Symbolic hustling

I'm currently writing a business plan for my startup. As the non-tech cofounder, my responsibilities will involve making cold calls, finding clients, attracting investors⁠— in short, hustling. But wait… I hate hustling! Don't I? After all, "I hate hustling" pretty much sums up every single post on this blog. And the whole point of my startup is precisely to make it easier for artists not to hustle. The more I think about it, though, the more I realise that there are actually two kinds of hustling: the regular kind, and what I call symbolic hustling. And my revulsion is strictly towards the latter.

Let me explain with an example. Let's say you're looking for a job. How do you go about it? Well, you need to send out resumes, schedule interviews, and network. Is that all you have to do, though? No, you also need to go to school, develop skills, and build up experience. But it's pretty obvious that these belong to two very different categories. The first category describes "things you do to tell the world what you have to offer." The second describes "what you have to offer." We call the second category "qualifications," and the first, "hustling."

Now, finding a job is pretty hard these days. For every job you might want, it always seems like there's someone more qualified. Wouldn't it be great, then, if you could be judged not just for your work skills, but also for the time and energy you put into hustling? Once you think about it for a full second, however, you realise that this is a really bad idea. If you could get credit for hustling, then everyone gets credit for it. The job market would become a race to the bottom, as applicants try to gain an edge by handing out more and more resumes and racking up more and more interviews.

I call this symbolic hustling. It differs from regular hustling not by how it's done, but by how it's received. Symbolic hustling counts no less than your qualifications do, effectively merging the two categories into one. Ordinarily, no institution would put up with this. It can only become a reality when a) qualifications are too fuzzy or capricious to ever be objectively measured, and b) the pool of applicants is way too large for even a fraction to be given fair consideration. In such cases, immediately identifiable and quantifiable metrics are desperately needed, and symbolic hustling does the trick.

Not surprisingly, then, this is what popular music has become. I often hear it said that musicians have to hustle now, just as they always had in the past. This is a half-truth. They're hustling again, all right, but not like in the past. Jimmie Rodgers and Charlie Parker never imagined they'd get credit for hustling. They did it because, well, that's just what you did back then to get your music heard. And if things worked out and you made it, you stopped hustling. Why keep sending out resumes when you're playing Carnegie Hall?

Look at Sun Ra. No one had to hustle harder than Sun Ra. Yet how much did his struggles as a working musician figure into his own self-created mythology? None. He preferred to talk about his trip to Saturn. That's how little hustling was worth back then. You did it to let the world know what you had to offer. That's all it was. It wasn't the actual thing you were offering. By contrast, so many of today's successful musicians will continue hustling throughout their careers⁠— keeping a constant online presence, touring at a heavy loss just to show they've done it⁠— because hustling is precisely what we love them for.

Here's an interesting question: When symbolic hustling counts, who wins? I'm going to venture a guess: not the best bands. That's just my hunch. I'm certainly nowhere near the best, but I've always aspired to be the best, and you need to aspire to be the best before you can be the best. (This is why British bands dominated in the '60s. They were all working-class kids desperately trying to break out of a rigid class system, and thus had a much stronger work ethic than their American counterparts. You couldn't tell by appearances, though. Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, which is why none wanted to show it.)

So if I hate symbolic hustling this much, then it's a good bet that others like me, the ones who aspire to be the best, probably do as well. This makes logical sense: Why divert time and energy away from things that will help make you the best musically, towards things that merely count symbolically? But then this means that the ones who aspire to be the best will never get heard, because they can't possibly compete in a world where symbolic hustling is given equal weight. There's just no upper limit to how much others can and will symbolically hustle.

I truly, truly believe that music will make a staggering leap in improvement once we do away with symbolic hustling. Sometime in the future, a pioneering band will come along that the mainstream can rally around, like Radiohead, making us all wonder if it might just as easily have happened much, much sooner, were it not for our current priorities. Because this band certainly won't be the kind that symbolically hustles, the kind that gets all the attention at the moment.

So that's why I'm eager to get this startup going, because it will help those artists who hate symbolic hustling as much as I do. And this is the best part about startup culture: Here, you hustle to get things done, not to get credit for it. It's an awesome deal when all you care about is getting things done. Just the very idea makes me feel empowered in a way that I haven't felt in so long. Seriously, it's like being a modern-day Sun Ra.