Unfinished Symphony

Vee - Prologue

Song: Build-a-musician

Artist: Give

Album: Something's Gotta Give

Genre: Punk

Offer yourself up in gold chains

To that ivory tower

Drink deep from that cup of saccharine venom

And join the Provincial Dream

Join the Provincial Dream

Give 'em three-chord bubblegum

Something they can swallow

Ear-worms wrapped in cellophane

And let 'em burrow deep

Let 'em burrow deep

You're their jukebox suture kit

Bandaging their hungry hearts

As long as they have quarters

The Build-a-musician will run

The Build-a-musician game will run

Here's your sales and here's your scorecard:

A platinum disc on the wall

An echoing footnote

The kids have moved on

To the next one down the hall

***

"Vee, baby, would you at least just consider it?"

Fuck you, Nafar. Fuck your stupid gold chains and your Imperial silks and your sports cars and this gods-damned penthouse office. I'm the reason you have all that shit. Fuck your sellout contracts and your watered-down, three-chord bubblegum ear-sewage. If I wanted to work for next-to-nothing and give my integrity up to your slavering shareholders I'd put on a fucking saddle first and say "ride me, daddy, I'm your little gigolo".

"No," I told him. I turned around to leave, hoping maybe he'd get the hint that I wasn't interested in Star Records' idea of an 'offer'.

"Why not?" he demanded, lacing his voice with as much insincere shock as he could muster. He ran around to block my way to the elevator, even deigning to take his stink-ridden, overpriced stogie out of his professionally-whitened teeth. "Tell me, Vee: haven't I always had your best interests at heart?"

Your interests end wherever profits do, Nafar. You'd drop me in the space of a drumbeat if I stopped writing hits. I can't explain this to you in your language, and in mine I'd have to dumb it down to: ME NO CHANGE MUSIC, because that's about all you bothered to learn about Hammi despite being my agent for almost ten years. So 'no' is all you get.

"No."

"You injure me," he said, staggering back as though I'd actually struck him. His theatrics were somewhere between sad and comical, but if I had actually hit him he would have fallen to the floor wailing, using perfect diction to try and convince me that I broke his jaw. I pounded drum skins for a living. The only things Nafar knew how to pound were cocktails, and models dumb enough to sign nondisclosure agreements.