The Analects of Music Part 6: Grindset

Performance

There is a quality I find about performing live that I can't get anywhere else. While I enjoy composing and recording, it is like painting or sculpting with sound. You end up with something that is frozen in time. Live performances, however, are a unique experience in that there is an immediate and intimate interaction / relation with the audience. The exchange of energy is an integral and inseparable part of the music. 

There is also danger. The artist takes a terrible risk of a substandard concert, or the vulnerability a musician has to external attack. There is also the inevitable discomfort of actually making these performances happen, the drudgery and hardship of an artist's life. This, however, has an advantage: to quote Nietzsche, whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In others word, “grindset.”

Music cannot exist in a vacuum. But the inner soul of the artist must have a measure of solitude; especially since the artist simultaneously hides and reveals himself in his music.

You've read about ancient civilizations, religions, and mythologies and practices like astrology, Kung fu, yoga, meditation, and the like. It's all a degenerate form of the original. Even with the greatest advances as of now it does not compare to what humanity has lost. We are too weak and venal to keep it without it destroying us, and the same thing has happened again and again. There have been thirty Adams and Eves, and thirty worlds like ours destroyed with no trace. Ours will be the last.

Knowledge belongs only to Allah. Everything we know and think we learned on our own has been loaned to us. And one day we must give it back.

In the meantime, we are expected to do something meaningful with it.