I have this mantra in my studio, that sometimes I forget:
Keep playing and see what happens!
This morning, before I had done much of anything else, I turned on my looper and began making music.
I love making music. Perhaps more than painting. More than sculpting. More than drawing. I could make music all day.
I did not say that I make good music.
I said that I love to make it.
There is a difference.
I remember Mos Def once saying something about people who truly love music eventually trying to make it themselves. I have always understood that impulse. There is something strange about the idea that music belongs only to the talented, as though rhythm were something bestowed upon a select few, as though the rest of us were meant only to listen.
But music is older than talent.
It is older than the music industry, older than the conservatory, older than the record contract and the recording studio. Before any of that, there was a body. There were hands. There were feet. There was breath. There was the discovery that striking one thing against another made a sound, and that repeating the sound made something else entirely.
We have always made music.
And what counts as good music is constantly changing. If you could take some of the music we make today and drop it into the world a hundred years ago, people might think we had lost our minds. We might feel the same about theirs.
So I am suspicious of the idea that there is some correct way to make music.
But I am not writing to you about my peculiar obsession with music.
I am writing to you about freedom.
These last few months have been some of the busiest I have had in a long time. This is partly why I haven't written much here. I have been working. Painting. Making commissions. Answering emails. Meeting deadlines. Taking calls. Raising children. Going to baseball practices. Trying to remember where I am supposed to be and who is waiting for something from me.
And I am grateful for the work.
An artist knows the particular terror of having none.
There are seasons when the phone does not ring and you begin wondering if it will ever ring again. And then there are seasons when everything comes at once. One commission arrives, and somehow another follows behind it. Then another. And you are afraid to say no because some part of you remembers the silence.
So you work.
There is a peculiar thing that happens when the thing you love becomes responsible for keeping you alive.
Painting has been one of the great loves of my life. It still is. But painting is also how I pay bills. It is how I care for myself and help care for my children. And once a thing becomes responsible for your survival, other things begin attaching themselves to it.
Deadlines attach themselves to it.
Invoices attach themselves to it.
Expectations attach themselves to it.
Emails attach themselves to it.
People attach themselves to it.
And eventually you can find yourself standing in front of the thing that once made you feel free and realizing that it, too, has become a job.
I am fortunate. I still love painting.
But sometimes the administration surrounding the making of art makes me feel as though my heart is leaving my body.
So lately, in the mornings, I have been making music.
Not because I am trying to become a musician.
Not because I am working on an album.
Not because I have devised some clever plan for turning this into another part of my career.
God forbid.
I am making music because there is absolutely no reason for me to make music.
And I am beginning to understand what a gift that is.
A few months ago, I put out a call saying that I wanted this little keyboard. One of my patrons bought it for me. Then something funny happened. People started sending me instruments. Keyboards and loopers and little gadgets and gizmos began arriving.
Slowly, a part of my living room became a place for making noise.
It used to be where my family ate dinner.
Now there are instruments there.
So my sons and I moved dinner to a little table in the sunroom.
And honestly, it is lovely.
We eat there.
And sometimes we make music together.
I want my house filled with music.
I want my children to understand that making things does not always require a reason.
I want there to be places in our lives where nobody is grading us, paying us, measuring us, buying from us, waiting on us, or asking what the thing is for.
I want my life to have some things in it that are gloriously useless.
Because I have spent so much of my life learning how to make my creativity useful.
How to turn an idea into a career.
How to turn a painting into an invoice.
How to turn imagination into something that can support a family.
There is dignity in that. There is privilege in that. There is even joy in it.
But there must also be something that belongs only to me.
Something that does not need to become anything.
And perhaps that is what play actually is.
Play is not the absence of seriousness.
Play is the absence of consequence.
It is the small territory where the self is permitted to exist without immediately being converted into productivity.
And I have discovered that it is surprisingly difficult to give myself permission to enter that territory.
There is always something else I should be doing.
There is always an email.
There is always work.
There is always a child who needs to be somewhere.
There is always some future version of myself who might benefit if the present version of myself would just get back to work.
But lately, some mornings, I turn on the looper instead.
I make a beat.
I sing something badly.
I turn a knob just to see what happens.
I dance.
Nothing is accomplished.
And something in me comes back to life.
I don't know whether music will always be part of my practice. I don't know if I will still be waking up and doing this a year from now.
I don't need to know.
For this season, it is enough.
And maybe there is something in your life that does not need to become a business, a side hustle, a personal brand, a discipline, a goal, or even something you are particularly good at.
Maybe you are allowed to love something without becoming excellent at it.
Maybe you are allowed to make something no one will ever see.
Maybe you are allowed to waste a little time.
Maybe some of that wasted time is actually your life.
So this is me giving myself permission to play.
And, if you need it, giving some to you too.
That’s it.
I love you all,
Shabazz
