I enjoy meeting people who try their almighty best to be someone they are not. Why? Because 1) It’s hilarious, 2) They don’t know that it’s hilarious, and 3) I get a chance to work on my poker face—the look of indifference to their struggles of identity. In the nightlife scene, they come in the forms of pseudo DJs, celebrities, entrepreneurs, promoters and even bartenders.
I was at Zouk for Chromatics & Glass Candy not long ago where I was introduced to a music blogger we’ll call A. I heard of this guy from his spamming of my inbox, self-proclaiming to be the best music blog in Singapore. Now, I run a music blog in my spare time and I don’t claim anything about the level of quality because inevitably that is up for the readers to decide. But A offered me his idea of what’s “best” and having taken a look at his blog, I was not sold. Peppered with brief writings and copy/pastes from press releases; it took 5 minutes of my life away and an extra minute to switch the damn music player off. I asked A what he thought about making some changes, but he said that there’s nothing he will ever change. I guess some people aren’t willing to grow. Outside of Zouk I bumped into so called “party promoter” B. The dude is known for pulling strings with DJs and artists for events and then leaving them disgruntled. I was wary of him from the get go but this guy can talk a whole lot of empty. If he did as much as he said he does, he’d already be a millionaire. Strike two for the delusional.
But my current favorite is C, the “Celebrity DJ/Model/Actress/Director/ Producer/etc”, who sure as hell better be better at all those other things than she is at DJing. I was sent a link to her latest mix on SoundCloud a few weeks ago. One of her mixes was labeled the “Best DJ Mix Ever”—a tell tale sign that it would suck. She is probably the only person who’s ever launched a launch event, aptly titled “[insert name] Launches the Launch of [insert party name]”. Talk about not being able to see yourself for who you truly are. I’ll leave you with a quote from objectivist writer Ayn Rand, in her non-fiction book The Fountainhead: “You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass.”