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bloodybells1 · 5 years

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On Specialization

I’ve never been comfortable with the term “bassist”. This may sound peculiar coming from a bassist, though not so peculiar if you consider that, as Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

First, a word about the pecking order of a typical rock band: often, the singer is understood, rightly or wrongly, as occupying the top rung, while the bassist will often come last. The zeitgeist supports this claim. For example, in one episode of Just Shoot Me, Wendy Malick’s character, Nina Van Horn, brags about having laid the singer of a band the previous night, but spits out her water when she’s informed by more sober members of the party that it was in fact the bassist she’d slept with.

In the broadest sense of the term, a rock band is kind of like a layer cake. The singer occupies the top layer, with the other instruments on down. Flashy guitar leads and sexy lyrics (“Come here, baby,” and so on and so forth) take center stage, followed by the drums, slamming and banging like an army coming from behind.

And at last, at the bottom of the cake, the bass guitar, which, to the untrained ear, most often presents a barbaric, low-frequency drawl. Often it’s made even more unintelligible by the music hall’s cavernous reverb. The end result is that the casual listener begins calling the bass player “the other guy”.

When I was active as a professional musician, as the band Interpol’s bassist, I obsessed over this totemic arrangement. It was difficult to ignore how recessive I could become with this instrument around my shoulder.

So, when the band stumbled onto the good fortune of fame and success, when cameras and journalists trained their gaze on us, I compensated for this “imbalance” with sheer braggadocio. Onstage I impersonated Nikki Sixx, while backstage, in interviews, I dropped outlandish statements, the better to have my words show up as pull-quotes. Sealing my public relations push, I scheduled extracurricular activities, such as DJ’ing and, well, coitus, because, hello, it was rock music.

It seemed I’d pulled a switch, that ropes were cranking open an underwater gate, and, before I could finish saying “Cocaine”, an inner Poseidon was releasing the Kraken. It felt as though I couldn’t possibly sate my appetite.

This was a survival strategy, of sorts. I had to find some way to course correct for the imbalance, to prevent my ego from disappearing under the bass guitarist’s fate, the opaque destiny of the bottom rung. I was (and still am) too much a narcissist to endure the role of “filling in the blanks”. I needed more, much more.

Many a fine bassist is perfectly happy to fulfill the humble dispensation of their craft. The best of them are masters of understatement, achieving great notoriety among aficionados (John Paul Jones, for example). But, for better or for worse, I was too much of a diva for that. I’m not exactly proud per se that I’m a diva, but this shouldn’t stop me from being honest.

I suppose this is why I now bristle when someone calls me a “bassist”. The word registers to me as a reminder, not only of lowly status, but also of an embarrassing rebellion against that status, which time has demonstrated as the sign of narcissism, not to mention immaturity.

But the word also implies a degree of specialization with which I have never been comfortable. Jaco Pastorius was a bassist. Bernard Edwards, of Chic, was a bassist. Cliff Burton, of early Metallica, was a bassist. Among the living, Billy Sheehan, of David Lee Roth’s band and Mr. Big, is a bassist. I will even concede that the chief influencers of my bass playing, Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order and John Taylor of Duran Duran, are bassists, in the truest sense of that word.

But I? I was a gifted musician and composer who came across the bass guitar by way of a college band that happened to take off. Afterwards, I simply used that talent for the less than sincere objectives noted above.*

I don’t disparage the life of specialization, nor those who’ve chosen it. If anything, I envy their attention span. Encountering satisfaction, and even success, following a single career track strikes me as patently wise, to say nothing of the karma of furthering the conversation in a certain field.

But I would hate to detract from the more esteemed practitioners of this instrument, those who clearly set out to make it their life’s work, by welcoming this appellation without the caveat I am writing here.

In anything, one can’t start from a weak place. Otherwise, the foundation is shabby, having begun from an inauthentic proposition. “This is what I should do” is deplorable. “This feels truthful to me” is the better course, no matter the cost, nor the risk. Playing the bass guitar, over and over again to the exclusion of other pursuits, just didn’t feel truthful to me.

At every step on the One Path of Specialization, my gaze would inevitably fall on the alleys and byways fanning out on either side. I’d feel a piece of my heart break every time. At the end of each day, having successively stranded one part of me, then another, I’d go to sleep feeling much less complete than in the morning.

This is no way to end the day. So, in order to preserve my sleep, I decided my curiosity was too important to ignore, that the greatest failure I could envision, for which there seemed to be no justification in permitting, was lying on my death bed wondering what lay under the stones I’d passed my whole life.

Naturally, taking action was an agony. Procrastination was the order of the day. It took years to make headway, years of worrying what would happen to me if I quit, of the deep regret I might encounter. My therapist at the time, listening to the 124th hour of my pretzel-twisting, finally said, “Carlos, you have the right to fuck up your life.” That was the narrative game changer I needed to hear, and I made my decision right then and there to leave Interpol and pursue training in other fields of interest, mainly acting, but also writing.

This isn’t to say I don’t experience regret, agonizing distress even. How often have I stopped for a latte at the local café, overheard myself playing bass guitar through the speakers, and rued the impetuous decision to leave behind such glorious specialization! It’s the height of confusion to taste blessed freedom and bitter mediocrity in the same quaff.

But then I think of two of my heroes, who support their rejection of specialization with an ironic philosophical outlook.

Stephen Fry, on a recent airing of Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense, explained to his host how he was able to produce the astonishing breadth of his oeuvre – novels, TV appearances, comedy specials, productions of Shakespeare, documentary films, influential tweets – with a humble confession: “Without sounding over paradoxical, it may be a result of having no particular talent.”

Henry Rollins, the punk rocker emeritus, admitted to as much on the multimedia web portal, Big Think, when he said, “I don’t have talent, I have tenacity . . . I have discipline, I have focus.” TV show host, lead singer, travel documentarian, actor, spoken word artist, writer, publisher, Rollins is not so much a great artist as a great “artwork of himself”. He exemplifies the truth that the sum total of mediocre talents equals a net gain of life excellence.

I always like to say: “There’s nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades, for the adage is incorrect: yes, you’d be master of none except that of being a jack of all trades.”

Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph reads: “Author of the Declaration of Independence [and] of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia." Notice the absence of his eight years as our third president. “Author of the Declaration” is certainly no secret, but the other two are generally not well known. Clearly, he was making a statement, despite what historians might prefer to emphasize, of what was truly deserving of remembrance.

Hedy Lamarr, a talented and beautiful mid-century Hollywood star, also co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied powers in World War II that Bluetooth technology incorporates today. August Strindberg, the dean of Swedish drama, was also an influential painter whose subjective landscapes, like the astonishing Wonderland from 1894, were ahead of their time.

Don’t get me started on Al Franken.

Rejecting specialization, because it affords multiple avenues and narratives, is a roundabout way to attain control, and therefore, if he’s feeling constrained, a control freak’s preferred modus operandi. What you lose in the area of expertise, you gain in control over the conversation, for at no point do you involve yourself so much as to permit outside narratives to latch (or leech) on to your pursuits.

At a certain point, I realized that my rockstar posturing in Interpol had an expiration date, past which it would be cute no longer, not to mention hazardous to my health and the emotional wellbeing of my colleagues. The history of rock music presents copious examples of this sequence of events.

But I still needed control. Therefore, I chose to reject the specialization of a successful career as a bassist.

Differences in career objectives meant that I would eventually have to leave the band. Of course there were other factors, more personal than I’m choosing to write here. I will cover that part in other entries. But the need to retain control of my own conversation, along with the desire to achieve that control through a kind of diaspora of artistic pursuits, is salient nonetheless.

I’ll close with a bit of a Marxist riff. Specialization is a capitalist construct (and I mean that with all the opprobrium that statement must sound like it’s making). Its origins lie in the Agricultural Revolution, the first time human labor was ever divided on a large scale, and the Industrial Revolution, which automated that division, created incredibly precise specialization, and amplified the labor force beyond anything previously imaginable.

This has given birth to a fetishization of “expertise” that has pervaded almost every industry. Today, we often ask someone we just met “What do you do?” One of the chief faults I could lay on modernity’s doorstep would be that this question, among all others, does indeed, sadly, provide the fastest track to a person’s core identity. “Trust the experts” sounds eminently advisable. People distrust non-experts the way they distrust when someone’s thoughts evolve, branding them as inconsistent, therefore untrustworthy.

But this is all optics. We are inculcated to believe in the unhindered progress of Capital and this presumes labor, specifically specialized labor, to fulfill its mandate. This makes us suspicious of those who do not specialize. We want someone to stand still, and “be someone”, meaning “be a specialist” in this, that, or some other thing. But this suspicion holds only if you truly believe that the end all of human civilization is the progress of Capital, a belief I am sure most readers, hopefully, at the least, of this blog, reject.

*There is an interplay between sincerity and artifice that permeates rock music, but I don’t wish to get into that here. Suffice it to say for the time being, that there are instances when a rock band suffers extraordinary reputational costs when pursuing a “sincere” style, and this happens, in my opinion, because rock music, in amplifying lifestyle, spectacle, and fashion, is inherently a post-modern art form akin to Pop Art and Dadaism, and therefore more ironic than sincere. This explains why it is so easy to make fun of Coldplay. But I’ll spare the reader the musicology lesson for another time. Yet, I write this to mitigate, perhaps only slightly, the disingenuousness of my “insincerity” as a bassist.

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