“How do we come off to other people?” It’s a question I find myself asking more and more every day. Our PR manager (a friend who’s really just majoring in PR) suggested that we really focus on what image we want to portray to the world, or else we won’t make it. At first this sounded stupid- what does it matter what our image really is? We’re a fucking band with mp3’s, not music videos. But then it really started dawning on me as I looked at the songs we had been writing, the way we were dressing, the types of songs we were doing…we were all extremely different people with no real sense of a direction.
On the surface, I thought the image was simple- I’ll be a sexy rock star who dresses to excess, hiding behind my mask of translucent plastic resting upon the bridge of my nose. It’s a way I could still have privacy even while up on stage; I’d have the best of both worlds. But the more I thought about it the more I realized there was something deeper that needed to be expressed. I am not a rock star and it kills me every day I look in the mirror. When I was younger I convinced myself I would grow up to be a rock star, and now it’s like every time I look in the mirror I have to tell that six year old kid “No, not today Matt. But here’s a lollipop and some hard liquor to make it better! Maybe tomorrow.”
I got up on stage at this real chill bar and opened the set by grabbing the mic and leveling with the crowd, “I am you,” I told them, “and the results of tonight’s show are directly proportional to how you react to what I’m saying now, what I sing, and virtually everything. This show is nothing more than a musical conversation between two friends. I may not know you and you may not know me, but tonight we are fucking blood brothers. We’ve known each other since birth and you beat up that kid who stole my captain crunch decoder watch when I was seven, and I got you laid by that chick you dug in your social studies class when you were seventeen. Tonight, we reunite, reminisce, talk about the girls we banged, and more importantly we knock back a few and have a good time. Here’s to you, old friend.”
Perhaps I’m inflating the notion of “rock star” a little too much. The way I define it is “one who is able to survive based solely on the income generated by playing live shows, having an album, and at least one fan who knows you by name and you’ve never met them”. This is the ideal life of mine. Despite all of the VH1 stories and the movies made about how hard it is to be in a band, I’m still convinced it’s the life for me. I mean me a 9-5 guy? Please.
So what is that image that I need? How should I portray myself? “Just be yourself, Matt.” they say, or “Just act like David Lee Roth.” But the real answer is “Just don’t.” My conscious realization of how I am being perceived has done nothing but hampered my stage presence, caused audiences to not truly give me their attention, and quite frankly been bored with me. I found the more I focused on being myself, the more I just consciously accentuated what I thought was myself. I’d give a conscious smile, a self-aware sway of the hips, a planned hand through the hair…it was routine. None of this hit me until one night.
So where am I going with this? The point of the matter is that stage presence isn’t left just on stage, nor is it just for “rock stars”. My stage presence was conflicted by multiple personalities- there was the hardcore rocker who wanted to kick over an amp in a Jack Daniels’ inspired rage, the overly sensitive guy who wants to woo the ladies a la Coldplay, the intellectual guy who wants to make people think about their lives when they hear my songs, the comedian who was there to entertain and make you laugh at current events, and the relatable “goold ol boy” who you might have seen having a cake cone at the local Tastee Freez. Ultimately, it was horrifically similar to my personal life. The real question then began surfacing,
The crowd didn’t know how to react. Some people got deathly quiet, others gave drunken laughs at the “got you laid by the chick” part, others boo’d, but then there were the few that I noticed who actually listened. I swear to fucking God I saw a fucking 6’2 250 pound dude shed a tear and raise his glass. It was a moment I will never forget, because at that moment I got to see people for who they really wanted to be- either the ones who are too afraid of their emotions and gesticulate at the world when they feel cornered, the ones who sit and do nothing, or the ones who when confronted with something new embrace it as a new experience and live it up to the fullest. Never has such a raw moment of human emotion been experienced in Zeno’s Pub.
“I may be you, but Who Am I?”
Now this wasn’t some teenager soul-searching bullshit trying to find out how to fit into the world; this was an attempt at defining the indefinable. We may think we know ourselves, we see this when people introduce themselves, or talk on their first dates. They’ll say things like “I work at a computer software company. I went to MIT. I consider myself, educated, charming, funny, enjoy movies, like dogs, and have a fascination with the Holocaust.” Yet how can so few words truly ever define a person? A first date, third date, even one-hundredth date doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of really understanding some people. Yet in a society when we have TV headlines giving a two minute news clip on a ten year war or Google to give the direct link to the most relevant answer, we assume the summary or the first results returned are all we need. So how the fuck am I supposed to portray myself to someone while I’m on stage, on a date, in class, at a job over the course of a couple hours?
The answer is you don’t. You refuse the summary words, you say “No” to the first returned results, and you look past the headlines of the CNN political scandal. You just act and give a true answer of where you are coming from, like that night on stage. Now would I use those same lines again exactly as I said them? No, that would be cheesy…and stupid. But you retain the idea that you know where you are coming from, and you don’t give the gratification of some bullshit Cliff Notes version of who you are, or feed into cliché expectations that you’re there to rock their socks off. You’re a living, breathing individual just as they are and you’ve had a wildly unique past too. You know that person you’re talking to is thinking about what he’ll be having for dinner tonight, or the last time he was laid, but it doesn’t matter. You market yourself by not marketing yourself, and people will all of a sudden be interested in what you’re having for dinner tonight and when the last time you were laid. There’s too much to a life that can’t be defined by a job description and words like “positive outlook on life, happy, funny, etc.” I don’t need Nick Jr. descriptions for my personality and you shouldn’t either.
We’re all looking for our HollywoodEnding, but individually we need to find out what in the fuck that means.
No comments:
Post a Comment