Why That Person On The Bus Is Playing The Music Out Of Their Phone

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings…On The Bus

This my confession as an Extra Ass White Boy.

For the rational and put-together people of the world, singing in public is punishment. At best, it’s an unfathomable social faux pas. 

For most well-regarded people in our society, walking is just that, walking: an opportunity to transport oneself from one location to another. A time for them to, perhaps, think about their lives, add items to their mental grocery list.

Walking, for most upstanding citizens, is something of a chore. It is something to be calculated and avoided.

Once our only means of transportation, walking is now relegated to tracksuit-grandmas at malls, house husbands at the park, and people getting out of cars in the parking lots of the buildings they’ve driven to.

Using one’s own limbs (like a sucker) to propel oneself throughout the world is an antiquated idea on par with toilet paper.

Seriously.

We’re still cutting down trees, mashing them into pulp, drying them into thin sheets, wiping our butts with them, then throwing the butt-wiped mess into the toilet to be flushed to the sea.

That whole process? The sanitary equivalent of walking down the street.

However outdated our original method of moving ourselves has become, most agree that walking is not a time to sing along to the music in your headphones, or worse yet, the music in your head.

Singing outside of the narrowly-defined “acceptable” spaces that society has cordoned off for singing, is not only unimaginable to the average citizen, but if imagined, horrifying.

And since 1% of artists make 90% of all the money in the music industry, that means that the only acceptable place to sing in public, for most of the public, is a stage at a bar who probably thought having live music would be “a fun idea”.

A Brief Lecture to Venue Owners

These are, far and away, the worst venues to play: the music-as-an-afterthought venue.

If you are in possession of a public space, one that sells some form of single-serve liquid drugs (coffee or liquor), and you think to yourself, “hey, maybe we should have live music”, just stop.

Stop right there and think about all the liquid drugs you’re selling and ask yourself, “does anyone drinking my drugs ever ask me, ‘why isn’t there anyone singing into a microphone in this establishment?’”. If the answer is no, as in, “no one ever asks me why people aren’t singing, in person, over a PA system in my coffee shop”, then you by no means need to add singing people to your business model. 

This is because your venue is probably in no way suited to experiencing live music. There’s probably too much light, the ceilings are probably too high, the acoustics were never designed for it, the stage is next to the door isn’t it?

Now, maybe you can get away with a classical pianist or jazz guitarist: something acoustic and instrumental only.

But if music is going to be a part of your venue, it should be the focal point, or it should be purposefully in the background. It shouldn’t be one of multiple factors vying for your attention. Most people are at your venue to either use their laptop (coffee shop) or visit with friends (bar/ coffee shop).

Even when you make music the focal point of your venue, mixed results are imminent, and that’s because the second worst venues to play are the bars that try. 

That is to say, that in order to even somewhat succeed at being a live music venue, a venue must dedicate itself to live music almost exclusively, and even then, most can only hope to be slightly better than a terrible place to perform.

The upside, if you are entertaining the idea of entering the live music industry, is that the people who will perform at your venue are used to performing at really shitty venues. It is a low bar, the bar for playing bars.

In my decade+ of playing nearly every live venue in Minneapolis, only 3 places I played ever had a green room.

This means, at most performances, the performer has the pleasure of of sitting among the crowd they will be performing for, having the social equivalent of a stroke, trying to down drinks to make themselves less anxious, unable to drink due to nerves, puking in the toilet, being asked to leave by security, telling security they can’t leave because they’re the headlining act, and having security confirm that with the owner while they tell themselves they shouldn’t have to puke again because they already puked once, but deep down they know there’s no limit to the amount of pukes in the pukes-before-a-show timeline.

I say all this to point out that while our largest cities are revered for their civic life, our society doesn’t really make good space for music.

We try to fit music in wherever we can, cramming it into the cracks and crevices capitalism has allowed for it, forcing it to, almost everywhere we place it, produce profit for those who are not performing it.

So, why would someone subject themselves to trying to perform music on the small tracts of wood and metal we’ve relegated public singing to?

Because, perhaps, before that person found those small, beer stained stages, they were the kind of person who sang out loud everywhere they went.

Yes, I am here to confess, I was one of those people who randomly sang and rapped in public.

The ones you avoid making eye contact with on the street, the ones you sit as far away from on the bus as possible.

I am…the league of shadows

Wait.

No, just a extra-ass White boy who struggles with self-expression. 

We’re All Some Kind of B.B. King

I struggle with words. Never could express myself the way I wanted. My mind fights my mouth, and thoughts get stuck in my throat. Sometimes they stay stuck for seconds or even minutes. Some thoughts stay for years; some have stayed hidden all my life. As a child, I stuttered. What was inside couldn’t get out. I’m still not real fluent. I don’t know a lot of good words. If I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I’d have a tough time explaining my innocence. I’d stammer and stumble and choke up until the judge would throw me in jail. Words aren’t my friends. Music is. Sounds, notes, rhythms. I talk through music. Maybe that’s why I became a loner, someone who loves privacy and doesn’t reveal himself too easily.

B.B. King, from Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King

When I think of my story, I think of a struggle with words.

Words were always something I reserved for writing, for being written.

Words as most people use them, in real-time, to communicate things such as their thoughts and feelings, or at least, the thoughts and feelings they want others to think they are having, are a death-defying tightrope act if you ask me.

As someone who struggled with words growing up, I unevenly regarded those who excelled at self-expression. I held them on high: the beat writers of the 50’s, the rock stars of the 60’s, the gonzo-journalists of the 70’s, the punk rock and new wave artists of the 80’s, the rappers of the 90’s.

Good influence after good influence is what I was all about.

Those who seemed to excel at the arts, also seemed to me to excel at a romantic, drug-fueled, self-made narrative of the individual.

This I did not excel at.

The simplest acts of social interaction proved to me to be almost prohibitively anxiety-ridden. I’m still bad at ordering anything at a cash register to this day (when do I extend forth with payment? Where do I look during the ringing up of my impulse purchases? I keep saying “no” to this person, should I say “yes” to the receipt so this whole interaction isn’t too negative?).

But it wasn’t really until college that my affinity for singing in private was prodded into public.

Picture this.

A socially anxious boy.

Overly sensitive, one who looks up to writers and artists as role models.

A life spent in public schools in one of America’s poorest major cities.

My family certainly lived comfortably above the poverty line, and my high school was regarded as the top high school in Wisconsin many times, by many different publications, but I say this to point out that I grew up with one, specific experience of class and race.

Going to college was in many ways a culture shock for me, one filled with (what’s this?) affluent White people I had never encountered in such numbers anywhere outside a mall. Now, suddenly, I was in classes with them, sitting next to them in the dinning hall, surrounded by them as I slept at night (a more intense way of saying I lived in the dorms).

These were Suburban Whites, and I – though I didn’t understand it as such in the moment – was becoming afflicted with class resentment, class inadequacy, class anxiety.

I felt, somewhere inside myself, where we keep the feelings we can’t acknowledge, that I was not worthy.

My urban upbringing held no currency here. Being able to recite every member of the Wu-Tang clan from heart was of little value, and,you may ne shocked, rarely came up in conversation.

And so I manifested this friction, this cognitive dissonance, this identity crisis really, into a mindset of The Misunderstood, The Underestimated.

I felt as though people couldn’t see the complexity, the importance, the overwhelming depth of Me.

And maybe they couldn’t (whatever depth a 19 year old White boy possesses).

But what mattered more was that I couldn’t see past my physical appearance, past the name brands I didn’t wear or pretended didn’t affect me, past the uniforms that other White people had learned to wear, of prep and common commerce.

Was my resolution to this problem, perhaps, addressing my choice of clothing? Maybe compromising in some small, external ways in order to ease my daily internal turmoil?Cutting myself some slack for giving into social pressures – of dressing a certain way or making a certain level of small talk – in order to maybe, ease the already difficult transition from home-life to on-your-own-300-miles-away-life?

Faking it to make it?

Absolutely not.

Maybe, due to the title and content of this essay, you came to the conclusion that I dealt with this discomfort of identity by rapping and singing out loud in public.

Yup. Did it while I was walking all around campus. Did it on the east bank and the west. Brought my own mixtapes into the shared bathrooms in my dorm to (ugh) play them while I showered.

I didn’t recite every line of every song, but sometimes…sometimes the moment just grabs you. Sometimes you need those you pass by in public to know you have value. And that, somehow, your knowledge of certain songs and ability to mimic them, imparts value on yourself among strangers, or at the very least, intimidates your intimidators.

People, there are ways to deal with your problems, and there are ways to not deal with your problems. Violence is never the answer.

And violence was certainly, at the time, inflicting my singing voice on others.

I will reserve this time now to issue a brief apology to all my college and 20-something roommates,

Dear Former Roommates,

I am sorry for all my shower singing but I do not regret a single moment of it. Dictated, but not read.

My apology to my college and 20-something roommates, dictated but not read

Limited Creative Spaces + Frustrated Self-Expression + Class Anxiety

So if you see someone on the bus playing music out they phone, headphones nowhere to be found, maybe think about how they might not be able to afford headphones after their last ones (perhaps, not of the sturdiest quality to begin with) just broke, how there aren’t places for them to express themselves, or a family around them that encourages them to express themselves, or a society that acknowledges that they have feelings. Perhaps they live in a society that bends over backwards to deny that their lives even matter, and that Aretha Franklin sings the blues because “people laying in ghetto flats, cold and numb”.

You can still be super annoyed and find it rude, for sure.

You can always be annoyed. No one person can deny another’s feelings.

But perhaps, what I’m writing can give you, as it gives me in writing it, perspective on what you’re hearing.

That music, and it’s singing, may not be what you’ve been told it is.

I feel I’ve often been told, growing up, that singing is a joyful act.

That people sing because they are free of worry, that their joy bounces out of them boundlessly, into song.

This perspective can certainly be due to my White Christianity and the White Christianity of America.

The latter told me that people sing like they whistle on The Andy Griffith theme song: happily and due to much merriment in their soul.

The former taught me, in-person every Sunday growing up, that singing was solemn (psalm, not song, “purposefully misleading”).

My church taught me that praising the very god who supposedly gave you life should only be done earnestly, devoid of as much melody and passion as possible.

In order to examine, or have a chance at counteracting this programming – that music is only for stages, dancing, only for those who are good at it, and singing is reserved to the joyful or duty-bound – let’s look at what can happen when a man is stripped bare (literally, as well as figuratively) of as many societal influences as possible.

The Part Where I Quote A This American Life Episode, Of Course

On This American Life’s 529th episode, “Human Spectacle“, a Japanese reality show kidnaps a man and makes him enter sweepstakes for sustenance.

And the guy accepts it. Like, doesn’t throw a fit about his “human rights” or his “liberties”. Just plays along with the idea that he now has to clip coupons to survive.

After, let’s say, six weeks of eating dog food, when I was able to get more rice and it arrived, I really felt a special kind of joy at being able to sort of return to humanity in a sense and taste delicious rice again every day.

Nasubi, saying some shit that would not fly in America

Toshio Tsuchiya was the producer of the kidnap show (actual name, “Sweepstakes Life”) and “back in the ’90s, he was considered the king of Japanese reality TV.”

Tsuchiya has a lot of lofty ideas of what the show was trying to accomplish. And when he talks about them, you do get the sense that it was in fact intended to be a sort of psychological experiment.

Toshio Tsuchiya via a Translator, (parenthesis my own),

The whole project was trying to reach at some very elemental simple humanity. You see, Nasubi (kidnapped contestant) had been sort of brought to a state where he was in such an elemental part of his existence (after being alone and isolated for so long) that he danced without realizing he had ever danced. And he danced on a regular basis. The modern individual is sort of shackled by convention and expectation and all these other things that we wear from day to day. And I wanted to see them drop some of that to see this simple humanity and then to see actual gratefulness.

Nasubi danced like no one was watching. He danced spontaneously.

Dancing isn’t singing, but it might be to the body what singing is to the vocal cords. Both are powerfully complex forms of human expression that don’t rely on anything but the body.

And, if a morbid Japanese reality show can teach us anything, it’s that maybe our culture, and the society we live within, is supressing more than we thought.

Well, initially, of course, I was there as a performer, and I wanted to be a comedian. But somewhere in the middle, the whole business of staying alive became my full-time occupation. So I think what you saw if you saw me dancing, it was really just a human being expressing great joy.

Nasubi

Aretha Franklin covered B.B. King’s “Why I Sing The Blues”. She didn’t write it but she chose to record it. She put her time and her voice behind it. I would take that to mean that Aretha Franklin thought there was some truth in the words she was singing.

Tomoaki Hamatsu (aka Nasubi) danced because he was happy. He danced and forgot he danced. He didn’t know it was in him.

But the music is in us: when we are happy and when we are sad. When we are on top of the world, or hitting rock bottom. It bounds out of us because of sorrow, joy, or class anxiety.

There are, in fact, many reasons we sing, many reasons we express ourselves, many more occasions to dance and sing than our modern adult lives make space for.

B.B. King said, “as a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings”. He also said, “the blues was about survival”.

Talib Kweli, by way of a Zimbabwean proverb tells us, “if you can talk you can sing, if you can walk you can dance”.

And I’m very glad I heard this song when I did because I took that to heart.

But Back To Me Though

I eventually funneled my rapping in public to…rapping in public in the small spaces our society has ordained for such purposes.

A socially anxious White boy rapping?

It makes more sense now that I’ve written about it.

If talking to people is scary (as it was to me), rapping on stage isn’t actually that much more terrifying.

If you find yourself in a place where your culture, or at least, the culture you grew up with, appears to be of little-to-no value, you may feel an undefined sense of anxiety, an unresolved tension.

And if your society relegates public displays of music to either professionals, or sticky bar stages, it may only be a matter of time until you find yourself, palms sweaty, knees weak, arms heavy, with vomit on your shirt already, mom’s spaghetti, getting ready to go on-stage.

If you think, “well I feel class anxiety and social anxiety, and I never rapped on-stage or listened to my music out loud on a bus”.

Well, you may be missing one key component: extraness.

My finacee has pointed out to me that I am, indeed, extra.

No one has ever called me that before, but no one has known me as well as her and also known the term “extra” (my parents).

When she said it, it kind of put all the pieces together.

Singing in the shower, rapping across campus, the constant drive to create…something. It can all be pretty extra. And I’m lucky she’s a good sport about it.