I’m trying something new this time: I’m providing a….written adaptation of my audio log. I say it that way because it’s not a straight transcript. Almost all of it is reworded, and I removed a decent amount for the sake of reducing redundancy. I didn’t change it structurally, it’s still meant to convey the same content and meaning. It’s just hopefully smooth(er) to read. The audio itself is at the top of the section, if you prefer me as background noise.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to post this today, but as I was re-writing the transcript, my dad brought me a letter. It was Nick Green’s zine. Not only is his faceeater project exactly relevant to what I’m talking about, but I was also thinking of Nick last night. It was while I was listening to a podcast update Dean Hebsher posted 5 months ago. Both Nick and Dean suffered from running afoul of Kurtis’ audience. Both have since pivoted into creative endeavors that seem, from the outside, much more authentic. They are rebuilding an audience that is there for them. Dean, sad to say, is still in a space of shame and self flagellation and grief. It was his description of daily suicidal ideation that made me really want to speak on it. Below the main log are the voice memos I sent Laura about it. There’s also a face cam video, semi- related about commentary on youtube, and a secret bonus treat at the very end ❤
audio log // jun.17.2026 // 11:30pm
—text adaptation—
There’s a parallel here, between this and another recording I just finished. I was talking about the podcast episode Dean Hebsher put out 5 months ago. One thing he mentioned was that, after everything, he took down the posters from the tours he did with Kurtis and Jacob. Not because he had only negative feelings about those two, or that he felt only betrayal – it’s a complicated relationship. But he asked, “would you frame and hang up stuff related to the job you were fired from?” The parallel I’m drawing is to Drew framing the terrible results he got from that music distrobution service — the one that sent his music out to different playlists. You know? Obviously that’s coughing baby to nuclear bomb in terms of personal devastation. But, hmm. I see something there.
Drew’s video…He’s experienced something like this twice now – with his band, and with the ninja streaming thing. Both times he was like, “Okay, how does this work, if I don’t leverage my already established audience? Not very well. I’ve already used my lucky get-in-the-door card for my lifetime, and without that this really isn’t working. A lot of people don’t even get one of these, I just happened to get one.” (of course, not taking away from any of Drew’s ability, perseverance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Feels redundant to say.) But I think the fact that he spent 4 years on it………
You know what’s funny, what’s welling up in me? As I’m starting to say this, I’m thinking, I know people are gonna love this video. It’s riding this crescendo, this wave of positive sentiment towards him. I’m having that feeling of cheering for the home team. Not that there’s any direct competition, but…… It feels sycophantic, is that too strong to say? Like: “I know, you know, drew knows, everybody knows. It’s great. Good job.”
Why do I sound so bitter? I’m kind of exploring my feelings in real-time. It’s a process I’ve cultivated. It’s difficult, and I have to sacrifice a bit of my sense of self. I have to lean into feeling more fragmented. My emotions are so strong, I get this really theatrical overlay on everything, that makes it hard to see reality clearly. In real-time, I have to literally step away from my thoughts and feelings and look at them. Slow down and ask, “what’s coming up?”, before plowing through with what I thought I was gonna say. That’s something people don’t always do, and might be useful, especially if you suffer with any sort of mental illness.
Fuck, man, I– It’s a weird feeling, about Drew’s success. So many feelings that are unnecessary. I guess most of that is stemming from something parasocial. But either way—
He gave himself a lot of real and substantive lived experience when it comes to being an independent musician. It’s nice that he can simultaneously be the youtuber that has the big platform –it’s like he’s on TV, in a way – but I also get to see him have a real experience of being a smaller artist. It’s the best of both worlds.
I’ve been marinating on a similar idea for a while. My friend Laura writes fan fiction, and she recently finished a story that she absolutely poured her heart into, knowing that its subject matter and niche would kneecap its reach. If you’re an artist, you will run into these times, maybe frequently if you’re in a good place, where it’s like, “I know what needs to come out of me”. And it just does.
How it’s received…. you kind of have to surrender to it. That’s easier when it’s not your job. When this thing that you made from your heartspace has to deliver a paycheck – that’s scary. Still, me and Laura have commiserated about not having an audience. I have to consider for myself, what would be satisfying? For Taylor Swift, it’s never enough. I think there is often an achievable “good”, but the tricky part is realizing when that has happened. It’s not letting FOMO or dopamine lead you to want more for the sake of more. It’s okay to keep going, but don’t let that want of more start to eat in the sense of fulfillment.
It comes back to purpose, too. I know my purpose in creating – it’s for the creation of itself, from whatever instinct that is in me. I know it in the moment, I feel it in the moment, it cannot be described in words. It’s just overwhelming and pure bliss…..and torture, in the process of it. That part is sacred and personal to me. Maybe one day I’ll work collaboratively, and it will be different.
I need to separate that from how I decide to share. The making process is my own relationship with the art. When I decide it’s done, it’s thrown out of the nest immediately. Hope it flies! Usually flops. I guess… to what degree do you need to guide eyeballs to it, so it can reach the people who would vibe with it?
In theory, in the most optimistic take, you’d hope the internet would facilitate that. I have an instinctive hope in it, because I met my best friend online. I recently sent her a very sappy message about how incredible it is we found each other, even though she lives across the fucking ocean, literally on the opposite side of the world. Even 20-30 years ago, we could not have had the same kind of close relationship we do. It’s discord, and other internet stuff, that keeps us connected in real time. I hope it can be in real life, one day. My brain is already strategizing ways to get out of this country.
All that to say — in theory, the internet has potential. But as Drew pointed out in his video, things settle to the bottom when you have algorithmically distributed, profit driven content. Search engines are fucked too. People have pointed this out about Google and YouTube search for a long time, but it keeps getting worse. It’s no longer like, “I’m searching for this specific thing, please help me find it, search engine.” Instead it’s like, “I don’t want the default algorithm, I want the algorithm slightly skewed over to this topic.”
So how do you, as an artist, find your people? It’s bittersweet, but Drew was right to suggest getting in touch with the local scene.
What comes up to me immediately, instinctively, is “Whoa, I don’t want to be limited to just the people geographically close to me!” but…. we haven’t grieved the internet that once was, if we’re still thinking that way. It is an illusion, especially now, that through any of these social media or streaming platforms, you will find those perfect artists. It’s likely going to deliver you people who are exceptional, but also very good at playing the game. Very lucky, too, with good connections. And the thing is, those people who know how to play the game, it’s not that they make bad stuff. It’s just gonna be a certain kind of stuff.
In turning to the local scene as a primary way of consuming music, you have let yourself grieve all the artists around the world you would love, but will never know. There is this white fog coming over the internet. It’s a metaphor that’s haunted me for a while, this white fog coming down over everything, to divide and conquer us. AI has accelerated it so much. I guess an algorithm has always been some version of AI, but you know what I mean. We are becoming more separate. These companies, the people who control the internet, are trying to preserve the feeling of organic connection. They’re trying to reanimate and puppeteer the dead internet, the zombie of it. Grieve that, and go to where real direct connection exists. Get involved locally, and then network. Connecting peer-to-peer, as they say.
Over time you will realize that what is in your local scene is not only good enough, and worth your time, but probably so much better than you thought. Just like with any local restaurant, or local craft market, these people are worthy. These people are enough, and so many of them are exceptional in ways that we don’t fully appreciate.
If you allow yourself to be a little bit spiritual, you get another layer of comfort: “I will be guided towards the people and the places that are best for me.” You can get off before that stop! You don’t have to take that last little journey with me……. but……
Okay, because it’s such an extra good layer, I want to give skeptical people the chance to consider it. I want to put it in the genre of sci-fi, because it’s easier.
Just hypothetically, imagine we are multidimensional beings. We know the material dimension very well, but what if consciousness comes from another dimension, or is another dimension? In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the multidimensional beings that created the Earth were seen as mice, but that was just a small projection into our material reality. In Carl Sagan’s metaphor of flatland, 2D citizens of a 2D world have a run-in with an apple, and they see just the strip of the apple that is projected into their 2D reality. You see? So this higher dimension, to me, is where or what consciousness is.
I think there’s a lot that’s hard to explain, particularly in art, and maybe…. unspoken communication? You can feel it when you’re playing music, that euphoric experience, when you’re in sync. Imagine the sound waves syncing up, but it’s your consciousness. You all click into this one frequency, and you ride that wave, you can feel it building up, and you push out and through! It’s so satisfying. To me, that exists in this dimension of consciousness. It’s something other than just material.
….. Let me be one note, this is my blog…. I saw it even in Danny’s show — god damn it, forgive me — even in Danny’s most recent show, I could feel it when he was setting up a joke. He loves the tension, he loves to hold that silence and look out, and he squints his eyes, he knows he’s about to, to…He poses the hypothetical, he holds that tension, ooh, and I feel it, and he just goes …!!!!bam!! Oh! The punchline. The way he says it just captures the absurdity of it, that we already know, probably, but it’s the way he articulates it. It’s sarcastic and dry, but in the end still – because it’s him – just…never mean. Just silly. Silly, silly, motherfucker.
But it’s there. I feel it in the moment. He doesn’t have to cosign this, but what it feels like to ride the wave of that joke, and just, oh the joy! The joy of riding it as he’s saying it, and how masterfully he lands it, his expressions…At the end of his late show at Park West, when he was just dead tired, running on fumes, it put him in a state where he was like, fuck it, I don’t care —at least that’s how it came across! The thing is, his instinct has as much precision as his deliberate control. His muscle memory knows, he doesn’t have to think. He can just be, he can just do, the precision is still there. It’s just intuitive.
And God, is it good. To me. To me! I don’t have to sell his comedy to anyone, but.
It’s that way with music too. I have very cheesy taste in music, maybe not the best or most sophisticated. I really love The Strike, and I was recently listening to their newest song, Edge of the World. At the start of the first verse, they have this percussion sound, which I think is the drumstick hitting the rim of the snare. It’s a very specific clicking sound, and it takes me back so viscerally to being in some dive bar in Phoenix, when I was like, 10 years old. I don’t know why they let me in, I guess just because I was the sweetest, most neurotically well-behaved kid. They let me in to see John Stewart with my dad – John Stewart on guitar, Dave Batty on the bass, and the best drummer in the world I’ve ever seen in person (I wish I remembered his name) We were at the table right in front of them, I could have reached out and touched his knees. But live music, man, especially in that setting, like….God damn, it takes you to another world.
It tempts me. [[Sometimes I drum the air, and I feel the power of being that simultaneous bedrock and engine for the guys in front of me, giving them the wings, jet fuel. Fly, my pretties!! It really does feel like power. Energy. Directed, but raw and rough. If I get back into music, it would be with piano. I would be so self conscious with the sound level of drums. But that explosive joy I get when listening to music –I cannot fucking sit still. It has always been a problem.]]
It’s an energy, a frequency. You can feel it, and we don’t have to label it, “higher dimension” or “metaphysical”, or whatever. Or, maybe I’m wrong, and it’s all material. The science just isn’t there yet. I’m an artsy fart, so to me it’s spiritual. I use the metaphor and the theatrics that my mind brings up to understand it, since I don’t have the science to describe it. But it’s in my reality as much as any sensory experience. I just can’t point to it. Instead, I put it in my art. I put it in the colors, the expressions…. you know, that one, like, fuck —- one of the cheesiest pictures I’ve drawn of danny… it was at the The Chicago theater, I think. Him and Kurtis were talking before the show, and Danny was joking, “What if I just staged dived, but it was, like, off the ceiling?” I drew a picture of him where he has this gold aura, like one of those aura pictures you can get in Sedona. It was like that, but pure gold, and his smile was… ooooooh just as cheesy as possible. But, I’m showing you what I see, what I see is not just coming from my eyeballs. I try to turn it into that visual language, and I sacrifice some of what I literally see to convey what I feel.
What I feel there, I think it’s from the dimension of energy and consciousness. In that dimension, there’s less separation. The rules don’t apply the same way. I see it as a big orb of water, and we are little waves that come up and stick into a physical body in the material dimension. You can imagine, those ripples and reverberations can touch people across the world. Time and space doesn’t work the same way, if it even exists there at all.
With those waves and ripples, I feel like we are guided towards things. My aunt is an example of this. She had a messy situation with her son and his wife, and was kicked out very suddenly. It’s similar to Dean – the way it happened was ugly, to the point of being traumatizing, but it took them to a better aligned place. A week or two ago, she was diagnosed with cancer. It’s operable, it’s operable, and she’s scheduled very soon for surgery. But before, she was living in a tiny rural town in Missouri. It was so remote, she couldn’t get medical care hardly at all. I believe she was guided here, to us.
Maybe I’m filtering only for the things that work out. Maybe that spin….. Hmm. That conscious spin. I’m showing my subconscious what I value, what I think the world is like, and it cooperates. Maybe it’s an energy that attracts more positive things. Maybe energetically there is no moral distinction, but I’m just attracting the kinds of things that I’m thinking about. If that’s gratitude and love and joy and optimism, I attract more of that. It’s not a reward I work for, I’m just aligning to what I value.
The time when I was the closest to being the crazy artist who’s like, eyes rolled back in their head, channeling, drawing abstract, nothing scribbles, I wrote, “Joy is a beacon – receive!” Again, that could slip into toxic positivity, if thought of in the wrong way, but maybe that is one version of faith. You don’t have to believe it’s like a benevolent thing from some guiding higher power, but rather that you receive based on the frequency you attune to.
The thing is….infants die. That’s going to be a bug bear in any philosophical or spiritual framework that I might want to develop. I have to hope it’s the exception that proves the rule, or there’s some other complication there. We are interconnected waves, and sometimes there are forces bigger than us. Fortunately, I’m coming around on reincarnation, so it’s easier for me to remember this individuation of consciousness is so brief and so fleeting. The scales are not balanced at the level. Within one little, tiny life, as little ants, we make the best of what we have. Hopefully, overall, our good actions and positive alignment will make that enjoyable, or at least bearable. Hopefully paying it forward, trying to make some difference, can add to those bigger forces in a positive way.
But how? Purpose, and fulfilment follows…
I have to ask myself, what is the purpose of sharing my art? The nice thing about being a little ant is, hey, that’s above my pay grade! You know? If my art never gets discovered, but I’m living my best life, filling my days with what feels right and most aligned – if I’m spending my life doing, and that doing is the best version of me, then the if or when my art is seen is above my pay grade. It’s not up to me, and I don’t have to worry. It will reach whoever it’s meant to. I had the satisfaction of making it, just like Drew did with his band’s album. That’s enough, creatively.
Where does that sense of lack come from, then? It’s connection, I think. If someone else experiences your art and takes it seriously, that’s a very deep way of being seen. It’s natural to be drawn towards that. Unfortunately, that’s a high level outcome that you can’t totally control. Instead, you can find connection in different ways, that are easier to manifest in the short-term. Go to local events, live music, touch grass, even. When you have community and purpose, you’ll probably have less angst about your art not being appreciated. It’s still gunna suck ass, but maybe it won’t be so soul crushing.
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If you’ve scrolled all the way down, horrified at the 40 foot wall of text and said, “thanks but no thanks”, I offer this little quite moment, a pallet cleanser —
>>robyns_ramblings 