Is money making us sick?

It can be ridiculously difficult to relearn something the society has taught us for years. When I was growing up, low-fat diet was the way to go if you were to live a healthy diet. We were given a food pyramid where the bulk of your diet came from carbohydrates. When we got bit older, we were told that those carbohydrates should be whole meal or whole grain, while the western world grew “larger.” Food industry pumped fat out of products, but with this also the flavour was lacking. So they replaced the fat with sugar. The bomb was primed and waiting to blow.

We pride our health system as the most advanced, still in large part it dismisses the most important aspect of it all, our diet. And where it does take it into consideration, the information is outdated and not based on the most resent research. All awhile our children are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, previously only known in adults.

And overtime someone comes along trying to change the way we think, backed up by solid facts, the system goes on a warpath that resembles very much a witch hunt. God forbid if someone prove that we have been wrong all along!

So what stands on our way for a perfect opportunity to learn? Well several things. I suppose on the personal level it is that age-old belief that being wrong is bad. So many of us still see mistakes as a bad thing leading into punishment, rather than chance to learn. But there are more to this story. Do you think it is a coincidence that pharmaceuticals, food processing and food retail chains are in some of the richest companies in the world? Is money making us sick?

Let me bring this all back to music business, as that is what I am here to (mostly) to talk about. Us independent artists are brought up with the mentality that getting signed to record label equals to success. There are endless services out there built around the idea that this is what the artist wants/needs. Many artists spend fortunes chasing this dream, while some see past the old model and go about their business independently.

Music is art. Art is way to communicate something from our hearts that we can’t put into words. By the time our art gets filtered through the major label juggernaut, gets optimised for the big sale, there is very little of us left. It is turned into a “big hit” to fit the formula that is proven to make the most amount of profit. And it becomes part of the system.

There are cracks in the system, and some independent artists make their way through them like lonely dandelion through perseverance makes its way through the tarmac in a car park. The care takers do their best to weed it out and fill the crack. Why? Because in their eyes it does not belong. They don’t understand it. Or they try to take it over and old it to look like something they can understand and make profit from.

So I ask you again, Is money making us sick? Food for thought.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE