Thank U, my new Alanis cover, is out now!
plus, what happens when everybody's selling and nobody's buying?
new song, Thank U, out now <3 here’s a little preview.
You might be wondering why I’m singing to you from inside a bottle. Well…sometimes I feel like Instagram / TikTok etc have gotten to be like a small town where everybody and their mother signs up to be a salesperson for a multilevel marketing program. A quick scroll through my own IG feed shows a bunch of really sincere people passionately trying to sell their courses and products and music and art and coaching—is it just me, or is everybody selling while nobody’s buying these days?Â
Thank U wasn’t written about this conundrum — first of all, it’s from 1998. Our sweet little baby hearts didn’t even know what Instagram sales funnels were back then. Secondly, Alanis seems to have written it about gratitude, surrender, and keeping an open spiritual mind — all things I have been learning about in my own life.Â
But marketing things aimed at spreading messages like this, via music or otherwise, has just gotten plain weird at this point. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have become personalized, open-24/7, virtual ideology shopping centers — each of us are wandering a giant virtual mega mall tailored very specifically to our own aspirations, ideals, curiosities, and beliefs.Â
I get so exhausted of feeling like I’m always selling something or being sold something. I long for open-hearted sharing that doesn’t end in a hook. It’s gotten to the point for me that if I happen to be scrolling through socials and I see a (probably very sincere, earnest) human being with their eyes closed and a hand on their chest, breathing, I just keep on moving because I’m 99% sure they’re going to end their video with ‘comment ‘breathe’ to receive a free stress reduction / breath work training’, which itself will of course be a sales funnel into a full online course purchase.Â
This whole phenomenon of personal and professional work blurring together is kinda f***ing crazy in the first place anyway, isn’t it? Late stage capitalism seems to have turned us into little hungry rat people, trying desperately to make livings off our passions and/or beliefs because we have gotten (rightfully!) sick of working our whole lives to support the profits and greed of huge corporations — so we take what could otherwise be really rewarding practices and hobbies in our personal worlds and we try to package them into salable things so we can ‘work for ourselves’—only to find ourselves bowing and scraping before the algorithmic gods. (Which, may I remind us all, are owned, built, operated, and capitalized on by the same huge corporations we quit working for in the first place.) Content creators and online artists haven’t really escaped the system at all. We’re still participating and perpetuating them from the comfort of our own couches.
I’ve done all of this myself. I’ve marketed courses and seminars, and I market music still — and the older I get, the more that I live, I feel more and more uncomfortable with the whole lot of it. On one hand, I’m so unutterably thankful that I can make a living doing something I love. I know a lot of people would really love to figure out a way to do that and haven’t yet been able to, and the privilege I enjoy in that regard is not lost on me. On the other, the sales and marketing grind that it takes to help me make a living at being a musical artist is making it alarmingly easy to…well, to love it less.Â
And when you intersect selling music with themes of *healing?* Woof. (Shoutout, by the way, to @healingfromhealing, one of the only accounts on Instagram that makes it feel worth logging on for me anymore. They hold mirrors up to the spiritual and esoteric trends of our time. (and usually it’s funny) What I appreciate most about their content is that they are not outright denying the validity of all spiritual experience, or making blanket statements about all spiritual practices; rather, they’re successfully highlighting just how complex and strange the intersection of spirituality, pop culture, tech, and money has gotten—and how worth examining it is.)
I drift around an online world that’s stuffed so side-splittingly full of sales funnels, it can get to feeling like I’m just caught in a never-ending giant labyrinth of spiritual / creative pitches and bids for my money and my attention—and that is what I’m scrolling before bed and when I wake up in the morning.
As I am neither rich nor determined enough to make like Wendell Berry and eject myself entirely from city life and social media and the systems that keep us here, I hope to at least put out content that acknowledges this burnout and exhaustion, which I’m certain is very real for a lot of us.Â
And that’s a little context as to why I’m singing to you from inside some prescription bottles in the video we just put out. 😂
Thank U is out now. I hope you can hear how much these words mean to me. They feel like some kind of an antidote to all of this. Even if I have to sell you on listening to the song. #priorities
YESSSSSS! I feel all of this so much! Instagram has started to feel like one long infomercial for whatever kind of self help, spirituality, health transformation you are looking for. It’s SO ODD and over saturated and unnatural. And, It’s too much! AND, it’s essential for creators trying to support themselves. So what to do. What. To. Do. Thank you for putting this into words for us. I feel you!
Hi Audrey. Your words resonate. I think we are all hungry for authenticity. I do my best to be authentic with others and myself. Being Kind is a good way to be authentic. It is hard to FIND authenticity in the world but if I myself AM authentic, I am solving part of the problem and maybe it will help someone find their own authenticity. I am now retired but I found some peace working in a field that was interesting but not my passion. This allowed me to buy the equipment I needed in order to DO my passion. It worked out pretty well. Honestly I tried making my passion my work but once I brought the pressure of making money into it, it killed it for me. We're all different and your music is working for you...keep doing it , it's beautiful.