Why  Do  Good  Bands  Break  Up?  
 
 
Leon  TK  
 
 
(SAMPLE  EDITION)  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 

Copyright © Leon Waters, 2018.

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of the copyright owner.
 Contents  
 
Intro  
 
Hurdle  1:  Getting  Good  
 
Hurdle  2:  Beyond  The  Bedroom  
 
Hurdle  3:  Becoming  Acquainted  
 
Hurdle  4:  Getting  Connected  
 
Hurdle  5:  Meeting  The  Business  
 
Hurdle  6:  Scaling  The  Summit  
 
Hurdle  7:  Immortality  
 
Outro  
 
If you are experiencing depression or suicidal thoughts, a
full list of crisis lines can be found at Suicide.org.
 WHY DO GOOD BANDS BREAK UP?

Intro  

When people think about the music business, empathy is rarely part
of the picture. In fact, it's probably the last thing on their minds.
We’re more likely to picture money trenches, dirty deals made in
shadowy back rooms, and suited men diving into piles of dollar bills
than we are to think about soft, squishy things like brains and
feelings.
This empathy gap damages us all, and it’s time to fill the void
for good.
This book is about the story behind the story behind the
music – and seeing things as they really are will require us to look
past our assumptions not only about the people who work in the
music business, but especially musicians and also ourselves, as
music fans. We live in a world where the everyday music fan is more
powerful than he or she was in decades past. This means there are
things we need to know – and should have been told long ago.
Over the past century or so, music has evolved gradually into
the mass of mongrel styles we love today. At the same time our
understanding of the human mind, and the reasons why we think,
feel, and do what we do, has also changed. Psychologists and
neuroscientists are now working together to fine-tune and test their
theories, while others take what has been discovered and apply it to
human problems.
Bands and artists have long struggled to come to grips with a
simple but harsh problem. The vast majority of them will fail, quit,
or watch as their careers collapse. This is usually not due to stupidity
– musicians are as intelligent as anyone else, and even smart people

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can do stupid things and make mistakes.
It normally comes down to a lack of insight, which will
remain elusive unless the musicians in question happen to have great
mentors. If they don’t – and most do not – they’re out on their own,
learning through trial and error and sifting through a mass of music-
related information for clues as to how it all works. This book is
based on that mass of information, as well as the collected works of
state-of-the-art psychological researchers, half a decade spent
studying at one of the UK’s top music schools, a decade of playing in
countless bands and watching them dissolve in real time, and several
years spent being bombarded by pitches, submissions, and stories
from across the world while discussing pressing issues with others
on the front line. Over all this time, the assorted stresses and
frustrations that come as part and parcel of a career in music kept
percolating until one question remained.
Why do good bands break up?
There is no pithy, concise answer to this question. When it
gets brought up in conversation, it’s normally met with shrugged
shoulders and vague comments about money, egos, and women
getting in the way. People generally agree that it’s hard to really
“make it” as a musician, and although many in the know will be able
to expand the discussion beyond hazy and sexist factors, the talk will
probably still fail to get to the root of it all. This is again not down to
the absence of intelligence, but rather a dearth of knowledge.
This book is riddled with music recommendations – and if
you come across something you love, the best thing you can do is
buy it. You’ll find out why that’s important later on. In between those
endorsements, we will take the deepest dive possible into the brutal
world of music. Its history is littered with casualties, and the list of
the fallen has grown too long to tolerate. In order to understand why
good bands break up, we are going to explore every stage of a
musician’s journey while travelling through the mind, the evolution
of music, and the business itself. Finally, we will scale the summit to
immortality – and find out why even superstars can struggle to keep
afloat.

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What we are about to do will change not just the way we
listen to music, but also how we think about the people who make it.

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 LEON TK

Hurdle  1:  
Getting  Good  
(Excerpt)  

In order to understand why musical partnerships fall apart, we need

to understand the musicians in question as best we can.
When trying to understand others, we wonder what they
think, how they think, how they feel, and why they do what they do.
It can be a frustrating, depressing, and frequently fruitless process.
But while the precise contents of others’ thoughts and memories
remain out of reach, psychological research has made plenty of
headway when it comes to the rest.
At the core of every person is a personality. Our personalities
form the foundations of who we are, underneath everything else –
and if we don’t understand personality, we don’t have a hope in hell
of understanding people. Fortunately, thanks to the tireless work of
the world’s psychologists, we have the tools we need to get started.
In music, we have the “Big Three” major record labels:
Universal, Sony, and Warner Music. In thrash metal, we find the
“Big Four”: Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer. Similarly,
personality psychologists refer to the “Big Five” personality traits.
The Big Five can be memorized using the mnemonic
OCEAN, and are:

-­‐‑   Openness;

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-­‐‑   Conscientiousness;
-­‐‑   Extraversion;
-­‐‑   Agreeableness;
-­‐‑   Neuroticism.

Although Hollywood blockbusters would have us believe that

the world’s population can be divided into two camps when it comes
to each personality trait (open or closed, agreeable or assholes, and
so on), that idea is a fantasy, not reality.
When it comes to our personality traits, we are not all like
light switches, either on or off – we can usually be found somewhere
between each pair of extremes, like the notches on a ruler. Some of
us could be described as “quite open,” or “pretty conscientious,” and
we can all think of someone who’s a bit of a dick.
Having said that, some people do occupy the extreme ends of
each personality scale – and artistically creative people tend to hit
high scores when it comes to two traits in particular.

Open Your Eyes

Artists are guaranteed to hit home runs when it comes to the O in

OCEAN: Openness.
By openness, we’re talking about openness to experience, the
willingness to engage with the unfamiliar, exotic, esoteric, creative
and culturally vibrant aspects of the world around us. Those of us
who are extremely low in openness are much less willing to do
likewise, living lives as shut off as possible from the potential thrills
and spills of music and other artistic pursuits.
Extreme scorers at either end of the openness scale are
relatively rare. Most of humanity is interested in music to a certain
extent. However, there are also those of us who get that much more
mileage from organized sound – and there do exist individuals to
whom music is nothing more than distracting noise, whether they’re
faced with a Disney soundtrack or a death metal album.
Extremely open people are likely to get excited about a wide

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variety of cultural options. Music, fashion, film, animation, acting,
dance, reading, drawing, painting, sculpture – if it involves creativity,
open people flock to it in droves. Music actually acts as a hub for all
the others listed above; think punk and hip-hop clothing, music
videos, song lyrics and band biographies, album cover art, and Spinal
Tap’s pint-size Stonehenge.
Regardless of how open we are, we all come into contact
with music at some point. Our first introduction to the joys of
soundwaves can come at any time, from a range of sources. Parents,
peers, a song randomly heard on the radio – these are but three of a
vast variety of potential starting points.
Once music begins beating on our eardrums, our level of
openness influences what happens next. Maybe we get sucked in
immediately. Maybe it goes in one ear, and comes out the other.
Maybe it’s not the first song we ever hear, but another one many
years later, which does the trick.
Our openness levels don’t only affect how we respond to
music; they can also lead us further down the rabbit hole. Personality
plays a big part not only in how we think or feel about certain
situations, but also in how we behave in response to them.
Personality even helps determine which situations we are most likely
to gravitate to.

If I Like It, I Do It

Given the opportunity, someone who falls in love with music is

likely to seek out more of it. The modern world is oversaturated with
recordings, from the dusty racks of used record shops to the
immaterial immortality of the Internet – and so music lovers can
happily gorge themselves on a constantly expanding feast that would
take many lifetimes to consume in its entirety.
For the extremely high-openness scorer, though, listening is
just the start of the journey.
Consider the clothes you buy. Do they reflect your music
taste? Do you have music-related posters on your wall, or did you

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have them when you were younger? Do you read music blogs or
magazines? How many gigs have you been to over the past year?
The past month? The past week? Do your friends share your taste in
music – or do you wish they did? When you discover a new favorite
band, do you find yourself focused intently on their logo?
If you’re high in openness, your clothes probably say as
much about what you listen to as who you are. Maybe you find it
hard to determine where you end, and your music taste begins.
You’ve probably at least wanted to stick a favorite band’s posters on
your wall, and likely have done – or would have done had your
parents not forbidden it. You probably go to as many gigs and
festivals as time and money allow. Your friends likely share your
taste in music – and if not, part of the reason you go to shows may be
just to be around others who share your passions. A particular band’s
logo may have stuck with you, leading you to spend hours copying it
onto notebooks, bags, perhaps even clothing.
Whether the above is true or not, if you’re high in openness
you’ve at least wondered what it would be like to make music. All
dedicated listeners do at some point. Stand in a festival field, and
you’ll find yourself surrounded by thousands of others daydreaming
about how it must feel to be the one who walks onstage.
But when we dream such dreams, what do we dream about?

I Wanna Be Your Lover

We’re adults, so let’s be honest here: No music-related fantasy is

complete without sex. Let’s first leave aside the sexist debate over
whether or not sex is a stronger motivator for men or women, and
take a deeper, harder look at a subject everyone has an interest in.
Whether we’re talking about peacocking cock-rockers or
bubblegummy pop groups, sex is a hot topic across a massive range
of musical styles. Angel-faced R’n’B stars sing about meeting a
special someone, hitting it off, spending the night, managing a
relationship, and falling to pieces in spectacular fashion when they
wake up in Splitsville – and so do sensitive singer-songwriters,

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tongue-in-cheek pop-punk bands, angst-ridden metal acts, and gun-
toting gangsta rappers. Whether you’re talking about Mötley Crüe,
One Direction, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit, or
NWA, the story remains the same.
When we hear a big star’s latest breakup song, a common
reaction is to roll our eyes and wonder how they could really be so
torn up. After all, musicians are supposed to be sexier than everyone
else – right? Isn’t that part of the reason they became musicians in
the first place – to become more attractive to the opposite sex?
Surely they could just snap their fingers, summon a replacement, and
get over it?
For the musical fantasist, the seductive power of
musicianship is fuel for the fire. Whether the dream is to attract a
lifelong soulmate or suffer a Viagra-overdose-induced heart attack
surrounded by a smorgasbord of pansexual groupies, sex remains at
the heart of it.
What makes musicians so attractive, then? This is a good
question – and although there are some obvious answers, there’s
more to this topic than meets the eye.

Come With Me

In Western culture, musicians represent a collection of characteristics

that add up to a deeply intriguing whole. For a start, musicians –
those high-openness individuals who pick up and pursue a path
rarely travelled to the end – are scarce. They are rare.
If we can’t have something, we desire it all the more. The
more abundant that thing becomes, the higher our chances of getting
our hands on it – and so its value in our eyes diminishes. If a child is
given fifty packs of his favorite cookie brand, and is allowed to
gorge himself, he will quickly get sick of them, and eventually
vomit. Stick a single succulent cookie in a glass jar somewhere out
of reach during a cookie shortage, and his eyes will fixate
obsessively upon that jar while his mouth waters uncontrollably. The
same holds true for adults of all genders – whether we’re willing to

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admit it or not.
Thousands upon thousands of songs have been written in the
throes of scarcity-induced desire. It is a feeling we are all familiar
with. If humans didn’t want what they can’t have, why would so
many such songs exist? And why would those songs hit us so hard
when we hear them?
Aside from openness, musicians are rare because they refuse
to conform to the expectations of wider society. From an early age
we are taught that the correct path through life is walked as follows:
Stay in school, enter higher education, go to university, get a degree,
get a job, and follow your chosen decent and respectable profession
until the day you retire. At that point, you’re free to make your own
lifestyle choices until the day you finally die.
Few educational institutions prescribe the path we are
following in this book: Discover music, become a musician, get
good, form a band, enter the music industry, hit it big, and hold on
for dear life for as long as it lasts. If a career adviser advised students
to follow the path we’re heading down right now, that adviser would
not have a job for much longer.
In the eye of the stern, forbidding teacher, the shy folkster
and the long-haired metalhead are sat in the same boat, living lives
outside the accepted boundaries of normal society. The path of the
nonconformist – of the musician – is not a popular one (outside the
realms of fantasy), and the pressure to give in and join the herd is
constant and intense. Beyond school, the mainstream media
mercilessly turns the pressure up to potentially unbearable levels,
churning out TV programmes, magazines, videos, and online articles
explicitly instructing viewers and readers on how to live their lives.
Moment by moment, day by day, week by week, year by year,
decade by decade – at every step, innumerable would-be teachers
stand eagerly at hand, desperate to micro-manage the gap between
birth and the grave.
Musicians must ignore such instructions, and have done so
for decades. Without defiant nonconformity there would be no rock
’n’ roll, no metal, no electronic music, no hip-hop, no punk. There

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wouldn’t even be jazz, or blues. If every musician over the past
century had simply given in to their teachers’ orders and the demands
of the world around them, what would our culture be like today?
Whatever you’re visualizing right now, I’m willing to bet it
made you shudder.

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 WHY DO GOOD BANDS BREAK UP?

Hurdle  6:  
Scaling  The  Summit  
(Excerpt)  

Depending on our interests, background, peer group, class, age,

popularity, ethnicity, nationality, height, weight, body type, looks,
sexuality, gender, life experiences, and so on, we develop a sense of
who we are – an identity. Similarly, bands have identities of their
own; they become more than the sum of their parts, identifiable by a
name, just like us. We can think of bands as being individual units
and say, for example, that Metallica is the best metal band in the
world, but we can just as easily picture them as groups of individuals
and state that Metallica are the best metal band in the world.
Bands usually get named when a group of musicians sit
around a table with with a pen and a notepad and plenty of alcohol,
then proceed to get completely ossified. The next morning they wake
up in various states of dishevelment, heads full of shame and regret,
and collectively stare in disbelief at the paper. The least humiliating
name is hurriedly given a trial run.
Some of history’s most iconic bands started off with awful
names (Sweet Children, The T Set, and The Polka Tulk Blues Band
would go on to become Green Day, Pink Floyd, and Black Sabbath
respectively), but some just stick with what they’ve got. History has
long proven that as long as the music connects with enough people,

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the band’s name hardly matters. The Beatles, Korn, and Limp Bizkit
didn’t even need to stick to basic spelling guidelines to make an
impact – although experimental wordplay rarely fails to cause
controversy among traditionalists and conservatives, and being even
slightly provocative makes for plenty of publicity.
At the most extreme end of the extreme metal spectrum,
grindcore bands deliberately choose the most offensive names
imaginable. Whether they do it for attention or not is debatable,
given how few people listen to grindcore in the first place. Lack of
mass appeal aside, when your band is called Anal Cunt (renowned
for such finger-popping ditties as Hitler Was A Sensitive Man),
Bumsnogger, I Shit On Your Face, or Natalie Portman’s Shaved
Head, it’s safe to say you’d find it hard to get gigs.

Rational Gaze

Before gigs are even an option, bands need songs. As anyone who
has ever watched a band open a grassroots gig in a 50-capacity
shoebox will know, some acts don’t get their act together before
hitting local stages – and the results are shambolic at best.
Undaunted, some bands just keep going that way, never seeming to
learn before eventually vanishing.
There’s no nice way of saying this: Most bands break up
because they suck, they underestimate the effort required, and throw
in the towel too quickly. The first hurdle every musician needs to
overcome is the one labelled getting good, because for the most part,
good bands are made up of good musicians. The exceptions are
obvious – if you’re a punk, for instance, the music you play is all
about not caring how good people think you are. Three chords and
the truth are all you need.
That seems fair enough on paper – but if you look at, say, The
Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and The Clash, they still wrote good
songs, and those songs are what they’re remembered for. They didn’t
show up one day, make some noise, and get instantly famous – they
practiced, had personalities, and made music that made people feel

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something. They had fans and haters, plenty of haters, but their
music stood the test of time. They’re not footnotes in history books;
people still listen to and love them today.
They were also better technique-wise than history gives them
credit for.
This returns us to the tired and time-worn technique-versus-
feel debate. Both sides have their merits – but few of us would
choose to listen to music that doesn’t make us feel something. Our
favorite bands make us happy, help us get our emotions out, and give
us something we can relate to on a personal level.
If they leave us cold, why bother listening?
Good bands are made up of good musicians (in terms of
technique or feel or both) who collectively make a sound that
becomes more than the sum of its parts – and also makes you feel
good. When you listen to them, you can zero in on the drums, the
guitar, the vocal, the lyrics (unless you’re listening to a grindcore
band), but you can also switch off your analytical side and just enjoy
the music for what it is. If it makes you feel sick, as some extreme
metal is intended to do, you’d have to be exceptionally dedicated (or
masochistic) to stick with it.
Look back over the history of iconic bands, and you’ll find a
vast mixture of musicians who vary in terms of technical skill, but all
succeeded in making millions feel something. There is no surgically
precise universal definition of a “good band”, only variations in
music taste. Some people like Radiohead; others get their kicks from
Slayer and Anal Cunt. Adore them or despise them, they still got
around to writing songs – even if society wishes they hadn’t.

Work

There’s no shame in sucking at anything, as long as you’re aware of

the fact and put in the time and energy, the effort, required to get
better. At some point, unconscious incompetence gives way to
conscious incompetence – and in order to level up to conscious
competence and eventually mastery, there’s no substitute for practice.

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The same logic applies to songwriting. Very few people are
born creative geniuses. Look back over the history of music, as we
did while clearing earlier hurdles, and you won’t find many
individuals who became instant icons or classic songwriters without
putting any time into their craft whatsoever.
Given how much music has already been written and
recorded, consciously incompetent creatives can understandably be
intimidated by the sheer weight of history. Lacking experience and
education, they easily buy into the myth that talent magically trumps
hard work every time. They aren’t aware that talented people tend to
either enjoy employing their abilities (and so sprint past the 10,000-
hour mark without clock-watching), or slack off and become
complacent while hard workers overtake them.
They also have to come to terms with the fact that creativity
isn’t something you can force. It can be encouraged, inspired, and
cultivated – but not willed. Ideas don’t arrive according to a pre-set
schedule, and they certainly aren’t always great without exception.
Openness to experience is openness to potential writing
material – and when it comes down to it, everything is material for
creative people. Throughout our lives, the subconscious mind quietly
stores memories and information for future use, from the location of
our school or workplace to happy moments, momentous events, and
personal traumas. In our imaginations, anything is possible; when we
sleep, the subconscious and imagination team up to present us with
dreams and nightmares.
Like sleep, creativity doesn’t respond favorably to brute
force. Nor is it actively encouraged in everyday life. As children,
we’re allowed to play as much as we like for the few years before
school begins. From that point on, play gets pushed onto the back
burner in favor of textbook learning, lessons, tests, and exams. While
acquiring a decent education is obviously an essential part of life, the
playful, open, and creative inner child is gradually silenced.
Time passes. We get a little older. The fully grown-up and
play-free working world begins to loom on the horizon. Along the
way, we get into music – and some of us decide to take a shot at

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turning play into work.
Then we wonder why it’s so hard to get started.

I, The Creator

Being able to progress from no idea to great idea is a skill in itself –

and for a great many budding songwriters, it’s something best done
alone. There’s nothing like a quiet room with a locked door, thick
walls, and no distractions. For introverts, it probably sounds like
heaven on Earth; for skeptical extraverts, it can seem crazy-making.
Nonetheless, solo creativity requires as much focus as the
aspiring songsmith can muster up. When things are quiet, it’s easier
to hear what you’re doing. Deaf neighbors are also a bonus.
Idea generation – the initial spark or inspiration that kicks off
the creative process – can be started by just playing. This is
something technique-focused woodshedders often forget to do,
wrapped up as they are in strings of endless scales and paradiddle
permutations. Treating music like work doesn’t work, especially
when it comes to writing. Our brains don’t work in shifts from nine
to five, like office workers and retail staff. They never stop
processing – and we have very little control over which thoughts
come out when, especially when we’re alone.
Sit alone in a quiet room wearing noise-cancelling
headphones, and focus on your breathing for half an hour. This is the
essence of meditation, and it’s fucking hard. Pick up an instrument
and focus fully on what you’re playing, and hours can fly by faster
than you realize.
10,000 hours might seem like a lot of time, but for musicians
lost in play, just having fun and seeing what they come up with, it
suddenly seems like one long holiday. The greater their connection to
the instrument, the more it fits their body type or personality, the
more in tune they become with it over time, and the more talented
they are (or skilled they become), the greater the sense of bliss felt
even when blisters form and their fingers bleed. Whether they sing or
not, they’ve found a new voice – and so they learn to speak, through

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single notes, stacked chords, the crack of a snare.
This is something introverts and extraverts can all come to
enjoy. The shyest introverts may never allow their ideas to leave their
bedroom or computer hard drive; the most anxiety-free extraverts
will likely start daydreaming about how many faces will light up
when they speak with their instrument in public. Either way, they’re
learning one of music’s most important lessons, that there’s more to
the world than work and school.

A View

Loneliness is perceived social isolation, a discomfort that cuts to the

core of what we are – and creativity is an ideal way to convert that
feeling into pure, blissful solitude. When nobody’s around, we’re
free to do what we like. We have space, and time.
Music easily fills both.
When someone actively chooses to spend time alone – as
almost all creative people and musicians must at some point – their
less open-minded peers are prone to labelling the “loner” as mad,
bad, sad, or a combination of the above. We’ve already established
the link between open-mindedness and neuroticism, and noted that
the latter is not a dirty word. Still, in the public imagination mental
health issues continue to be stigmatized – especially in their more
disordered and extreme forms.
In school, children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) find
it hard to keep up and cope. They find it practically impossible to
sustain attention and sit still for extended periods of time – and their
teachers’ patience inevitably gets pushed beyond its limits. In the
playground, kids with ADD are often taunted, insulted, and bullied
for being different. They can’t just snap their fingers and fit in;
neither can they force their brains to conform to a one-size-fits-all
system. Some are put on medication, entering the mental health
treatment system at an early age. Sometimes it all works out.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
For British beatboxer Reeps One, the flip side of his

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childhood ADD diagnosis – the ability to hyperfocus on a personally
meaningful, interesting, and stimulating task – led him to perform
vocal feats once considered impossible. Through thousands of hours
of single-minded practice, Reeps One figured out how to create
increasingly complex sounds using just his voice; won the UK
Beatboxing Championship twice in a row; and even had his brain
scanned during a unique neurological study in London. As an adult,
Reeps One’s unique creative abilities served him well – and he
argues passionately that being proud of the way your mind works is
more effective than being made to feel ashamed of it.

Behind The Doors

While ADD remains a controversial topic – not to mention a source

of genuine distress – it also by its nature has the potential to enable
idea generation on a prolific scale. Idea generation is critical to
improvisation, and improvisation is a core part of genres such as jazz
and beatboxing – as well as songwriting in general.
An improvising musician continuously generates ideas until
they stop. Jazz guitarists sit in their practice rooms and challenge
themselves to keep playing without repeating a lick; beatboxers do
the same with a microphone, imitating as many instruments as
possible and even discovering new timbres entirely. In order to move
forward, though, just generating ideas is not enough. We also need to
develop them.
Before the record industry came to dominate the music
business in the 1950s, music publishers were the true kings of the
hill. Publishers employed teams of songwriters who bounced ideas
off each other, and shopped their songs around to the record labels of
the day. If it was good enough, multiple versions of a given tune
would end up being released by a variety of labels. After The Beatles
made writer-performers the new industry standard for rock ‘n’ roll,
the image of John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting opposite each
other, guitars in hand, became synonymous with collaborative
creativity and mutual harmony.

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For The Rolling Stones, it worked slightly differently.
According to legend, manager Andrew Loog Oldham once locked
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a kitchen, refusing to let them out
until they wrote a song together.
As with any form of practice or work, a good dose of
conscientiousness can work wonders when developing an idea. ADD
– a manifestation of low conscientiousness – might fuel prolific idea
generation, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to team them up with a
more organized collaborator, and balance things out?
What about someone who’s a bit OCD?

Brain Lock

Obsession and compulsion sound like essential aspects of any

successful musician’s psychology. In biographical material and
interviews, we hear how obsessed a given musician or band became
with a particular idea, how they felt compelled to follow it through to
completion.
In The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, journalist David Adam
tackles OCD head-on, blending science with his own story as a
creative person with OCD. In the process, he debunks the notion of
OCD as a creative aid, highlighting it instead as a major pain in the
ass, a mental health issue that holds sufferers back rather than
propelling them into a bold, glittering future. In OCD terms, an
obsession is constantly present in the mind, intruding, unwanted,
undesirable, and lurking within awareness as the person in question
tries to get on with things. The obsession gets in the way of everyday
life, negatively impacting work, relationships, and social
opportunities. It’s nothing like musical inspiration, which may be
intrusive but is also positive, pleasurable, wanted, and desirable –
and it has nothing to do with doggedly pursuing a career in the music
industry.
Like a hole in a bucket, obsessive thoughts sap energy and
cause the OCD person so much distraction and distress that they try
to push the thought away through compulsive behavior. A textbook

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example: checking a locked door to make sure it’s locked – not once,
but many times – and then not being able to stop doing it. The
problem with compulsion and attempting to suppress obsessions
(which are often irrational, such as the complete conviction that a
close friend’s house will burn down if you don’t perform a given
compulsion a certain number of times) is that the compulsion makes
the obsession worse. Obsession and compulsion form a feedback
loop – and while a musician like Gary Moore can control feedback to
beautiful effect, obsessive-compulsive people just wind up miserable
until they consult a mental health professional and set off on the
long, hard road out of hell.

My Way

As if that wasn’t bad enough, OCD also doesn’t represent extremely

high conscientiousness – but OCPD (obsessive-compulsive
personality disorder) does. People with OCPD are uptightness
personified, constantly preoccupied with rules, lists, schedules, and
anything else remotely related to perfectly regimented productivity.
Without a sense of complete order and control over the world and
people around them, OCPD sufferers get angry and distressed, often
resorting to passive aggression rather than fisticuffs. Rather than
becoming hyperproductive, people with OCPD focus on the
perfection of structures that could potentially help them get things
done – but in the process, they lose sight of the actual goal they set
out to achieve in the first place, whether it be writing a song or just
having fun. Even if they do get around to starting a task, it often
doesn’t get finished; few things are perfect enough to satisfy
someone with OCPD, so they miss deadline after deadline or
postpone projects indefinitely before moving on to plan something
else.
In collaborative situations, people with OCPD offer a choice:
their way, or the high way. They refuse to allow themselves the
chance to play around, considering anything unstructured a waste of
time that could be spent working, or working out the best way to

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work. In the eyes of OCPD, that way is the one and only way to do
things – and if collaborators, friends, and workmates don’t follow the
rules, there’ll be hell to pay. This thinking even applies to social
activities outside the office or writing room, which the OCPD person
insists must be as structured as work-time. Sports are acceptable;
hanging out and chilling for a day with nothing to do is not.
After a while, even the most patient friends can be pushed too
far. OCPD strains relationships to their limits, it impairs productivity,
and when working on songs it can suck the air out of the writing
room, replacing vital oxygen with bullet-pointed to-do lists and
impossibly high standards of perfection. An extremely patient
collaborator and a good therapist may be able to help the OCPD
person work through it and begin to get things done, but creative
solitude, the freedom to perfect a process in a state of total control
and orderliness, will probably be chosen instead.
Either way, pairing up ADD and OCPD will most likely end
in a fight, not a repertoire of great songs. Lock them in a kitchen, and
they’d break the door down.

Map Of Your Head

In the public imagination, artists are expected to be tortured,

troubled, mad and sad. When they produce great art that reflects an
unusual or negative mental state, the neuroticism or mental illness
that inspired it is romanticized rarely by the artists themselves, but
the wider world that sees and hears the results. Some even go so far
as to claim that being mad and sad is an essential part of creativity,
that the most tortured artists make the best art.
This is bullshit. In the world of rock ‘n’ roll, countless songs
have been written about and inspired by negative life events,
thoughts, mental disorders, traumas, and so on. But those songs were
not only written because of the issues thrown up by extreme
negativity – they were also written despite the gravitational pull of
those same problems. Neuroticism alone is not enough to fuel
creativity; without openness to experience, the true root of the

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creative personality, great songs are unlikely to come.
After a negative experience or state of mind pops up and
we’re forced to get through it, it can take some time before
inspiration sparks, if it ever does. Creative artists have the capacity to
make something good out of something bad, but that doesn’t
automatically mean they will achieve greatness every time.
Sometimes the idea that comes is rubbish. Sometimes no idea comes
at all. Sometimes the seed of a masterpiece emerges from the
darkness. There’s no way to guarantee a given result. That’s just not
how it works.
Some musicians – especially when they’re first starting out –
buy into the myth of the tortured artist and set off on a quest to get
fucked up. They think that by causing themselves mental, emotional,
even physical harm, or at least putting themselves at risk of
experiencing the above, they will somehow unlock a magical bounty
of bottomless genius. This is just not necessary. If someone happens
to be born troubled, or they wind up that way over the course of their
life without meaning to, then turning to creativity and cultivating
greater openness can ignite a light at the end of the tunnel. Although
their future remains uncertain, they do the best they can because they
have no choice. From their point of view, anyone who runs around
hoping to screw their own brains up for the sake of maybe writing a
half-decent song is a fucking idiot.
Not all musicians are equally neurotic; it’s a sliding scale, not
a light switch. Neither is music a competition to see who can become
the most neurotic. It’s not like an old-school hip-hop sound system
faceoff, where the most overwhelming mental illness wins. Lives are
at stake. Too many have already been lost for the tortured artist
“ideal” to continue unchecked.
Everything may be material, but sometimes it’s best to work
with what you’ve got.
 
 

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 LEON TK

Hurdle  7:  
Immortality  
(Excerpt)  

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few
close friends, then for money.”
Although Moliere was talking about the art of putting words
in a row, the French playwright’s assertion also applies to musicians.
Money-focused musicians are famously stigmatized, especially if
they play rock, punk, or metal. “Prostitute” is one of the more
elegant words they can expect to be called over the course of their
career, especially after they first attract the attention of the record
industry.
Cutting with a much sharper edge is the word narcissist.
Narcissism is the music business equivalent of the common cold,
although in the public view it’s considered about as desirable as
leprosy.
Before we get stuck into narcissism properly, it’s worth
considering the fact that unhealthily narcissistic people are prone to
bouts of major-league envy. We’ve already noted that many creative
people, including musicians, wilfully hold themselves back from
doing good work – or any work – because they’re afraid of being
attacked by the envious. So when someone attacks a musician on the
cusp or beyond the event horizon of success, we have to ask: Is the
attacker really envious? And if they are…are they the narcissist?
Some people do attack successful musicians not out of envy,

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but because they genuinely and passionately believe that the
musician has in some way “sold out”. Others also subscribe to a
particular moral standpoint that allows them to play the sellout card,
but are also envious at the same time. Still other onlookers are just
plain envious and couldn’t care less about moral values – but playing
the sellout card allows them to justify the attack and feel even better
about it afterward than they might otherwise. For a fleeting moment,
they look back and tell themselves they did a good thing. Their envy
is temporarily concealed not just from others, but from themselves.
Then it boils over again, a new target is chosen, and the cycle
continues indefinitely.

The Only Way To Know For Sure

When people cry “sellout” or “narcissist,” they signal that they may
actually be envious narcissists themselves. Their targets, on the other
hand, may or may not be narcissists – but because they’ve achieved
at least some measure of success, they’re more likely to be tagged
with the label. That label will continue to stick for as long as the
musician in question remains publicly visible.
So how do we work out the truth?
We can’t, unless we happen to be professionally trained
mental health workers, have direct access to both attacker and target,
are prepared to grill them both at length on their possible narcissism,
and by the end of it are sure they’re telling the truth. We might as
well throw in a lie detector test for good measure. That’s the only
way to know for sure, unless we happen to have a time machine and
mind-reading device to hand.
In other words, the best way to achieve absolute certainty
about these things is to be either God, or Doctor Who.
This lack of objective certainty doesn’t stop many online
commentators from stating their opinions as if they formed an
addendum to the Ten Commandments. Since we’re already going
into still more controversial territory, we won’t get into the debate
over whether or not God is real – but a person who thinks Doctor

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Who is real is either a child or an idiot, and anyone who believes
themselves to be God or Doctor Who is probably already
institutionalized.
The narcissist tag is ubiquitous today, and anyone who does
anything that makes them stand out a bit is vulnerable to it. This
keeps countless people from doing something that could generate
positive change in the world. They’re too anxious about the
possibility of stigmatization – and in the case of this particular worry,
it actually has a good chance of coming true.

Century Of The Narcissist

Is narcissism all bad? Is it always destructive? Is it never healthy?

Envy is very obviously unhealthy and destructive, but Craig
Malkin, author of The Narcissist Test, doesn’t consider all narcissism
to be a sign of incurable sickness. In the rush to label every
successful person we don’t like as a narcissist, Malkin’s voice offers
an oasis of sanity in a vast expanse of caps-locked online comments
and emotionally distressed emojis. Narcissism isn’t a black and white
phenomenon; it’s subject to the sliding scale and guitar amp knob-
twiddling metaphors we’re already familiar with.
At the extremes of the sliding scale we find people with
narcissistic personality disorder, and what Malkin refers to as
echoists. An echoist is clueless about what they want or need; their
focus is on serving the needs and whims of other people, even at the
cost of the echoist’s health. When people are scared beyond reason
about making their voices heard, and the possible consequences of
doing so, they shift toward zero. Zero requests for aid, even when
they desperately need it; zero visibility to other people, at least if the
echoist can help it; zero sense of self-worth or specialness. Even kind
gestures such as compliments are batted away. When their unmet
desires and needs pile up too much, echoists can become excessively
needy – but at the same time, they’re worried witless that others will
spurn their call for help, and abandon them.
Extreme echoism’s polar opposite is the kind of narcissism

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that most people have in mind when certain musicians get labelled
that way. A person with what the DSM-5 calls narcissistic personality
disorder is truly toxic. Grandiosity knows no bounds here, and other
people only exist to serve the narcissist in whichever way the
narcissist desires. Empathy, as in Machiavellianism and psychopathy,
is non-existent. This kind of narcissist couldn’t care less about
someone else’s feelings, and they may not even be aware that others
are capable of feeling emotions at all. Exploitation and manipulation
are second nature to the extreme narcissist, and when the world
doesn’t respond to their efforts with instant and overwhelming
adoration, confusion and rage reign supreme as the narcissist vents
their grievances with little thought for the consequences.
Whether lost in skyscraping daydreams, fantasizing about
omnipotence, or bragging relentlessly about achievements big or
small, unhealthy narcissists don’t hesitate to tell the world how great
they are. If they haven’t done anything yet, they may avoid trying to
get anywhere, as doing so would put them at risk of failure; instead
they will keep talking a good game, even though they have
absolutely nothing to hand to back it up. Interestingly, the DSM-5
takes pains to point out that high achievers might act in a narcissistic
manner – but that doesn’t mean they have NPD. Narcissism only
becomes pathological when it prevents someone from functioning
properly, or causes them to become distressed.
At no point does the DSM-5 include “becomes a musician
and gets signed to a record label” as a symptom of narcissistic
personality disorder.

Jump

Narcissism is rife in the music business. As we’re about to see, it has

to be. Without what Craig Malkin calls healthy narcissism, we would
never make it this far.
Healthy narcissists lie around the middle of the narcissistic
spectrum. They’re not too timid to identify what they want and go
after it, and they’re not bordering on psychopathy. These are the

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people who see themselves as special in some way, and are willing to
overcome any obstacle in the name of creativity and achievement.
Instead of trying to tear others down in an envious rage – as
unhealthy narcissists are likely to do – the healthy narcissist works to
build themselves up. If they do get a little too carried away, and find
themselves showing off, they’re quick to clip their own wings just
enough to return them to the safe zone.
Healthy narcissists don’t usually go in for empty boasting.
They’re already out in the world, getting things done. They have
something to show for their efforts. They’re also likely to draw fire
simply by existing.
This kind of narcissism is not a disease, something to hide
and be ashamed of. Without it, a given musician has no hope of
clearing all the hurdles we have at this point – and they definitely
would never be able to clear this final one. Echoists have little
chance of achieving immortality in the music business; at best,
they’d struggle to free up time for themselves to focus on getting
good. In extreme cases, they’d be too busy attending to others’ needs
to even think about doing something as apparently selfish as playing
an instrument for fun.

Drive

Healthy and unhealthily high narcissism gives rise to confidence –

the sense that we can do something and do it well, even before we do
it. A musician who picks up a guitar, knowing they can get through
the song they’re about to play and do a great job of it, is confident –
and genuine confidence is something that has to be earned.
Musicians who consider themselves special, who are not echoists but
either healthy or unhealthy narcissists, will be more given to
pursuing the goal we’ve arrived at with confidence. They will be
confident in their chances of getting signed, even if it hasn’t
happened yet.
Unfortunately, unhealthy narcissism stands a good chance of
scuppering a musician’s career from the first hurdle onwards.

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Confidence can be misplaced. Unhealthy and extreme narcissists find
it difficult to take constructive criticism on board. No matter their
critic’s intentions, every word is interpreted as a vicious personal
attack. Puffed up and arrogant, these musicians remain stuck in
unconscious incompetence. In their minds, they’re God’s gift to
music; to everyone else, they’re a laughing stock.
Driven more by neuroticism than healthy narcissism’s inner
stability, unhealthy narcissists might manage to get good – but even
then, they’ll struggle to find compatible bandmates. If they really are
awesome songwriters or instrumentalists, and rustle up some musical
partners in crime, their bands will have to overcome more
dysfunctional conflict than their less difficult peers. Within music
scenes, unhealthy narcissism causes chaos and conflict – although it
will be tolerated, so long as the band are entertaining to watch.
At that point, high narcissism levels can prove helpful. As
their humbler peers keep their heads down, diligently slogging away
and slowly accumulating contacts, the scene’s more narcissistic set
throw themselves head-first into the spotlight – and grab that much
more attention for doing so. Behind the scenes the band might be at
each other’s throats, but onstage they’re nothing less than thrilling
and unpredictable. Onlookers find themselves drawn to the band like
a magnet, unable to look away.
This kind of higher-than-average narcissism isn’t NPD; it’s in
the middle ground between healthy and disordered. Should the more
narcissistic band begin to experience functional issues as its
members freak out, unable to cope with the shitstorm, it’s more
likely that some kind of mental health issue lies at the core of it all.
Audience members and fellow scenesters may speculate and debate
the possibilities at length, but what we might as well call the Doctor
Who Principle still applies. Professional shrinks would have a field
day in this kind of situation, and the band would run up a serious bill.
Narcissism is necessary for success in music. Echoists are so
out of touch with who they are that they barely have a self to express.
You can’t write anything, let alone get onstage and perform it, if you
have nothing to say.

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 LEON TK

Self Esteem

Successful people will at some point be asked who they think they
are. Echoists don’t have the answer – but a narcissist will let you
know. Musicians who get somewhere are usually at least a five on
the one-to-ten scale of narcissism, and there are as many subtle
shades in that range as there are when you crank up the bass on an
amp.
When constructive criticism is taken on board, skills can be
improved – and genuine, not delusional, confidence can come into
play. A feedback loop forms as confidence drives effort, then more
improvement, more confidence, more effort, and the muso feels
better and better about themselves. This feeling often runs deeper
than just feeling good about writing songs, pulling them off
flawlessly, and posing in all the right places during a live set.
It improves the musician’s sense of self-esteem.
Since creative musicians are likely to be neurotic, it’s no
surprise that their self-esteem levels often start out at a low ebb. As
they get good, beginning musicians discover a new sense of purpose
– one of self-esteem authority Nathaniel Branden’s famous “pillars
of self-esteem”. They begin to dream of life beyond the bedroom,
and pluck up the courage to venture into the real world, form a band,
write songs, and scale the summit.
Along the way, healthy narcissists keep their egos reined in.
Their self-esteem and genuine confidence are allowed to rise up to a
point, but if they slip up and start getting cocky they’re the first to
realize it. They quickly make a self-deprecating quip to balance
things out, and continue as normal. They hold nobody but themselves
accountable for their own actions, taking full responsibility for their
mistakes; they stay actively aware of the world around them without
getting lost in fantasies and delusions; they accept things they can’t
change, and adjust whatever they can; they’re not afraid to assert
themselves in an appropriate way; and they do their best to stay true
to their moral values, whatever those might be.

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By sticking to the path of balance and awareness, these
healthy narcissists can go far in the music business. But when a
musician’s self-esteem isn’t fully actualized, and the only quality
fully embraced is their purposeful, deliberate drive toward great
achievements, they’re all but destined to encounter some potentially
life-threatening problems.
The first fork in the road comes when they’re put under
pressure to sell out.

Sell Out

Authenticity is a big deal in the world of band-based music. Fake

posers need not apply – although they do anyway. After all, “fake it
‘til you make it” is frequently touted as the only magic bullet a
musician will ever need. So long as you fool everyone else, you’re
fine; they’ll give you what you want and smile while they do it.
Presumably, once you “make it” your life’s problems are
suddenly solved. No need to fake it anymore. Because you’ve
achieved success, you can now “just be confident” and get on with
the busy business of winning.
When grassroots-level musicians adopt this strategy, the
results are naturally ridiculous. The sum total of their recorded
output is one demo that sounds like it was recorded underwater, yet if
their social media stats are to be believed, they have 100,000 fans
who can’t wait for them to tour Delaware and India. Those Indian
fans really seem excited – although strangely, even the fans from
Delaware don’t seem able to spell the band’s name correctly. And
just to top it all off, the band is based in the UK.
Although debate continues to rage over whether or not
changing your body language can change the way your brain works,
when we meet someone who is trying to fake it despite not being a
professional actor, we feel uncomfortable. The faker in question
comes off as sleazy or slimy. We might not be able to put our finger
on why, but our skin crawls nonetheless and we try to get away –
unless we happen to be a shark eager to take advantage of such a

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naïve person.
Successfully faking it requires a lot of practice – and while a
musician may be able to get through a set using pre-rehearsed moves,
once they step offstage they have to keep the act up for however long
the gap is between shows. This can be draining, and leaves them
vulnerable to deeper psychological problems that will persist until
they learn to plug the hole at the bottom of the bucket. They have the
option to work on their self-esteem at any time, but as long as they
focus only on how they come across at a superficial level, they will
still struggle with what psychologists call congruence.

Fake Happy

We like to think that when we meet people, what we see is what we

get. We want to believe that the way this person is behaving reflects
who they really are on the inside. If they offer their opinion, we
might automatically assume they really believe their words.
As we found when considering compliance, this isn’t always
the case. People conform in order to create the “correct” impression
all the time. Someone might strike a power pose right before a job
interview and boldly stride in, give a handshake to remember, then
spew out a stream of impressive-sounding and ingratiating words
that win the interviewer over, even though they add up to nothing at
all. The faker knows that everything they just said was an aromatic
blend of nonsense and lies, but in this instance they “make it”
anyway, and get the job.
Incongruent behavior might fool others, but it doesn’t fool us
– and it’s problematic not just because we run the risk of being found
out, but because it does nothing to help us gain a solid sense of self-
esteem. We sacrifice our integrity – another of Nathaniel Branden’s
crucial pillars of self-esteem – in the name of career advancement
and financial gain. If we make it a habit, we can expect our level of
self-esteem to remain the same at best.
If who we are on the outside doesn’t match who we are on
the inside, we are living incongruently. If how we behave is an

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accurate reflection of the way we see ourselves – bold and self-
expressive if we have high self-esteem, timid and uncertain if our
self-image has taken a beating – we are being congruent, even if the
results are not ideal. Especially when people feel anxious in the
knowledge that how they feel inside will not help them get what they
want if it shows through in their behavior, they start to
overcompensate. Their speech is peppered with bragging and self-
aggrandizement; they come across as grandiose and entitled; and
they’re so focused on trying not to be found out that they fail to
empathize or connect with their interlocutors as human beings.
In short, they come across as unhealthily narcissistic – but
really they’re just insecure, incongruent, and trying too hard.

Nothing To Undo

Self-esteem and congruence, the practice of personal integrity

reflected in the way we hold ourselves, form another feedback loop.
If we’re living in line with our values and ideals, our sense of
integrity remains intact. Our self-esteem gets a boost, since we can
rightly feel proud of not compromising our principles, and we stand
a little taller in the face of those who would have us conform to their
expectations.
If we sell ourselves out, and take on a job we hate because it
pays well, our integrity takes a knock – and so does our self-esteem.
We put ourselves under emotional labor, putting on a bright and
smiley face even though we’re dying inside. Compliant because
we’re being paid to comply with the company’s wishes, we smile
and wave as a customer leaves, while fervently praying they trip over
and fall in the street on the way home.
With all these sellouts, fakers, and posers running around,
where does authenticity come in – and what is it, anyway? This is
easy to answer, at least for our purposes here: Authenticity is honesty.
In music we get pissed off with people who fake it, because they’ve
lied to us. Rock fans despise karaoke artists who are so fake, even
their backing track is Auto-Tuned – and they feel that way not just

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because the mimes can’t sing, but because they’re pretending to be
able to sing. Their performance itself is a lie. It’s dishonest. It’s not
real, genuine, or trustworthy.
It’s not authentic.
Fans of band-based music like to feel certain that their
favorite musicians can hold their own in the live arena – but even in
pop music, it’s possible to go too far in the name of faking it until
you make it. Publicly, Milli Vanilli were a pair of vocalists named
Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus. Their album Girl You Know It’s
True spawned a host of hit singles and landed them a Grammy for
Best New Artist, while Pilatus declared their cultural contributions to
be more valuable than those of The Beatles, Mick Jagger, and Bob
Dylan.
That Grammy would be taken back soon after, when the truth
about Milli Vanilli was exposed in one of pop’s most infamous
scandals. Pilatus and Morvan hadn’t sung a single note on Girl You
Know It’s True; uncredited session vocalists were the real voices of
Milli Vanilli. Rob and Fab were pretty faces, part of one of music’s
most effective marketing exercises ever, but not much more. In the
aftermath, Pilatus – who had once referred to himself as “the new
Elvis” – fell furthest, cutting his wrists, threatening to jump from a
balcony, abusing drugs, spending a short time in jail on a list of
charges, heading to rehab, and eventually passing away in a hotel
room in Frankfurt, his death reportedly due to excessive ingestion of
pills and alcohol.
The price Rob Pilatus paid for his part in a deception that
involved several other people was tragically excessive. But since
dishonesty was the root cause of his downfall, Milli Vanilli are still
regarded with the same derision usually reserved for the worst kind
of criminals. Faking it until you make it is ill advised in the music
business, but pursuing that path anyway should not be considered
punishable by the death penalty.

Big Picture

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When bands and artists sign record deals, they can expect at least a
few commentators to accuse them of selling out. Fans may assume
that the band have now made it, and anxiously wonder whether or
not their debut album will be a watered down, tepid caricature of
what the band once were. The record industry does not have the
cleanest reputation in the world, for all the reasons we covered when
first meeting the business.
Is a record contract always a deal with the devil?

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