Was anyone else's mum just weirdly particular about giving long and emphatic lectures about how bad drugs are, and how they ruin lives and all, and how you've got to avoid certain industries, types of work/lifestyles and certain people because she just automatically associates them with drugs? (What am I saying 'was' for, my mum brought it up literally two weeks ago...)
Thinking of it now, I find it almost absurd, the association of certain fields with illicit and life-altering drugs. Because I'm someone who currently works in music and entertainment, my mum has been bringing this up nearly bi-weekly since I accidentally mentioned to her once that I felt a bit embarrassed at how I didn't really know how to order a drink, nor had a drink of preference because I just hadn't really done that very often, and whenever I had I was super awkward, because through a mixture of growing up in a very bar-free environment and lockdown hitting around the time I came legal, I just didn't have a drink order ready at the top of my head the way my housemates (way heavier drinkers) did the second they'd locked our front door to step out.
To me, knowing what you wanted when you stepped up to the bar was a slight power play thing, if I was interviewing a group backstage at a venue or whatever, and people are looking to me to lead the way on things because 'it's your show, we'll do whatever you want', then I feel like you've at least got to look like you're comfortable in your environment and don't look out of your element or like you've never been to a bar before. And it's just such a common thing for people to be all, oh yeah, let's get a drink to break the ice and then we'll settle into a nice chat, hopefully a little looser and more comfortable chatting than when you'd first met. The last thing you'd want to do then is make things awkward in the moment that's supposed to loosen things up.
My mum took that as all the possible warning bells that I was on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, because 'that's how it begins, just take an orange juice' (I had one (1) drink). It's completely not about the drink at all to me, it's about not seeming like I'm 12 and flummoxed at a place where I've technically invited someone. I've sort of dragged myself into this one: I got right annoyed at the writers at our campus newspaper's arts and culture sections, because they write like absolute idiots. I've had at them before, I think their music writers have written some of the worst pieces of music journalism I've had the misfortune to lay my eyes on. Sure, the pieces get worse as you read further down, but right from their opening sentences, they sound like they've never been to a musical event that hasn't been musical chairs at an 8 year old's party, and there and then I lose all respect for them.
This writer was at a gig and had requested an interview with a huge artist (you know how Foo Fighters are widely known and pretty much decorated with at least three Grammys every year that they release music? This artist was like that, but for my country, and my country's equivalent of the Grammys. To me, they're the Coldplay of our country and I think they're a bit naff, but whatever, people really like them).
Requesting an interview with an artist is fine, shoot your shot, I repeatedly do, but you have to understand when people turn you down, and you also know that the bigger the artist, the earlier you've got to reach out, because the layers of bureaucracy and email chains only get bigger as you go up in stature and to bigger record labels. Their writer reached out to a band that's been nominated for 15 [our Grammys] in about as many years, 5 hours before the gig, was unsurprisingly turned down, and then was in a huff about it the entire show. Complained about the venue staff being 'hostile' towards them for... informing them that their request, which had been passed on to the band's management, had been turned down after being asked the day of the gig. Months babe, you've got to reach out months in advance! When we reached out to a significantly smaller group than this one, who were on BMG Records, a Sony subsidiary and so by proxy a major label, it took us 3 months and the reason we ultimately got it was because the guitarist in the band liked us. The label said no, he said yes and so we could tell the label to suck eggs. You can't reach out on the morning of, or even the week of, and then throw a tantrum in print because you didn't get the interview. First time?
This writer then went on to complain about health and safety when caught in a moshpit of 17 year-olds, then complained when they went to venue security about it and were offered to be moved further back in the audience, saying how were they supposed to do their reporting job if they couldn't be in the front, where the pit typically is, but while also not taking part in the pit. If the 17 year-olds who've been locked indoors throughout lockdown for 3 years and are now attending their first-ever concerts can know this, why don't you? First time?
This writer also went on to say some fairly questionable stuff about the opening acts and the crowds, talking pretty exclusively about the opener's sex appeal and subsequently describing the excited 17 year-olds as groupies, which is always a fun accusation to be throwing at minors about a band of twenty-something year-olds. Got all your band info from movies and AO3? Have you been to a gig before??
And so I lost all respect for that writer and the entire paper, I do not fucking understand how they ended up as arts and culture editor of the student newspaper, they'd have got fired as a contributor from like, Melody Maker back in the day for less, and let me tell you some of those 90s and 00s British print publications let them write some pretty indulgent stuff. They spent the whole entire article moaning woe-is-me, I learned nothing about the gig they meant to review from the article.
And I never want to be like that, I won't let anyone think that of me. You've got to come across as comfortable in your surroundings. This is your place! You're the music journalist, you are expected to have been in a bar or a pub before. I was reading the recent long feature interview NME did with Fontaines D.C., they talked separately to Grian and Carlos, and the entirety of the interview with Grian takes place in a London pub, and that's necessary because it adds to the character. Grian, with some good descriptions courtesy of an astute writer, can completely believably inhabit the character of the pub poet, the people's poet, the punk poet and spiritual successor to John Cooper Clarke, and to do that, it is necessary to sit him down in a London pub on a hazy afternoon, let his character take its time to really come through in its natural home. Here, the focus isn't on you, you can't really disrupt that flow with a fucking orange juice. You aren't on the same wavelength, I think, if he's talking about his Guinness and you're sitting there, having fumbled at the bar because you don't have a made up mind about a drink, and are clearly out of your depth in the company of someone that can contemplatively nurse a pint while reflecting on when to let go of the ordinary lad in a loose tee, incognito in a pub, and embrace the weirdness.
Now I could be being extra harsh here, after all the very same NME have interviewed Grian previously on a walk in the countryside. I suppose everyone has something new to bring to the table, and that's what makes things interesting. And if you're a good enough writer, you can place your subject onto any sort of backdrop and find them either right at home, or at odds with their surroundings in ways that allow you to highlight their interesting qualities. Writing is fun. But I do think being able to order a drink is 1) a good confidence skill to have 2) something you probably should be able to do once you're inching towards your mid-twenties 3) does not fucking mean you're becoming an alcoholic, my god. I don't even like a drink, I just think I should 1) be allowed to push and discover what my limits are rather than not know it when I need to know it 2) be allowed to be drunk like once ever properly without it being considered a moral failure on my part 3) be able to hold myself up in the second home of the music scene: the venue with a bar, a pub, a nightclub.
But the reason why I find my mum's association of music/nightlife and the direct pipeline to hardline addiction absurd is that she thinks getting into other fields somehow makes it safer. Some of the worst stoners I've known have not necessarily been actors or musicians, though that could just be because I know more people who aren't actors or musicians. And my god, I'm in the tech sector (outside of music journalism, because as we all know, none of the things in the music industry except accountant, lawyer or exec's son, have been actual jobs for the last 20 years and the rest of us are really just wasting our time chasing sweet nothings. We make nothing from what we do, so we also have other jobs and degrees). It's basically an open secret that tech sector folks are at this point abusing ritalin/ADHD medication for the productivity and often are also booze abusers. My sister is a business student. The 'London bankers doing cocaine on the clock' stereotype doesn't come from nowhere. These are brushed aside as unfortunate realities of a dark industry that you should strive to avoid, but for some reason the entertainment industry is a no-go for these specific reasons. (Although tbf the fact that I don't get paid to do a lot of the stuff I do above is also a pretty massive problem in my mum's mind, which is fair.)
It frustrates me that you can 'corporate-wash' all bad habits away. If it's happening in an office, then it's acceptable, a sad reality but what to do. If you're a coked up banker, you're a respectable and ultimately wealthy dog of a human being, if you're a musician smoking weed, you're the dregs of society. If you're a crazed developer driven to exhaustion by a gaming corporation with unrealistic deadlines, being asked to work 24 hours with no overtime pay during the 'crunch period' that seems to come every year and for every single game the company launches, then you're just doing what you have to do to stay alive in an industry where you should remember that there will be ten more people eager to replace your lucky punk ass if you pass out from exhaustion, but an artist on drugs is better off dead. Baffling to me.
Is this just my mum though?