The Lavender Room

Like many people, I take my opinions and qualms with the world to the sanctity of my Close Friends story on Instagram. Well, here I am, bringing my short-form hatred into the long-form world.

This blog is for people who love music, community, and art but hate what capitalism has done to it. I’ve been studying to enter the music industry for the last three years at university, and I’ve always felt like an outsider in the world of entertainment business students. Surrounded by people who see entertainment as a business and a way to make money rather than explore humanity and connect to people (maybe I chose the wrong major). Now, that is not to say that everyone who works in music is somehow inherently evil, I too was/am on the path to enter the music industry on the business side, but lately, all I’ve felt was deep resentment toward a world that once brought me so much joy and comfort.

Having to sit through standard business classes, force fed AI propaganda, and told that essentially every choice I make from here on out will determine my financial success or failure has made me disillusioned to the idea of working at a label or some other music conglomerate. It is simply not for me.

I love music, I love listening to artists explain the world through their eyes. I love to enter into the intricacies of the melody, lyrics, production. But how can I sit here and claim to want to champion artists or do A&R for a label when the world the artist must enter to find commercial success is corrupt? Of course, commercial success should never be the aim or goal of making art, rather a possible positive that could come from it. Art should come from heart, passion, pain, humanity, and it shouldn’t be a privilege to make nor engage with it. Art is an ancient form of community that has been around longer than the exploitative systems we have in place today.

This leads me to where I am now: lost, confused, and still the only thing I know is that I want to be involved in music. Chasing after internships and odd jobs and connections doesn’t make me happy. Writing makes me happy, listening to music makes me happy, meeting new people makes me happy.

So here is my blog, The Lavender Room, where I will critique the culture that surrounds music and the institutions that facilitate it, and maybe even change a few minds along the way.