New Rules NYC (#Wattys2015 Winner)

Why You Should Create In Times Of Chaos

Chapter 30: Mason

It wasn't like I didn't see it all happening, the days made up of seconds floating around me like the green code in the matrix, nothing linear, no destination. Ben had come back for three days before heading to Portland and back to Europe, his return had fueled me with at least the fumes of purpose, enabling me to summon the productivity to clean the loft and make stoned chit chat to him about all the 'amazing' opportunities that I had lined up.

Was there a word for embellishing the energy and satisfaction you had for your work? I guess its you call it lying to yourself, you know that tone people flick on and start rolling yammering out a practiced response. Devoid of investment, harboring delusion, although I'm sure if you did it enough you could probably convince yourself it was the truth, perhaps that is the secret, believing the facade enough and it becomes reality. Ben mostly wanted to talk about some girl he had met in Berlin, so I didn't have to cover for long. The comfortable distraction of someone else's life.

Doing nothing each day is inherently a routine, aside from the daily trip to Oasis to pick up a three-dollar falafel sandwiches - white sauce and hot sauce, always avoiding the tip when I had a server that was different from the day before. On the days I had cash in my wallet I'd often hit it twice. Appropriately named, the place defined the laws of this city, there was no better value. Instant gratification.

I'd given up on expecting to hear about production work, stopped checking all the updates from Andre, the East & Low accounts and Emma. The days had turned into never ending wormholes of Reddit posts, PBR and the odd Valium to keep things fluid. Now and then I'd hit up the a few people for work. I wanted to swim, I figured that would shake things up a but McCarren Park pool didn't open for another few weeks and I couldn't summon the swagger for the Williamsburg Hotel, the dialed up hipster vibe of all the out of town visitors in the home of the supremely cool.

I hadn't posted anything to Youtube or Soundcloud in weeks, still working on a couple tunes but removing myself from the ecosystem for some reason: still watching a bunch of stuff, scanning through the lives of others, charting the growth of work that enters the world and moves from tweet to blog to news site - tried by my constantly refreshing envy.

I was thinking of Beyoncé's most recent album, how it had come from nowhere. In a world where everyone has 140 characters to fill and a presence to maintain, no one leaked anything about the production. All she posted was a fifteen second video on Instagram, when video had just been added to the site. The onslaught of a surprise album already available on iTunes and accompanied by a video for every track - all without any pre promotion - breaking every rule that had applied to the music, every rule of the entertainment industry. No notice at all.

I loved that instant intensity and buzz of releasing so much work unannoeunced. She dominated every channel - all at the same time. My whole thing with the Malt Liquor Monday channel had become remixing a newly released tune on a Monday, so without much else to do, I gave myself the ridiculous challenge of remixing the entire Kendrick Lamar album, every track. But doing it over a 24 hour period. Live streaming the whole thing. Potentially not the most entertaining thing to watch, but to keep it fresh I made a fuss of debuting each track when it was done, then posted it to Soundcloud as a free download.

It wasn't long after I tweeted the first tune that I had a couple thousand people watching me live at work. Everyone was following the #KendrickRemix tag, so as people retweeted what I was up to and the sites looked for a follow up story to the album, there I was, four tracks in after 7 hours and needing to really up my pace to finish the job.

The buzz meant I was album to pull in a couple of people to come and lay down extra vocals and verses all while it was streamed. That was two days ago. After staying up for close to forty hours, fuelled by Adderall and Redbull I crashed hard, sleeping for about fourteen hours and waking up to notification city on my phone.

Now I flicked through the stats. Soundcloud: 6 Millions Plays. Twitter, about 5k new followers. Youtube, about 7k new subscribers.

It's a weird feeling, to see your name on all these sites you check everyday without leaving your house. It was a buzz like anything else I'd ever done, it took on a pulse, got bigger and bigger. And just like it begun, it was over - the people that thought it was interesting moved onto the next thing. I piggy backed off something really big, and used it to take something for myself. Screw real-time marketing, real-time remixing was the where its at. I wondered what else I could do it for. Would it catch on and become commonplace when a n album dropped. One thing was obvious, I needed more. Another n24 hour golden ticket, another passport to relevance. I flicked through all the random emails jamming up my inbox, one stood out.

FROM: Andre@eastandlow.com

Hey Mason, loved your work on the Beyoncé remix, great idea!

I watched you at work on the stream, if you're interested, we would love you to come in to work on a few tracks for us.

Just a couple day project at the moment, but let us know if your interested.

Andre