Identity Matters

How My Identity May Have Twisted a True Story of Unrequited Love

Photo Credit: Christian Elizondo

Dear Reader,

I have been focused on some heavy topics lately, so you can consider this a palate cleanser. It is my attempt at lighter fare. Though, if you take a listen to the above song, it’s pretty much a downer. Sorry, not sorry.

Today, Facebook reminded me of that time I wrote, arranged, and performed the music for a rock song entitled Giving Up with an acquaintance from high school who wrote the lyrics. Looking back, I think this song was a swan song for the others involved in making it. I believe I was the last choice — a last best hope — after other more obvious aspirations were dashed for providing it a creative outlet.

Perhaps, I can hope, my talents were seen as a potential final refuge, not chosen for my superiority, but as potentially the last inn for creative projects like this, otherwise headed for a proverbial slush pile. If I am right about this, being someone's last choice pleases me immensely. I love the idea that I could enter into a place of scarcity and provide someone an oasis, or a bridge to new possibilities — hence my later career choices (I am a lawyer now).

The theme of being wrongfully passed over, ignored, and stuck (when I know I am marvelous) is extremely relatable to me, which made this song so easy to arrange and sing. But I always sensed that letting go of people and things that never wanted me in the first place could be a way to personal freedom and a chance to find new things worthy of my focus. I am not sure if this sentiment was shared with the others who joined me in this creative endeavor.

In fact, there tends to be a moment of visible disappointment in a lyricist’s eyes when I first present them with my arrangement of their work. This is usually followed by a look of realizing they are being asked to let go of solo creative control, and then choosing whether to endorse the effort I had made to help the project. Compromise is built into the process of creative collaboration. When someone compromises by using me in a creative project, they have to compromise on the fact that I am a white man who looks and sounds extremely white, which can change the entire context of the expression.

I was not entrusted with just how far and deep the author gave up upon a love he once had, or even to a full knowledge of why. But I sensed there was more to the story. The only choice I had was to abet the creation and to see if it might, through catharsis, become a new way to expression. To my knowledge, this song did not become a new way forward for any of us, which made me think there was more to the story that a white man like me could not be the stand-in for.

Money, body image, race, and religion all feed a more complex story about why sex happens, and why it doesn't. By using me as the stand-in for the lyrics of this song, I think the issues narrow to a point where mental health looms larger than, perhaps, it should. Or it may have shifted audience interpretations about the nature of the mental health issues that were or may have been present in our representation of the experience of romantic dejection in music.

It is not to say that such a topic is not worthy of art, if it is true. But, here, it may have been an unintentional falsehood caused by a belief that any man could stand-in to tell the story of any other. As an artist, sometimes it is my job to let a piece stand with its flaws in order to receive feedback. But I still have so many questions about this one, regarding identity and collaboration.

The author of these lyrics was my age, but he was not white. We went to high school together in the mostly rural Central Valley of California, where conservatism and Christianity tended to serve as a thin veil for several forms of bigotry common in most of America. We also went to high school in a time when many of us were taught that America had overcome issues of race and gender, and that equality for all had already dawned in U.S. society so that every person was generally the same as another.

This was the prevailing theme in the time and places where we grew up, and so we were not prepared to share with one another about how the experience of race (or any other distinguishing factor) could have changed the story told in the artworks we made. The song Giving Up was supposed to speak to the universal emotional experience of unrequited love. But the reasons why love goes unrequited are always extremely personal.

The entertainment industry also pushed artists to universalize their sound, which during the Millennial-era created hits where meaning itself just flew out the window. Songs pervaded with “na-na” and “la-la” and incomprehensible phrases that could mean whatever you want them to mean became music gold. Stories about specific places in California where race may have played into the reason love went unrequited would not have been favored in the 2000s and most of the 2010s.

At the same time, we made something beautiful here, if a little raw. Not everyone wants to have their personal, specific details discussed in a song about general emotions that potentially any man, woman, or non-binary person could feel. But this seems to broach my persistent questions about the role of American bigotry in the choosing of who gets access to platforms where universal messages and sounds can be presented that seem to be capable of making artists as big as Taylor Swift.

A white person can make a universal plea to the public about any topic and be taken as the representative of potentially any person in that situation. But how much of this success is because of the bigotry and racism in America that ensures that others have a different experience? Why aren’t the things that make us different deemed as universal as the things that make us similar? Because, in fact, we are all individuals who can relate to being excluded and rejected for any number of reasons, which can be hyper-personal but may include larger issues of race, religion, and gender.

The illusion that white people experience emotions like rejection in simultaneous hyper-personal and general ways is quite the magic trick. All Americans seem (or seemed) to be convinced that when a white person feels love or dejection, that any other white person will also relate to them. But it is not so.

In fact, individuals from non-white groups may be able to capture the universal experiences of human emotion, even regarding the experiences of white individuals, better than white artists. This potentiality seems to reassert itself continually in the music space, so much so that when Eminem mastered a Black form of musical art, he was celebrated by white America for, apparently, proving that a white person could also move the human heart as well as Black rappers. If I am right about this state of things, the musical and cultural standards to which many American musicians and artists aspire is set primarily by non-white artists.

Yet, when a non-white cultural standard is mastered by a white artist they seem to experience success that is unparalleled even as to those who set the standard in non-white spaces. I think the desire of white Americans to participate in cultural movements they feel excluded from is part of the reason for this lopsided reality: an America where Beyoncé experiences only a fraction of the fame Taylor Swift enjoys. Yet, this is not the entire story, because Beyoncé is the country-singer now, taking on the more personal medium of country music that Swift abandoned to become a fame-maximalist years ago.

When a white person is chosen by non-white artists as a valuable commodity, or as a doorway or access point to a broader American stage, as Dolly Parton was repeatedly — something else is happening. It appears that some white Americans have held up their end of the heaven-defended line, as the American poet Phillis Wheatley called it. Some of us have sought to improve our own privileges as human beings, as Wheatley also commended Harvard students to do, so that one day we can open a doorway to usher in the vibrant talents of a Whitney Houston or a Beyoncé who are potentially better able to maximize the value of an art form we worked so hard to maintain.

But my experience of being chosen to sing a song of dejection leaves me with questions. Was I chosen as an access point to the world of rock music, which is generally a white space, or was I chosen to be a symbol of the author’s exclusion from the rock music world? Did I represent every-man, or did I embody what the lyrical author lacked? Was I a vessel of the author’s emotions to the public or a foil to exorcise his feeling of dejection, by proving, at least to him, that he could not be the avatar of his own artwork in public space?

These unanswered questions lie at the foundations of this musical project, and may have been the reason it did not go anywhere. I believe that leaving these kind of issues unresolved can fester and rot the foundations of any creative group, depressing energy for promoting the project until it is altogether abandoned along the lines of this song’s very themes. Once a person’s place in the artistic discourse is self-executed publicly, it seems there is nowhere left for that person to go as they have bowed out of the very conversation they started.

Or, perhaps, this is just the theme of the song at work, and all this was merely performative in the service of the song’s evocation of dejection. Perhaps it is the only way to properly make a song about self-destructive emotion. Yet, all I can say now, is that, after this song was cut, the group almost immediately disbanded. We have not spoken since.

Yours Cordially,

Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.