…we only regret the chances we didn’t take.” 

Good morning! I was looking at my drafts folder this morning and I have a few drafts back from when I first started this blog. I’ve been ignoring them because they’re so old, but this morning I decided to click on this one – and I feel inclined to publish it. This was back from early 2013. I would have been 24, still with my high school boyfriend (who started a jazz band called The Joints) and I was probably working some full time office job but heavily focusing on marketing his band. I set up their gigs around town, I was running a website for them, and was helping them produce their first album. I was in it. I really believed in what The Joints were doing – they were all ‘classically’ trained musicians who were putting their own spin on jazz and I loved it. I wanted them to ‘make it’ – to have a following, a wider audience, to share their music with more than jazz listeners in Boulder/Denver. I also wasn’t listening to a ton of other music back then either – I was fully engulfed in jazz. I wanted to understand its nuance, but also how it could appeal to a wider audience.

It’s pretty weird looking back on this post. I can tell how naive I was, and how focused in on my little ‘bubble’ I had become. I was also pretty harsh and obviously jealous. I really wanted to just delete this post, or post it but with several edits, but I’ve chosen to keep it the way it is. That’s partly what blogs are for, right? To see where we were and how far we’ve come?

I think the month of December I’ll be doing a lot of ‘look backs’ so it’s fitting that I stumbled across this post. I want to get posts up of some of the trips I’ve taken in the last couple of years, do some reflections, remember where I’ve come, so I can start looking forward :).

Happy 1st day of December everyone – I hope we can all do some reflection this month to better help us understand where we want to go in the new year. Enjoy my unedited post (spelling errors and all) from 2013 below.

“Whew, I am a little worked up this morning.  I was leisurely eating breakfast and scanning Facebook when I read a post that said something like “First thing I am doing in the morning: Watching This” and it is  Macklemore & Ryan Lewis video on NPR.  I have heard of them a little bit but never really checked them out so I decided to watch the video.  I did watch the whole video (motivation to write this blog) and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking to myself “Is this for real?”  “this is some kind of joke right?”

I have lived with/worked with/been around music for a good part of my life and the more I am around it the more I realize how lazy and uneducated our society is – case in point “Macklmore and Ryan Lewis.”  I will give it to them that they try to have some good points/morals in their songs – i.e. legalizing gay marriage.  However, this is not music or “real hip hop” as one of the 9 million viewers commented, this is crap…

The musicians I work with and choose to surround myself by look at music as an artform and practice it for hours a day, they mean what they play, they write how they feel, and it is REAL.  So tell me why Macklemore can get 9 million hits on YouTube and The Joints can’t even reach 500?  Because too many people refuse to listen to the real meaning of music.  They listen for a beat and some stupid lyrics.  Congratulations, because of all of you Macklemore and Lewis don’t have to shop at Thrift Stores anymore.  “This is real hip hop” – who are you?!? Do you listen to The Roots?  How about J Dilla?  Try that for real hip hop.

Sometimes we need ignorant people to light a flame under our ass.  One of the members of The Joints is heading on a new journey to New York (congrats Danny!) and he had a conversation with B about how to not let The Joints fail and to only make them better.  Danny is proud of The Joints, we are all proud of The Joints and people like Macklemore are only fuel to the fire to continue to make real music that actually makes you think.  When did our society stop enjoying thinking?  Here’s to a year of real music that means something, to people who stand up for what they believe in, and work their asses off no matter how many times they get stepped on.  If you like thinking and enjoy listening to music that matters, keep up with The Joints – we have awesome things in store for you this year.

~motivated to not let b.s. get in our way~”