I don’t want to be a rat anymore

In the early stages of your career as a musician, you get very caught up in the romance of being an artist. You live and breathe it. You are and should be practising all the time, and when you’re not practising you should be thinking about practising, and you don’t have time for simple things because you’re too busy trying to go deeper into artistic expression. You are inspired and fresh, and you want to study at the best institutions with the best teachers, and you revere people who play until they bleed and can’t sleep at night because they’re thinking of the difference between a Beethovenian and Brahmsian articulation. You take it all very seriously, and you are constantly looking inward, and you judge non-artists for their apparent inability to look inward the way you do. You spend all of your time with artists because they are the only ones who understand you and you all fall in love with each other because you are all so interesting and so expressive and intellectual and so righteously dedicated to sacrificing everything to this higher ideology which the rest of society, by design, rejects.

But before long, you are violently assaulted by the horrific revelation that you are not a glamorous Bohemian. In fact you are a precariat, and those are very different things, you see. You have spent your whole life so far intentionally ostracising yourself from the ‘real’ world in the noble pursuit of becoming a true artist (because you bought into the lie that it will be worth it eventually), only to realise you are simply running the same rat race — just on a slightly different track.

There are other caveats to this situation, too. You don’t get the perks that other people in the normal rat race do. You don’t get a monthly pay check or tenure or sick leave or work-life balance or healthy routine or the right to speak to someone in Human Resources when there is a dispute. Or, if you work in an orchestra or an opera company or whatever, and you do have those things, then congratulations, you’ve simply joined the normal rat race.

You realise that you are mentally ill. Any joy you once derived from playing music has been sucked out of you by the leeches of itineracy and financial distress and institutionalisation and perfectionism and toxic workplace politics. You don’t really belong anywhere and you have no real friends because everyone is secretly competing with you and criticising you behind your back. You realise that in fact you would probably not be friends with many of the people you work with in any other situation if it weren’t for the trauma bond you formed trying to survive this profession, and that is because they are exactly the same as you: insecure, poor, jaded, anxious and depressed. You begin to really appreciate that you are not at all special, and none of the people in your profession are special either, although they believe they are, and you begin to loathe the cultish narrative to which your fellow musicians subscribe; the naïve, romantic, inscrutable mythology of a fragile industry propped up by its desperate agents. Because for every single one of them (whether they admit it or not) even the ones with the most illustrious careers who have enough of a platform and enough of an income to do whatever the hell they please, art has turned into a job. A job like any other. We may as well be pushing papers in a tiny grey cubicle in some monstrous corporate building, where the only choice we have in life is whether to eat a salad or a tuna sandwich on our lunch break.

There are boxes that need ticking, you see; processes that need following, standards that need upholding, formalities and panels and bureaucratic requirements and rules and orthodoxies — spoken or unspoken — about what you can and can’t do with art. And the people for whom you are performing are not common people, as you were once led to believe. Really they are colleagues, institutions and grant-givers, and they judge how well you jump through the hoops. Even the audiences who come to see your performances are not common people, but also a type of pseudo-expert panel of judges, who expect to hear things exactly the way they heard them in the Spotify recording.

It costs so very much even just to feed yourself enough so that you can be alive in order to make art that — far from making art — most of anyone’s time and energy is spent finding money and making more of it and ensuring it won’t dry up in the future. And it’s a terribly impossible situation, because when things get bad enough that you find yourself genuinely considering becoming a public servant or whatever instead, you think of how much you would rather stick a rusty fork into your eyeballs than to hear yourself utter phrases like ‘thought leader’ and ‘deliverable’ on a daily basis. That is, of course, unless you come from serious generational wealth, and you can afford to sort of swan in and out of being an artist as though it’s a hairstyle you feel like changing, rather than a matter of life and death.

And then you feel guilty, because it really isn’t a matter of life and death at all. You feel guilty because you know you are very lucky. The ticket out of a working class life was purchased for you, before you were even born, by a privileged class of people who happened to value and could afford your education in music. And because you are educated, you feel that you sympathise with working class people. You may even think that you represent them. Because you are educated, and a musician, you know everything, and you are pretty much better than everyone, and so of course you know what is best for the working class (an education in classical music, among other things). You like to think you’re quite down-to-earth, actually, because you had to overcome your own challenges to become a musician, and you had to struggle against other middle class people for your spot in the industry, and that took discipline. Where is the solidarity? — you think to yourself — Don’t they know how important music is? You know what it’s like to be downtrodden. You are an artist! You are under the thumb of the bourgeoisie!

But then you remember: you are the bourgeoisie. In reality, you are so badly out of touch, so enmeshed in the world you inhabit, that you couldn’t be more alien to real-life working class people. You realise that for all the feel-good woke rhetoric of your industry, you and your peers are absolutely not on the same side as the real-life working class, and in fact the real-life working class justifiably detest you and everything you represent, and all of the things that you ever thought were important are actually infinitesimal and only further expose the ever-widening class divide. Of course the working class don’t give a shit about you. You and your very important concert in a big fancy hall with superstar international soloists. You and your valiant campaign to champion works by minority composers. You and your edgy avant-garde gig in a grungy basement somewhere which features the most radical and ground-breaking music anyone has ever heard since Schoenberg. You and your earnest plea to local government for more arts funding. No, of course they don’t give a shit, and nor should they.

Because when it comes down to it, you will never climb down from your special arty place in the middle of the social ladder. You work hard to be there, and the least you deserve is to stay where you are. You are a cultural authority. You have a reputation, degrees and awards, prestigious connections, attention from publishers and broadcasters, and a social media following. But you also want more than symbolic currency. You want your little slice of land just as much as the next person does. You want to be successful enough that you can get a loan to buy a house; an eco-friendly, sustainable plot where you can grow vegetables and tend to chickens, which you think will make you extra righteous (basically as righteous as the working class). Yes, you want that land, and you want investments and insurance policies and savings for your retirement one day. But you know that your niche job as an imperial decorator is increasingly irrelevant in society, that there are more competitors and fewer opportunities, and this creates a sense of urgency inside you. It’s okay though, you think, because when it comes down to it, you will make sure that you end up as one of the winners in this game. You will make sure that you set up your life comfortably enough, even if it means sacrificing some of your integrity, so that ultimately you are not the one who gets left out of the shrinking middle class. You are satisfied with the idea that you won’t move up (you probably wouldn’t complain if you did, but your credibility as a warrior for the oppressed might suffer) — but you certainly won’t be going down. You are an artist. You were meant for a higher purpose.

And then you catch yourself thinking this way, and you can’t bear the fact that despite your superior education, you are still fundamentally an animal, a scavenger crouching as near as you dare to the big predators, all the while keeping an eye on the other scavengers, who will not hesitate to kill you if necessary to ensure that they get the last sliver of rotting meat on the carcass before you do. And you think to yourself, I don’t want to be a rat anymore. But unfortunately you are a rat, and nothing will ever change that fact. So maybe the best you can do is to stop pretending that you are anything other than a rat. Maybe the best you can do, without complaining, is to quietly take yourself off to the race track again tomorrow morning, like all the other rats.