I have always known life isn’t fair.
I probably learned that the first time I was ever around a group of my contemporaries in nursery school. Inevitably somebody got to have the last juicebox because they pooped in their pants and needed high fructose corn syrup to ease over their embarrassment. “It’s not fair! I wanted the last juicebox!” I would wail at the pooper, as they sucked happily on their plastic straw. ” I deserve it because I didn’t poop in my pants! What kind of treat do I get for not pooping in my pants? Nothing? Well that’s just terrible!”
As a teenager, I heard that statement a lot, as I tried to convince my parents to let me stay out late and do things I had neither emotional or cognitive responsibility to handle. “Mom, you’re so unfair! Everyone else gets to go to the knifefight behind the mall! Even the other Christian kids’ parents are letting them go pass out gospel tracts! I swear if the cops come, I’ll run away! It’s not fair!”
And the response to my whining would always be the same, blood-curdling response: “Honey, Life’s not fair.”
Ugh. It makes me cringe just typing it. The truth hurts.
So now I am an adult, and I have been living with my unfair life pretty successfully thus far. My brain has expertly learned to totally ignore the possibility of fairness in any outcome. So it’s not a big deal if I have a baby before I want to, make one third the pay that someone with my skill set is usually paid, and rescue a shelter dog only to have him eat our stuff and pee on every soft surface in our home. It’s all water off my back. Life isn’t fair. I’m cool with that.
What gets me, though, is when life isn’t fair for other people. I can handle mass unfairness for myself, but for other people it still makes me angry. There are a million situations that I come in contact with every day it seems like, many of which are of a political root. Like in the state of Alabama, it is perfectly legal for mothers to have a baby at my house by themselves, with no help, but if they want to pay a midwife to come make sure they don’t bleed to death when they have said baby, it is illegal. So they can either bleed to death by myself or go to a hospital and be subject to tons of tests and procedures that are neither necessary nor beneficial? Those are their only choices? Not fair. Or take the food industry, where many of the nation’s largest slaughterhouses raise animals in deplorable conditions from birth, where they never see the sun and stand in a 3 square foot area in their own feces while being pumped full of growth hormones until they are slaughtered in the name of cheap meat. 99¢ hamburgers? Not fair. (In case you are wondering, I am not a vegetarian, but I do choose to eat humanely raised and free range meat whenever possible). Women bring promised a better life in America are being drugged and dragged into the sex slave industry? These are just two of a million different examples of how adult life isn’t fair. I could go on and on.
Lately, I have been more and more aware of the unfairness of life in the arts and music scene. These travesties do not occur because of laws put in place, or heartless corporate magnates per se, but because of bad choices made by us- the choosing public. Here is what I mean. Below is a comparison of the lyrics to two songs.
| Kesha- “Til Tok”
Wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy [CHORUS] [Chorus] Don’t stop, make it pop DJ, you build me up No, the party don’t start until I walk in Don’t stop, make it pop Don’t stop, make it pop |
Sleeping at Last- “Emphasis”
Death is promised to the bee who’s sting protects the colony. The smartest thing i’ve ever learned is that i don’t have all the answers, Death is a cold, blindfolded kiss. But the sweetest thing i’ve ever heard is that i don’t have to have the answers, |
As for the inspiration behind the two songs:
| “Tik Tok” was co-written by Kesha, Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco and was co-produced by Luke and Blanco. The song took three takes to get right as Kesha jokingly “white-girl rapped” over the beat.[1] At one point, she had wanted to rewrite the verses of the song because she thought they were funny, clever, and not just garbage.[2]
Kesha said the inspiration behind the song came from coming home half-drunk and stumbling after a night out of partying. She would usually write down a few words of a song, then the next morning, she would wake up with the story waiting to be told. The opening line came from an experience where she woke up surrounded by “beautiful women”, to which she imagined Diddy being in a similar scenario.[3] Kesha further described the theme of the song in an interview, emphasizing that it embodied her own lifestyle,
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the music and vocal melody for much of “emphasis” came all at once. it’s a rare situation when that happens, but when it does i am very grateful!
originally i had imagined the direction of this song to be a bit more rhythmically stiff, full-band and more musically complicated. but the more i played around with it, the more i realized it was a very lyric-focused song. it felt more suited for a stripped down, folk-like song arrangement rather than a full band situation, allowing the lyrics to be the focal point. over the last few months, i have rediscovered my appreciation for randy newman’s catalog of work. in the tiny moments in between working on our music lately, randy’s were some of the only songs that i felt like hearing. the structure and approach of “emphasis” was definitely inspired by mr. newman’s ballads. he has a way with simplicity that i’ve always appreciated. when i wrote the very simple parts for this song, it was an obvious place to look for affirmation that some songs just weren’t born to be anything but simple. and that’s a good thing. after some time of refining the verses for this song, it became clear that yes, simplicity was key, but at that point, i only had one part of the song written and quickly realized that it needed a chorus too. so, after much trial and error, the chorus was finally written and we realized that all of the ingredients were there and the last step was to spend time writing the lyrics. i played around with a few themes lyrically for this song… at one point it was going to become a subtle, but very optimistic love song (that direction ended up becoming our song, “next to me”) but after trying some different words over the parts, once again the direction defined itself in spite of my plans. the theme ended up following a lyric i wrote early on for this song, but tossed away several times because it wasn’t the optimistic love song theme i was hoping for…: “death is promised to the bee so, the entire theme was born out of that question. (as you can see, it just did not want to become a love song from the very beginning) whatever our beliefs or non-beliefs may be, how do we answer the many incredibly difficult questions that life unapologetically presents to us? this song is my attempt at wrestling with some of those questions and ideas. to be honest – heading down that road as a songwriter on a deadline, was rather scary. not exactly a topic that cam be whipped up quickly and i feared that the song would just be a sad series of difficult questions without any answers or reasonable resolution. every answer i could come up with was extremely complicated and unsatisfying, so eventually this lyric came about: “the smartest thing i’ve ever learned it may not be a particularly satisfying answer to such big questions, but it is sincere one. it felt freeing and right for this song to resolve with such a simple idea. much like our song “watermark” (and a few previous songs from other records) i decided that recording the piano and vocal together live, without a click track, made the most sense for this song. i’ve become pretty fond of recording gentle songs like this in that way, because it tends to make the songs feel more real and organic, rather than rigid and over-processed. every song is different, but songs like this really depend on the piano and vocal playing off eachother, so recording them separately can come across a little less sincere sometimes. also, recording without headphones or anything really in the way, just makes me feel more comfortable playing. (i get easily distracted and discouraged when gear gets in the way!) we felt like this song could easily benefit from a standard string arrangement (violins, viola, cellos, etc), but that felt a bit obvious and unnecessary for this one. almost indulgent in a way. so, we took a different route and decided that a single cello, playing almost as a duet to the vocal would be a more interesting route to go down. so, we asked our friend and incredibly gifted cellist, melissa bach to perform on this song. (melissa performed on “storyboards,” which is where we first met her) we chose melissa for this song because she has a very solid, soloist quality to her cello-playing and we felt like she would completely understand the direction. we didn’t want something specifically written out or pre-planned.. we wanted it to be freer than that, so she was game for just trying out takes and seeing what happened. dan and i drove into the city with a small recording set-up and melissa was kind enough to let us swing by and record in her and her husband’s home. we spent an hour or so letting her just improvise with the song and it was gorgeous straight away and clear that it was the right direction to go with this song. she played beautifully and was just a perfect fit. looking forward to doing more with melissa soon! so, the final step was atmosphere. while i began work on a different song, dan took the recording of “emphasis” home and played around with some final keyboard sounds and added some subtle and tasteful highlights throughout the song. mixing and mastering were smooth sailing and before we knew it, “emphasis” became the 2nd track on our “november” EP. we’re real proud of it. |
Tik Tok has sold 5 milion downloads worldwide, and has been named the Number One Song of 2010. The thing that really gets me is tha Ke$ha claims that “she had wanted to rewrite the verses of the song because she thought they were funny, clever, and not just garbage.” Wait- you mean the song before this version was garbage? Then what is this? Sondheim? Now I don’t consider myself to be a total square. I like to wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy sometimes myself. But if you look at a list of the top 10 songs of 2010-
One comment on Life Isn’t Fair
Kristy Powell
As you know, I’m with you. But I love that you brought your experience into question with the music and arts industry. I too hate that people make millions not just because they can, but because we let them, we tune in, we buy their shit and we freely allow them to rape our capacities. Ugh. 2011 is going to be all about a deeper level of intentional consumption (or no consumption in my case with some stuff).