Adapted from a letter to PBK:
I believe that you and I have discussed why it is that it seems like I and my work have been rejected, neglected, ignored, or ridiculed by my/our peers.
There are probably several reasons for this, many of them due to my attitudes and "character".
I have a tendency to PULL BACK from "success". Every time in my life when I felt like I was approaching "success" I felt a kind of fear, or maybe it's more accurate to say revulsion, or contempt. Fear of success - that's a good phobia to have, ain't it?
In high school I never did fit in with any one social group. The hippie kids thought I was too straight.
The rich kids kind of liked me - but they never really accepted me into their group because I just wasn't part of their whole social scene. It's interesting that many of the people that I went to high school with had parents who were much older than mine - my friends tended to be the youngest in their families - I was the oldest in mine. I went to school in one of the 10 richest townships in the USA. I really seriously wanted to fit in with those rich kids but I just never could. I wasn't cool enough for them either - I didn't drink and smoke and hang out and party.
After a while, instead of trying to fit in, I just got sick of it, and resentful, and rejected those efforts to fit in, to make it. I figured that if being me wasn't good enough, then it was all FALSE, and therefore worthy of being rejected.
I hated cliques and I still do. I hate in-groups, and anything that smacks of an elite. I also hate running with a pack, and have no interest in being friends with large numbers of people.
It's important to note that my parents were and are the same way. For all of their great and awesome qualities, my parents are loners. Neither of them have close friends, never have, really. They both had similar experiences to mine in high school.
I'm just like them in that way.
Who knows? We talk about how ethnic identity can shape attitudes toward reality. One of my ethnic groups, the Scotch-Irish, nobody ever really talks about because they have been so completely assimilated into the American population through inter-marriage with Germans and English and Irish immigrants, and other factors. We don't recognize the Scotch-Irish as an ethnic identity because they became part of WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA. And white people in America are apparently not interesting and not worthy of investigation.
Not sure if you know much about the history of the Scotch-Irish, but here's a very brief outline:
- in the 1600s one of the Protestant British kings offered land in Catholic northern Ireland to poor Scottish farmers who could barely eke out an existence in the bleak conditions in Scotland. The king did this in an effort to wrest control in Ulster from the native Irish.
- Scots moved en masse to Ulster for the promise of a new start with cheap land.
- Of course they met resistance and violence from the Ulster Irish (rightly so, probably)! It's obvious that the Ulster Scots were being USED. Never ending trouble. On top of that the British government taxed the hell out of them and didn't really support them in their struggle with the native Irish.
- In the early 1700s, the Ulster Scots evacuated Ulster for America
- it was a mass exodus, almost an empyting out of Ulster.
- In America, the established British settlers looked down on them as third-class citizens and trash.
- The so-called Scotch-Irish were forced west into the Appalachians, where they could, in that wilderness and in isolation from the rest of "civilization", forge existences of their choosing. Of course there they met resistance from the Native American peoples.
- Later the Scotch-Irish became the stereotypical "hillbillies", resistant to outsiders, the Feds, outside control.
Sure, what I wrote above is a generalized storybook-ized account of the Scotch-Irish. I wrote it that way to illustrate a point about my own personality.
The Scotch-Irish started out as loyal to the king.They were betrayed by him and hated by the natives.
They came to America, where they didn't fit in with the native British there (or the indigenous peoples!)
They just didn't fit in anywhere! They developed a cussedness, distrust of strangers, a deep loathing for authority.
I am NOT suggesting that the Scotch-Irish dealt with the mass genocide, slavery and persecution of African American slaves and Native American people. Clearly, the Scotch-Irish were settlers, looking to find their place in the world, wherever that was, and they just kind of sort of wanted to be left alone!
"Authority" can be interpreted as being cliques, elites, and in-groups.
I have a personal tendency to say what I'm thinking, in a public way; and without necessarily intending to offend anyone, I don't hold back from saying what I have to say because it MIGHT offend someone.
It's my conviction that each person's personal truth can be told without impinging on anyone else's "thing".
I would rather do things the way that I want and that I feel are correct than try to fit in with what I need to do to get ahead and succeed.
So, consequently, when my peers from the 1980s DIY music scene were of course following a natural progression of doing things to get their music heard by more people - that meant getting records out - and later CDs -- I rejected all of that.
Instead, in the late 1980s, I re-dedicated myself to the original DIY hometaper Cassette Culture values - independence, not letting money be a deciding factor in what one did, building communities and networks, emphasizing a gift culture mentality, making contact with new artists.
It has always been important to me to take the time and make the effort to help homemade music artists who are new, just starting out, much younger than me. I consider hometapers who are 30 years younger than me to be my peers and comrades. I want to share with them some of my ideas and value system beliefs in the hopes that they will carry the hometaper core values on into the future even if the means of production changes completely one day to a digital landscape.
I believe that you and I have discussed why it is that it seems like I and my work have been rejected, neglected, ignored, or ridiculed by my/our peers.
There are probably several reasons for this, many of them due to my attitudes and "character".
I have a tendency to PULL BACK from "success". Every time in my life when I felt like I was approaching "success" I felt a kind of fear, or maybe it's more accurate to say revulsion, or contempt. Fear of success - that's a good phobia to have, ain't it?
In high school I never did fit in with any one social group. The hippie kids thought I was too straight.
The rich kids kind of liked me - but they never really accepted me into their group because I just wasn't part of their whole social scene. It's interesting that many of the people that I went to high school with had parents who were much older than mine - my friends tended to be the youngest in their families - I was the oldest in mine. I went to school in one of the 10 richest townships in the USA. I really seriously wanted to fit in with those rich kids but I just never could. I wasn't cool enough for them either - I didn't drink and smoke and hang out and party.
After a while, instead of trying to fit in, I just got sick of it, and resentful, and rejected those efforts to fit in, to make it. I figured that if being me wasn't good enough, then it was all FALSE, and therefore worthy of being rejected.
I hated cliques and I still do. I hate in-groups, and anything that smacks of an elite. I also hate running with a pack, and have no interest in being friends with large numbers of people.
It's important to note that my parents were and are the same way. For all of their great and awesome qualities, my parents are loners. Neither of them have close friends, never have, really. They both had similar experiences to mine in high school.
I'm just like them in that way.
Who knows? We talk about how ethnic identity can shape attitudes toward reality. One of my ethnic groups, the Scotch-Irish, nobody ever really talks about because they have been so completely assimilated into the American population through inter-marriage with Germans and English and Irish immigrants, and other factors. We don't recognize the Scotch-Irish as an ethnic identity because they became part of WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA. And white people in America are apparently not interesting and not worthy of investigation.
Not sure if you know much about the history of the Scotch-Irish, but here's a very brief outline:
- in the 1600s one of the Protestant British kings offered land in Catholic northern Ireland to poor Scottish farmers who could barely eke out an existence in the bleak conditions in Scotland. The king did this in an effort to wrest control in Ulster from the native Irish.
- Scots moved en masse to Ulster for the promise of a new start with cheap land.
- Of course they met resistance and violence from the Ulster Irish (rightly so, probably)! It's obvious that the Ulster Scots were being USED. Never ending trouble. On top of that the British government taxed the hell out of them and didn't really support them in their struggle with the native Irish.
- In the early 1700s, the Ulster Scots evacuated Ulster for America
- it was a mass exodus, almost an empyting out of Ulster.
- In America, the established British settlers looked down on them as third-class citizens and trash.
- The so-called Scotch-Irish were forced west into the Appalachians, where they could, in that wilderness and in isolation from the rest of "civilization", forge existences of their choosing. Of course there they met resistance from the Native American peoples.
- Later the Scotch-Irish became the stereotypical "hillbillies", resistant to outsiders, the Feds, outside control.
Sure, what I wrote above is a generalized storybook-ized account of the Scotch-Irish. I wrote it that way to illustrate a point about my own personality.
The Scotch-Irish started out as loyal to the king.They were betrayed by him and hated by the natives.
They came to America, where they didn't fit in with the native British there (or the indigenous peoples!)
They just didn't fit in anywhere! They developed a cussedness, distrust of strangers, a deep loathing for authority.
I am NOT suggesting that the Scotch-Irish dealt with the mass genocide, slavery and persecution of African American slaves and Native American people. Clearly, the Scotch-Irish were settlers, looking to find their place in the world, wherever that was, and they just kind of sort of wanted to be left alone!
"Authority" can be interpreted as being cliques, elites, and in-groups.
I have a personal tendency to say what I'm thinking, in a public way; and without necessarily intending to offend anyone, I don't hold back from saying what I have to say because it MIGHT offend someone.
It's my conviction that each person's personal truth can be told without impinging on anyone else's "thing".
I would rather do things the way that I want and that I feel are correct than try to fit in with what I need to do to get ahead and succeed.
So, consequently, when my peers from the 1980s DIY music scene were of course following a natural progression of doing things to get their music heard by more people - that meant getting records out - and later CDs -- I rejected all of that.
Instead, in the late 1980s, I re-dedicated myself to the original DIY hometaper Cassette Culture values - independence, not letting money be a deciding factor in what one did, building communities and networks, emphasizing a gift culture mentality, making contact with new artists.
It has always been important to me to take the time and make the effort to help homemade music artists who are new, just starting out, much younger than me. I consider hometapers who are 30 years younger than me to be my peers and comrades. I want to share with them some of my ideas and value system beliefs in the hopes that they will carry the hometaper core values on into the future even if the means of production changes completely one day to a digital landscape.