Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical
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“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying CAN food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Emma Warren (Music Journalist and Author) MUSIC “Singing is crying for grown-ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning its creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of music. The world loves music for bridging those lines. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the wellbeing music brings to society and the wellbeing of those who create. It’s a much SICK? YOU MAKE needed reality check, deglamourising the romantic image of the tortured artist.” Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer, Chair of the Ivors Academy) It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their ndings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable & George Musgrave Sally Anne Gross guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation. CAN MUSIC SALLY ANNE GROSS is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. She is also a music manager and music business a airs consultant. MAKE YOU SICK? GEORGE MUSGRAVE is an academic based at both the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a musician. MEASURING THE PRICE OF MUSICAL AMBITION POPULAR MUSIC | CREATIVE INDUSTRIES CULTURAL STUDIES | PSYCHOLOGY Sally Anne Gross & George Musgrave Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave University of Westminster Press www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Published by University of Westminster Press 115 New Cavendish Street London W1W 6UW www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Text © Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave 2020 First published 2020 Cover photography © Jackson Ducasse Special thanks to Ritual and Emily Warren Cover: Diana Jarvis Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912656-64-6 ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-912656-65-3 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-912656-61-5 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-912656-62-2 ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-912656-63-9 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book43 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying and distributing the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated, that you are not using the material for commercial purposes, and that modified versions are not distributed. The full text of this book has been peer-reviewed to ensure high academic standards. For full review policies, see: http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/publish. Suggested citation: Gross, S. A. and Musgrave, G. 2020. Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book43. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16997/book43 or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Contents Acknowledgements ix Note: On the Music Industry/Music Industries xi 1. Introduction: Special Objects, Special Subjects 1 1.1 What Makes You Think You’re So Special? 3 1.2 You Don’t Have to Be Mad, But it Helps 5 1.2.1 Can Music Really Make You Sick? 8 1.3 Abundant Music, Excessive Music? 12 1.4 Communicating when Music is Media Content 14 1.5 Music Education and the Pipeline 18 1.6 What Are We Seeking to Do in this Book? 22 2. Sanity, Madness and Music 25 2.1 Signs of Emotional Distress and the New Language of Mental Health 26 2.2 Music and Suffering: The Limits of Magical Thinking 30 2.3 Methodology: Our Survey Findings – Anxiety and Depression by Numbers 33 2.4 A Deep Dive: Solo Artists, Gender and Age 34 2.4.1 Interviews: Understanding Feeling 36 2.5 Conclusion: Status and the Rhetoric of Fantasies 38 3. The Status of Work 41 3.1 Financial Precarity and Defining ‘Work’ 42 3.1.1 Work, Work, Work 42 3.1.2 Money and Meaning 44 3.1.3 Pleasure and Self-exploitation 46 3.1.4 Professionalism and Value 47 3.2 Musical ‘Success’? 49 3.2.1 How to Define Success 50 3.2.2 Capital, Image and Illusion 51 3.2.3 Failure, Responsibility and Identity 52 vi Contents 3.3 Expectations and the Myth of the Future 55 3.3.1 The Achievement-Expectation Gap 56 3.3.2 Music as Social Mobility 57 3.3.3 ‘Deification and Demolish’ 59 3.4 Conclusions: Take Part, Make… Content 60 4. The Status of Value 63 4.1 Validation ‘Online’ 64 4.1.1 Feedback and Vulnerability 64 4.1.2 Competition and Relevancy 67 4.1.3 Abundance and Communicating 70 4.2 Validation in ‘the Industry’ 72 4.2.1 Reputation and Contracts 72 4.2.2 The Deal 74 4.2.3 On the Role of Luck 75 4.2.4 Luck, Power and Privilege 78 4.3 The Myth of Control and the Nature of Blame 79 4.3.1 Symbolic Inefficiency and Stickiness 81 4.3.2 Do You Feel in Control? 83 4.4 Conclusions: Welcome to the ‘You’ Industry 85 5. The Status of Relationships 87 5.1 Personal Relationships 89 5.1.1 Family, Guilt and Sustainability 89 5.1.2 The Role of London 92 5.1.3 Touring and Family Life 93 5.1.4 The Work/Leisure Distinction 94 5.1.5 Music as a Gambling Addiction 97 5.2 Professional Relationships 101 5.3 Women and Their Relationships 106 5.3.1 Sexual Abuse and Misogyny 107 5.3.2 Self-Perception 109 5.3.3 Women Online 110 5.4 Conclusions: Drive and Being ‘Occupied’ by Your Occupation 112 6. Conclusions: What Do You Believe In? 115 6.1 Discipline and Dreaming 115 Contents vii 6.2 ’Twas Ever Thus: What’s New? 119 6.2.1 Experiencing Abundance, Making Data 120 6.3 ‘Let’s Talk About It’: What Would Living Better Look Like? 123 6.3.1 Therapy and Listening 124 6.3.2 Public Policy and Learning Lessons? 125 6.3.3 Duty of Care: Responsibility and Control 128 6.3.4 The Case of Lil Peep 130 6.4 Music Education Now: Reflections 134 6.4.1 Questions of Content and New Ways of Teaching 138 6.5 Concluding Thoughts: Myths and Wellbeing 140 Appendices 143 1 Musicians Interviewed and their Demographics 143 2 Additional Cited Interviewees and Interviews with Mental Health Professionals 144 3 Directory: Music and Mental Health Resources 145 4 Notes on Methodology 151 Notes 155 Author Information 157 Bibliography 159 Acknowledgements We would like to say a very special thank you to all the musicians who participated in this research project without whom none of this would have been possible. We would like to thank everybody at Help Musicians UK. A special thank you is due to Jonathan Robinson whose initial introduction and subsequent hard work and support helped produce the research this book is based on. Our sincere thanks to our colleagues Professor Christian Fuchs and Dr Anastasia Kavada in CAMRI at the University of Westminster, and Doug Specht for all his postings on our work. Thanks also to Professor Catherine Loveday for her help with the new data analysis in this book. For legal advice thanks to Mike Shep- herd at Trainer Shepherd Phillips Melin Haynes and to Collins Long. Thank you also to our editor at the University of Westminster Press, Andrew Lockett, who has believed in this book from the beginning. Thanks to our incredible MA Music Business Management family. Special thanks to Graham Ball, Jamie Reddington, Denise Humphreys and Hannah Joseph without whom things might just have unravelled completely, and all our students, past and present, who had to put up with our rantings! We would like to thank Christabel Stirling and Professor Heather Savigny for their generosity and very helpful comments.