Do You Sing?

A while ago, in Dan Levitin's great book This Is Your Brain On Music, I came across the story of Jim Ferguson, a professor of Anthropology specializing in African tribes. Jim, like most of us, doesn't sing in public; naturally shy and by no means a professional singer, joining in the chorus "happy birthday" on special occasions is probably the closest he ever comes to staging a public performance. His doctoral fieldwork sent him to the tiny, tiny nation of Lesotho, an African country entirely surrounded by South Africa, where he patiently and painstakingly documented, interacted with, and earned the trust of the locals. So one day one of the Sotho villagers comes up to Professor Jim and invites him to join in one of their songs--not unusual, since the Sotho "consider singing an ordinary, everyday activity performed by everyone"--and gets the reply, "I don't sing." The villagers' response was classic: "What do you mean you don't sing?! You talk!" Jim explained, "It was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs."

Levitin makes the point that in our country, in Western culture, we make a distinction between expert performers and amateurs. There's John Lennon, and then there's you. There's Jimi Hendrix, and the rest of us. The mere mortals. It's not just music, either--if you can think of it, there's someone who's a pro at it. Professional cooks, even though we all eat daily. We have professional storytellers, comedians and actors, doing shiny, polished versions of the exact same thing we all do whenever we meet up with our friends at the bar. People like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Levitt get paid very handsomely for being professional thinkers--their job is to be (incredibly) smart for a living. Not that this is a bad thing; I love to see real pros at work, witness all that creativity and passion and practice come together into a finely-crafted whole.

But there's always that temptation to compare yourself to them, to undersell your own work and effort and say "I don't sing" even if there's nothing wrong with your voice. I'm only 22, but I could have filled a library already with all the lines and phrases I've thrown away because they 'weren't good enough', whatever that means. How much have you lost to the overwhelming urge to self-edit, to clean and scrub and polish your work until all the personality and spontaneity is gone?

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, here's him giving a talk at TED 2004 about the pursuit of perfection--and how massive a disservice it is. There is no perfect singer; there's no perfect anything. We live in a world of seven billion humans, each with their own preferences, tastes, ideals. You can't please them all--but it's not really about them, anyways. Don't be "technically excellent". Be you.