Iggy Pop – who ought, quite frankly, to know a thing or two – gave a recent interview to the NME in which he gave the following piece of advice to all wannabe rock stars, art stars, would-be career bohemians, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the creative underbelly: don’t get a job. According to Iggy, we should all be unemployed, and so should all of our friends. Don’t even hang around with people who’ve got jobs, said Iggy. It’ll bring you down. Hanging around with a bunch of [other] impoverished, famished, spaghetti-eating, tobacco-smoking artistes in threadbare shirts and rotten trainers at least furnishes a sense of community, whereas if everybody else is buying a house and shopping at Waitrose it’s quite difficult not to question one’s raison d’être. Which, of course, one must never do – not if one’s serious about making it, just like Uncle Iggy did.
Good old Iggy Pop. He’s right, of course, but it’s easy for him to say, and anyway, he’s old.
It’s not that I condone the conservatism of Generation Y (born between 1978-2000, aka the Millennials, aka the Internet Generation, aka the Apathetic Generation: we are the new future of art and culture), but times have changed since Iggy’s day, and the relative affluence of our time and paradigm has led to higher living costs and lower standards of life.
In other, less rarefied words: we’re all broke as hell. What if, during a particularly heavy session, your drumsticks break and you can’t afford new ones? What are you supposed to do then, Uncle Iggy — stop rockin’ out?
No. You’re supposed to go out and get a job, as your mother’s been telling you to do for years. It’s not even a choice, really. It’s just the way it is.
That’s the thing. Everybody wants to sell out, and so everybody shows up in the great sellout centres of the world – London, New York – all foaming at the mouth for that juicy break, and meantime, all struggling like hell to get by. London and New York are two of the most expensive cities in the world. Why on earth would a broke-ass artist-type want to live in a place where you have to work, or else face starvation?
It’s a paradox: the golden, big-money opportunity is waiting out there for the lucky hopeful who’s both gifted and dedicated enough, but in order to get at it you’ve got to be doing your thing – and doing it well, for which you need practise, for which you have no time since you’re always working.
And listen, kid, don’t fool yourself: the Good People To Know are having themselves a great old time, without ever having noticed the absence of your rare talent from their lives or from the world. They’re noshing down at the restaurants at which you’re polishing the silver and washing the dishes; they’re blithely floating straight past you en route to the VIP room in the nightclub that pays you to pass flyers out in the street.
Hovering around the table waiting to be cast in the next Ridley Scott just ain’t gonna cut it.
Still, the best of us have been there – or at least, those of us who didn’t start out on the Mickey Mouse Show or on Byker Grove. Kate Winslet famously worked in a North London Deli while starting out, and Jennifer Aniston, the patron saint of hopeful waitress-types the world over, put in many a long hour at front of house, rather than central stage. Both Mick Jagger and Simon Le Bon worked as hospital porters. Go figure.
Another option, while awaiting one’s big break, is to seek work in the general area you’re interested in and get paid to do something which is almost what you’ve dreamed of – but not quite.
Fyfe Hutchins, lead singer of the Guillemots, worked for a while in a piano bar, just like Billy Joel, while he spent his hours not working in a bedsit, labouring on a four-track and slowly assembling a band.
Dita Von Teese was always driven in a certain direction, and worked her first job in a lingerie shop before becoming a go-go dancer.
The slightly embarrassing before-they-were-famous clips of well-known actors doing junk food commercials and corporate videos with bad hair and earnest, hopeful eyes occasionally crop up on YouTube, and we all have a good laugh at their expense, recognizing our downtrodden day jobbing selves and feeling just a little bit better about the fact.
Doing ads and understudies, playing cheesy covers or guitar-teching for the pros sure beats the hell out of polishing silver, wheeling a gurney, making coffee or shucking peas, and the Good People To Know are marginally more likely to recognize you as a contender.
The danger here, though, is complacency: ending up happily mediocre and marginally less broke. It’s what Uncle Iggy warned us about. In a dead-end job, at least, you get a certain brittle attitude going on. It’s a rage that no self-respecting rock star or method actor or cultural phenomenon ought to be without.
“One day, you bastards,” you’ll be thinking, with every swash of the mop, with every bleep of the register, as you steam a cappuccino and squeeze out a have-a-nice-day, “I’ll be something, and I’ll be somewhere far, far from here.”
Eminem, for example, who’s an angry young man if ever there was one, worked as a short-order chef. I’ve been a short-order chef and it’s got to be one of the toughest, dirtiest, worst-paid jobs in the unskilled market, in which the hours are long and the morale is low. The Marshall Mathers EP shows our man in fry-kettle skivvies outside the wheelie bin with a couple of garbage bags, every inch the bummed-out blue collar serf – and yet he wears that rage as a badge of pride, and rightly so. It’s a calculated message to every wannabe stuck in a crap job: one day, kids, you’ll be something, just like me. Hold tight, it says, and stay angry.
We’ve all got to work, kids, but don’t let’s work too hard. Let’s focus on the dream.
Greatness, it’s been said, comes from hardship and hand-to-mouth and all that rage that comes of it. It’s something that Jean Genet and Rimbaud, two great poet-saints of Boheme, were very clear about; would-be artists and writers will never make the kind of money that actors and rock stars do, even if they become successful, and so they’re a little more resigned to it; they know that poverty’s part of the program — part of the aesthetic, even.
Pete Doherty, a middle-class army brat with that same sensibility, honed his povvo-chic rock-bum persona working as a gravedigger, reading poetry (with Rimbaud and Genet no doubt featured among his chapbooks) while perched on a headstone (see, even Pete Doherty had a job once upon a time!). Relative poverty is good for an artiste. It promotes resourceful thought and creativity, and if you’re to speak to The People you’ve got to get down there with ‘em, right?
And if that means four years of eating pasta and riding the buses, then success, when it comes, will be all the sweeter for it. Hold tight, then. Don’t get fired. And good luck with the Big Break.
