way, I have no regrets about my choice to abandon a "music career" way back when, and I'm also excited to dip a toe into the business side of music now, at a time when the whole music industry is so desperately cooked. We'll see how it turns out.