I met Vincent Moon tonight/ A Take-Away tribute

I cut class. For this:

I guess it wouldn’t be too farfetched to say this video (and consequently, this song) changed my life?

Or I should be more cautious. I’ve been careful about using these words lately:

• idol
• icon
• love, say “I love…” the same way I’m allowed to love a significant other or my cat.

I’ve also been wanting to write about music as a gateway drug to the business of living, but I’m starting to realize how awful that phrase–“the business of living”–actually is. Why add tedium where it shouldn’t exist? I mean, why be bored, why treat it like work? Heck, why do anything at all.

But back to the business of living and back to music as a drug. I guess that terms inaccurate, because music isn’t in the business of dulling the senses, rather it elevates them, if it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

So maybe it is still a drug, in that sense.

But what I realized over the years is that it’s not that easy to put someone on a pedestal when you’re standing in the same room as them. And if you ever want to transcend that divide, it becomes necessary to acknowledge the very basic components of their humanity, like jetlag or silly dances. This is where it becomes easy to confuse idolizing and edifying someone with just deeply admiring what they do.

I met Vincent Moon tonight. In terms of freaking my proverbial shit, meeting Vincent Moon was high up on the list. I went through a phase where it was nothing but take-away shows, I would literally spend hours poring over the archives and contents of La Blogotheque and the Black Cab Sessions, with Blogotheque holding a special place in my heart because of videos like. Man Man’s “Van Helsing Boombox”. I would get depressed and sink into existential ruts, endlessly dwelling on the relevance of what I’d devoted my life to, and I’d turn to what Vincent Moon was doing, and realize it didn’t matter.

While we all have our own individual ideas of success, nothing quite compares to the joy that comes with being acknowledged for doing the thing you love. Blogotheque in a lot of ways encompassed all those things. It’s music, it’s travel, and it has this unwavering devotion to authenticity, to capturing a performance with or without the validation of exorbitant production costs and legions of screaming fans.

I was trying to explain the whole Take-Away show concept a while ago, and came up with the whole food service analogy, where it’s a meal with the fat trimmed away; literally, take-away, in the sense that it’s dining without the service, focusing on the music as the main ingredient and returning performances to the streets, where they can take place without the illusion crafted by the same mechanisms that make celebrities, and make it possible for music to legitimize its existence from across a barricade and atop a stage.