If you talk about your artwork as 'product' you are dead to me.
When I say artwork I mean any artistic endeavour, be it banging sticks on bits of rusted metal, daubing yourself in paint and then rolling on a hemp canvas, writing sickeningly sweet love poetry for a girl that will never read it and would mock you if she did or making sculpture out of elephant poo.(I've only done two out of those four things. Elephants are quite rare in rural Wales.)
The second you refer to the results of your labours as 'product' you can have no relevance or value to me. Your every word is an insidious lie that I will have to scrub out of my memory once we part. I have nothing in common with you. I can have nothing in common with you. Your sheer presence on this planet is an affront to civilised society and I will rescind my 'no Suicide' clause especially for you. I'll even buy you the plane ticket to Switzerland.
Art, and music in particular is about forming an emotional connection with something that feels so valuable and personal to you that you will exchange cash money to possess it. It becomes a part of you and who you are. If I hadn't heard Screamager by Therapy? when I was fifteen I would be a different person now. Possibly a happier person with more hair but a different person nonetheless. I am the sum of all my genes and experiences and music has played a huge part in who I am today.
I write terrible derivative sci-fi that I hope one day a publisher, in a fit of syphilitic madness, will publish. But that's not the reason I write. I write because I feel I have to as if these stories are crowding my subconscious and won't go away until I'll transcribed them. I write because I HAVE to.
If I was writing with the sole intention of selling my work it wouldn't be coming from my heart I wouldn't believe in what I've created. It would no longer be 'art' it would become 'product'.
And that's why, Dappy from N-Dubz, you are destined to be a broken man. Haunted by the dreams of what you could have created if only you'd listened to your heart.
(Of course by broken man, I meant spiritually unfulfilled whilst lounging on a throne of platinum, surrounded by gorgeous girls whose name's you can't remember, in a hillside pool party in LA. Bastard. Can I sell out now please?)
