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Low Self Esteem and Looping



rich wrote:
"In my opinion, there are deeper currents of why we feel we 'come up 
short'., 
but that's a long winded thread that is terribly off topic and probably 
too 
personal for the wonder that is the internet."

Quite frankly, Rich,  I think that western culture is steeped in low self 
esteem and that it radically reduces the creative and artistic output of 
the 
lion share of it's artists.

I think this is actually a vitally important thing to talk about here at 
Loopers Delight and on the internet.
We also, in this country, seem to be very uncomfortable talking about 
feelings and emotions in public (and especially
in an internet forum such as this).

This is precisely why I think it should be a topic of conversation.

In my experience (having taught over 2500 private students and played with 
hundreds of different kinds of musicians)
there is a kind of 'Olympic' mentality that tends to pervade music.   You 
know, this is reflected in the  "If I"m not going to be the best or at the 
very top of all the musicians doing the kind of thing that I do, then it 
just isn't worth all the effort to try and learn how to play" kind of 
attitude.

Brian Eno's notion that 6 billion humans would make 6 billion completely 
idiosyncratic red crayon/white paper drawings of a house and a tree is 
really germane here.

It is easy to forget in our 'Grammy' award winning mass culture, that the 
impetus to be creative seems to be universal.
Many cultures like the vastly creative Balinese culture don't even have 
words for Art in their vocabulary, simply because everyone in the artist 
goes home after work and does something creative.

What I have loved about the live looping community is that the technology 
seems to have some kind of liberating effect
on musicians.   Lots of other technologies and styles of musics have a 
similar effect so I'm not claiming anything extraordinary for our 
community 
here, but viewing all of the artists,  newbies and pros alike, at the Y2K4 
festival really
inspired me and reaffirmed my faith that everyone has the ability to be 
unique and creative artistically.

It could be me just being an old fart (cue up the old geezer saying,  "In 
my 
day,  we bled for our art and we LOVED IT!")
but as a teacher I have noticed a very dramatic decline in the interest 
level of young musicians in the past ten years.
In my experience,  students are less 'gung ho',  less educated (by a large 
factor),  less inclined to take chances with creativity than they were say 
15 or 20 years ago.

There are a lot of reasons for this (if it is, indeed true, and I can't 
prove it more than anecdotally):    the advent of Video games,  massive 
amounts of entertainment to be viewed,  400 stations on television,  much 
faster editing styles in
Videos leading to much lower attention spans.   The attention span of my 
typical students is about ten minutes an hour less than it used to be.  
I'm 
finding a lot of students are overwhelmed by a 40 minute lesson whereas 20 
years ago, it was barely enough time to cover what needed to be covered.

I think a lot of all of this is directly attributable to low self esteem.

Don't get me wrong,  I have just as much of it as anyone (you should have 
seen my knees shaking when I did my live looping presentation at PASIC 
this 
last week as a confirmation) but I think this is something that we need to 
start talking about as artists and musicians and loopers.

I think the mutual support is incredibly important and one thing I hear 
more 
than anything is how inspiring creatively it is to
be around 50 loopers for a weekend, just because everyone:  newbies and 
pros 
alike all feel really supported.

What do y'all think about this (can you tell I"ve been in Nashville for a 
week)?

yours,  Rick

ps   by the way and apropos of absolutely nothing,  I got to shake Aretha 
Franklin's hand after her performance on
Sunday at a Casino outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

I want to publicly thank the generosity, love and support of Tom Roady for 
hosting me in the past fantastic week.
You should have seen him playing with Aretha, with the legendary Roger 
Hawkins (of Muscle Shoals fame) and I looking on.
He was incredible!!  And dammit!!!!!   He's a live looper!   LOL.

I talked to a lot of young percussionists who are planning on going out 
and 
buying their first DL 4 or Boss Loopstation to
get into looping for the first time.    It's totally down to Tom for 
giving 
me the opportunity to evangelize like that.  Thanks brother!!!!