By Jehad Choate
Contributing Writer

Jehad is a second semester guitar principal.

How many of you made your life decision as an artist with no support? How many of you had to scrap every cent of milk money you had as a kid to buy your first guitar? How many of you had a girlfriend who was fed up with your late night gigs, or a mother who constantly thought you were on drugs (even on days when you weren’t) and ruining your life with art? I’ve been there before. The life of a true artist is walked shoeless on rough terrain. No matter how much you want to protect yourself from getting injured your constantly baring your self to critique, hoping for a knowing glance or a tapping toe for assurance.

But why did we choose such a path? Did we do it for glory, for expression, or for a spiritual connection to the universe? Did we do it for sex, for god, or as an act of defiance? Maybe it was all these reasons combined, or none, I can’t speak for you. Maybe I am just a bastard child of Voltaire, but I constantly question why I am the way I am, and why I choose the things that surround me. I might not ever know true love this way, or achieve complete happiness, but I know that my life as an artist has brought out the best in others, and me and that’s a good start.

When I started this revelation at an early age, my dad despised it. See, apparently, when you grow up in an Indian household, you are supposed to go to college, become a doctor or engineer, marry a nice girl that follows the same faith as you, shoot out a few kids, and enjoy the fruits of your labor with possibly a side investment of small chain convenience stores. Unfortunately for my pops, I was the wild card of the family. I hated but respected math. I hated it because I couldn’t allow myself to be interested in it. I respected it because I knew that no matter how much I complained about it, it always surrounded me in everything I did, including music. Not a good attitude for a Medical or Technological professional, though. I also couldn’t be limited to settling down with a nice Muslim girl, because I personally don’t practice any religion and would hate to be betrothed to a woman who would remind me every day that I’d surely go to hell for how I behave. If I really wanted that, I’d date Miley Cyrus. She’s legal now right? I digress… I told my dad when I was sixteen that I wanted to quit High School and move to California and be a rock star. I was ambitious, if you’d like to call it that. Unfortunately, my dad had a heart attack around the same time, not because of my crazy goal, but because of poor dietary habits, and kept saying before he went under anesthesia “I have to survive so I can put my son through college.”

If THAT wasn’t a guilt trip! When I did graduate high school, I realized in order to get anywhere you apparently had to have money, so I was kind of stuck in my hometown brooding over the fact that my potential might be lost. I decided to go to community college and I got two degrees over there, one in music engineering and the other in music education. All the while I toured, and played some gigs here and there, I knew whatever I did in this world, it was going to be in music. But why? I barely feel normal as it is on this planet, and the only time I feel sophisticated, sexy, intellectual, appealing and moreover, complete, is when I am performing, or at least existing with a soundtrack behind me. Don’t we all? The hardest part about choosing my musical life is that its one of the few careers, besides porn star, that no matter how serious and professional you are about it, no one thinks you take anything to heart. A musician that doesn’t take anything to heart… sounds like an oxymoron to me, but you’d be surprised how other people can be sometimes. I remember the day I knew all my actions were justified, it was sometime around my third semester in my previous college, and my dad was driving me somewhere, when he asked me out of the blue, “Why are you doing a career in music, when you could be making money in a real job?”

Even though the question caught me completely off guard, my response was flawless as much as it was memorable. I asked him why I would want to inhibit myself with something as limited as medicine or engineering? He gave me a puzzled look. I told him musicians study and understand more of the universe than a mere scientist, philosopher, theologist, and therapist combined. I told him, we study anatomy and physiology to learn how to breathe better when we sing, and to condition our muscles in our embouchure and hands when we play. We study physics to understand how sound is made through acoustics and how to manipulate it. We study literature and poetry to perpetuate our music with intelligible lyrics.  We study engineering to understand signal flow and processing, and architecture to house the right conditions for this phenomenon in recording. We study chemistry when the world is too much for us sometimes. We study psychology and sociology to reach masses. We take speech classes to network with important people in these masses. We study economics and business to justify our financial dues for our work. We study religion and spirituality to keep our heads in the clouds and we constantly study ourselves to keep our feet on the ground. I told him an engineer’s library has books of calculus and technology and a doctor’s library has medical journals and Latin dictionaries for diseases and body parts, but a musician’s library has everything they have and more.

My dad cut off my tangent by saying he understood, but what he didn’t notice was at that particular moment, I finally understood why no matter how many unpaid gigs I had to deal with, and how many moody drummers I had to fire, and how many agonizing hours I spent in the studio, I chose this path as a musician because it made me a better person.  I might have started for all the wrong reasons, but I stuck with this one thing to the point where I am now three thousand miles away from home living it more than ever. Scientists and mathematicians think inside the box about what kind of properties make it. Musicians destroy the box and create more boxes infinitely. We are a breed of mankind, overqualified and underappreciated because when you apply to your lifestyle something that everyone loves; everyone else who isn’t doing it thinks you are mad. And maybe we are a little crazy, maybe we need to be, because there is something cycling our personalities that burns to be noticed, and we have the talent and tools to do so.

There are so few truths in this life than self-actualization. To know who you are, can make everything around you so much more meaningful or sometimes meaningless. When I socialize with my peers, there is a good mix of us older guys who have been through college before looking for a new angle on life, and the younger guys fresh from high school, committing the same leap of faith.  Both respectable by nature, but I am glad I moved here at twenty-two, as opposed to eighteen, or shockingly my initial goal age of sixteen.  All through out these years when that fire started burning inside me to get out and show people what I do best, I kept improving, but there was an emotional maturity I had to achieve before I left. There were years where my bitterness and cold approach were suitable, just as much as my bleeding-heart approach was appropriate. This type of selective maturity kept me from a level of prosperity because I was more concerned with playing the right note than finding the groove in music, or life. Sure, by eighteen, I mastered the art of playing notes, but I was only imitating music, or life, and there was so much more I learned from the people around me and the bands I opened my soul to that got me to make my final step to being a better musician, or person.

Contrary to what our baby-boomer parents impose on to us over our tender years of growth, Music is a valid career decision. Mainly because most of the left-brain developed glamour jobs of yesteryear are being done twice as efficient and cheaper over seas by seemingly third world countries. Don’t believe me? Ask a normal engineer (if he actually has a legit job in this awesome economy) how much he makes a year in salary. Then Google the average salary of a computer engineer’s salary ten years ago… no, twenty years ago.  Not so glamorous now? Most companies and consumers of today are thirsty for a balanced approach to life. Left-brain science and logic with right brained humor, empathy and creativity.  Why do you think most of our majors require us to not only write and perform our music but also know how to record it? Why do you think car commercials are about prices as much as they are about emotions and aesthetic appearance? People don’t want a world over-run with zombies in suits and ties crunching numbers all day as much as they don’t want a world over run with overly sensitive people crying about the polar bears as they stop you in the street while your rushing to class.  Musicians whether we know it or not, have a holistic grab on things. With all the bits and pieces of information we’ve gathered doing what we love to do, we end up satisfying our logical and communicatory side with our intuitive and creative side—making us holistic individuals.

Now I am not saying musicians will run the world, and I’m not saying they should, that would be far too secular for me— I like variety. But I am saying that we contribute to this world just as much as any doctor or lawyer could. We keep people dreaming, and we still make legends out of ordinary people. We still have the guts to sing and play about emotions that people try to bury in apathetic times, and ultimately we are conditioned to be worldly people with all the knowledge we obtain in our entertainment for the masses and for ourselves.  So when someone asks you that fateful question of why you do what you love to do as opposed to making money with a real job, You tell them all the things you get from it, and then ask them, “Why not?”