The farther along I explore the world of indie art, the more I listen to PRSPCTVS from all the players I can. I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of people locally and abroad heard what they had to say. This ranges from artists, to DJs, to promoters to the fans (a group so very few artists ever talk to) and more.
I have a corporate background in web marketing and client retention. For over a decade I was trained to turn people into data points and measure trends and patterns. One of my main strengths is mapping a user journey to identify pain points so we can optimize for improved return on investment.
Basically, I learned how to improve systems to make sure the end user (or person who pays) loves their experience so much they want to pay more. Given how few of us get paid to make our art, you’d figure more of us would align to create better moments for people. Instead, there is ego.
Who am I to speak on this anyway? All I can say is I did read a whole bunch since 2018 and people been sharing their PRSPCTVS with me for a long while. I’m here trying to bridge the gap.
What is ego anyway?
I haven’t taken a psychology class since CEGEP. Consider this a page-1 Google breakdown on this giant topic, that I will study more over the next year.
Google, provided by Oxford, says ego is, a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance. In other words, this is a loaded topic. There are pages and pages of philosophical explorations into the ego, running way back before my birth in 87.
This all got popular because of Freud, where your psyche is broken into id, ego and super-ego. The id is your reptile brain, the super-ego is your moralizing voice of reason that will confine your actions and the ego tries to find ways to satisfy your id without fucking up too bad.
The ego runs around your psyche and gets pulled in all directions leading to anxiety. You may see a shawty and your id is like hit that. Your super-ego is like naw B, wifey at home. The ego, trying to satisfy all sides is going to remind you that your imagination is a wild place, and you can work it out later.
Since the ego has to balance your impulses with the morale code you follow, it has to assess where you fit into life. It creates your sense of self so you can figure out your place in the world based on the external forces around you.
In a lot of ways, ego creates the main PRSPCTVS of your subjective reality.
Big ego little ego pink ego green ego
Ego has definitely become a term you here all over these days. A big ego person is often someone who’s sense of self is high, only it’s perceived in a bad way. It comes off like narcissism and arrogance, where the ego in question relies on fabricated PRSPCTVS to compensate for a lack of self-esteem.
We’re also encouraged to stay humble, killing that ego so that we remember our place in life. Freud believes the ego is more likely to pick the id over the super-ego when given a choice. This means unless you check your ego, it will lean towards serving the impulsive side. Passion is lovely but being too much of a slave to it can kill your empathy.
Now ego is tied into your self-esteem. The kill your ego idea is a warning to avoid the hubris that comes from arrogant decision making. When your ego gets bruised, like life reminding you that maybe you aren’t special, it may start to invent things to protect itself.
Soon lines of logic that you once thought silly, start to make sense because you need to believe it. It gets even more convoluted because sometimes believing in your own bullshit is exactly what you need to get to the next level. It worked for me.
No matter who you are, arrogance has a glass ceiling. My rule of thumb is if you are manifesting reality, run it. However somewhere along the way it must become reality.
Like everything, the key is balance
Some ego is a good thing. You need that ego to look within yourself and understand what you want out of life. Since your id is flooding you with desires, and your ego is an interpreter, it does serve a valuable function. Your ego is going to help you build confidence.
Your ego being a lens, can be calibrated. With discipline you can learn to filter through your emotional reactions and recognize your ego for what it is. I learned to identify when my ego is butt hurt since its decision-making process is bad for business.
I’m bad at it, but I CAN do it.
Unfortunately, confidence and arrogance look the same. When I was younger, I was a loud, opinionated person who spit wild game with nothing to back it up. I made a lot of statements about who I was going to be. I know there was a lot of arrogance in this era because I did not believe in myself yet.
I did know I was onto something.
Along the way I did enough things that instead of relying on manipulation for attention, I could just look at my past and smile. I developed skills and accolades and made sure that my younger self was really a prophet. He knew one day I would be sitting here in the position I’m in.
Only he was ironically an anti-capitalist yet still figured we’d get rich off art. He cared more about pussy to be honest.
Confidence and arrogance
I think about these two terms a lot. Both are used to describe me depending on what you know about me. To some, I’m a know it all with opinions on everything. To others, I’m a dude who’s done hundreds of interviews, read a lot, and stays well learned, so my opinions bring a fresh set of PRSPCTVS.
I’ve watched people react all kinds of ways when I say stuff about myself. I once showed an unnamed rapper in the city a PowerPoint I made to explain organic community building. This was done for a middle/upper management audience in a software company.
I made a version cutting out work related info to show the peeps. I researched this and leveraged all my experience, with real examples to back my points up. One slide showed what I believed my value proposition in Montreal was at the time.
This dude stopped me and was like “you can’t say that”. He had no problem with anything I said until I inserted myself into the conversation. Candidly, he felt offended and hurt over my confidence in where I believe I will be in 5 years.
He felt I was being arrogant. Often when people react that way to me, I see it like this is a “them problem”. I wish confidence wasn’t twisted into arrogance when the person you talk to has low self-esteem.
Those down to die for their art
This whole blog is because 448Films sent me a video where I ranted. The main point of that was most of us in the scene are not special.
I know plenty of people get bags in this. As rappers, not that many of us can live off rap alone. Therefore, we are all the same.
I chose to name drop Husser, Shabbo and Chung as examples of people I see as ahead of most in the game. Husser in LA teaching us all. Shabbo and Chung are making music with the dude who just hung out with Jay-Z. Trust Shabbo and Chung don’t need that to win, but like we need to have PRSPCTVS.
Someone commented saying I was a sheep. I feel they misinterpreted the point. What I found wild is they said, and some of us would lay down our lives for this shit. He felt I was making a mockery of things.
I’m an entertainer, -shrug-.
It sounds ridiculous to me that anyone thinks they are special because they would die for their art. Maybe in your circle dear reader, there are not many who are down for that. In my circle, that’s like a minimum requirement to even be considered. If your passion isn’t at that you make bad “life choices” to achieve it, then I consider you a hobbyist.
I think heavily on the things people say.
Ego in the industry
I’m trying to write this whole thing without provocation. It doesn’t serve my purpose to stoke flames pointlessly. I do think we as a culture need to have some honest conversations about how we can grow. I see us throw around words like ego, unity, and support without any action plan.
None of this is personal, but it is business. We are all players in a little industry known as the Montreal Anglo Hip Hop scene. You can swap it to your city name, if you not here, and most of it applies. My theory is if we collectively focus on exporting Montreal culture to Americans, we will all make more money.
That’s a big goal because it requires a lot of support from a lot of people. It also instantly comes with ego questions like, who gets to be special?
In the mix is people who are freshmen in their first few years. Full of passion and ready to go. You got OGs and veterans who have constantly chugged away at this for decades. You got people like me flexing their first 10 years as a huge badge of honour.
There are the rappers who will be stars and the ones who are destined for support roles. Stars normally start with support roles.
High key, photographers, videographers, designers, and paid ad specialists are a dime a dozen. We need more journalists booking agents, managers, PR Specialists, and white-collar jobs.
Ego keeps people from learning new roles.
Ego blocks support
I mean ego blocks support among the peers in a local music scene. The fans could not care less about our petty problems. The fans want to see us all win and do music together. They want to feel like, if anything, they played a part in helping us all achieve the next level.
Then we get all salty over dumb moments and then the little petty starts. I’m guilty of getting salty and talking wild and I am aware this comes with consequences. Once that starts, words like support get thrown around in abundance.
I know all this because I spent the better part of my adult life being a hater. I have spent the last few years working on not being a hater. The process of being less of a hater requires studying hatorade so you can avoid it.
Through all that I am left with a confusion over what support means. Or at least an understanding it’s rarely a reciprocal thing. I may provide you 5000 spins on your Spotify, will you do the same for me? Is supporting each other about equal repayment of effort?
Is support about backing someone in particular? Is it about waiving fees for friends? Is it about paying friends for services rendered? Support can mean a lot of things.
Since ego creates subjective realities and we can’t agree on what to do with these ideas, it just looks like ego makes us throw words around to avoid solutioning.
Solutions matter
I don’t want this blog to be aimless. The whole point is that without understanding ego for what it is, we can’t focus on solutions. Another way to word it, we can’t remove ourselves from the equation to look at the bigger picture.
The reason I say none of us are special is because all of us are replaceable. If any of us died tomorrow, heaven forbid, the machine would still roll on. All we got is the time we have and the resources at our disposal to make our moves.
I’m into collectivism and probably lean more socialist than capitalist in my utopian state. I think the best path forward is for cliques to form that share goals. Your goals and my goals are different, so if we aren’t going in the same direction, we should just be allies in this.
If we on the same wave, we should clique up and make strategic choices, so we all win. Insepctah Deck was frustrated at first but look at his career now. Once you have similar goals, you can work towards solutions.
End of the day, solutioning is how you move forward. You move past the problems and focus on what you are trying to accomplish.
Then my team and your team can link up and support each other for bigger shared goals. To me it’s Montreal Vs Everybody. Even the French side.
I’m more articulate in my blog
Drunk me ranting is going to come off like he does. I was challenged by Soul.I.Am to take the time to articulate my point if I am actually trying to be an activist for change.
The topic of ego was the core subject of that rant. In case anyone else thinks I am triggered by them, no that is not the case. This has been on my mind since I got that comment I referenced earlier. I’m also on a song about ego that I recorded with Horg Man before my last Toronto trip.
I go out of my way to check my ego all the time. It’s really important to me. I know how easy it is for me to slip into bad habits and piss people off. I do it this all the time too.
This was my effort to explain a lot of weaving thoughts in an organized way. I hope someone gets something out of this side of the content.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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