Camus and Curren$y: Why I Preach Indie

The Absurd Man

In his classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus introduces his idea of The Absurd Man. A sort of existential champion that embraces, overcomes and stands in defiance of the absurdity of life. The most famous example he provides is obviously the titular Sisyphus, supposing that by smiling on his cyclical walk back d0wn the mountain after the boulder rolls to the bottom, by defying the absurdity of his punishment, he reclaims ownership of his fate. One must imagine him happy, you know the quote. However, there are several other examples that Camus provides throughout the book that give a lot more insight into his philosophy of Absurdism, as well as the different ways one can become The Absurd Man. He makes allusions to Don Juan, the seducer that makes his way from one sexual conquest to another, creating a constant cycle of ever-changing partners without any semblance of permanence. Camus argues that Don Juan is someone that rejects the idea of some kind of divine transcendence, that he can never face the “consequences” of his womanizing because they don’t exist to him. He is never hoping to find True Love or some other imagined moral happy ending, so he can never be disappointed when he doesn’t reach it.

Granted this is a harsh example to use in practice, but it highlights and reiterates a central theme of the essay, creating one’s own reason to live or rather, reclaiming agency over that reason. The freedom of The Absurd Man, this existential hero, comes from the removal of the constraints of conforming to a set role in life. Camus refers to the Artist as wholly embodying the absurd life, creating a new world parallel to our existing one that is entirely satisfied with description instead of explanation. This defines absurdity. The explanation for things is irrelevant, because in the grand scheme, there are none. All we have at our disposal are our descriptions, our perspectives of what life is. We create our own reason to live, not a meaning to life. If life has no meaning, it is entirely up to us to determine how we want to live, what purpose we want to fulfill. As Jean Paul Sartre would put it, we define our existence by determining our own essence, or the things that make us us. It is also up to us to grapple with the terrors that come from confronting this responsibility. To quote Kierkegaard, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” How we choose to spend our lives is a tremendous weight to think about. It can be our burden, as well as our breakthrough. Now that we have a condensed idea of Camus’ idea of what an existential champion might be, as well as the weight that comes from determining one’s own life, you may be asking yourself, “What the FUCK does that have to do with a weed loving rapper from New Orleans?”

Fear and Loathing in New Orleans

I’ve always hated the summer. Long, sticky, drawn out days full of nothing but whatever plans you can come up with. A large amount of time is spent indoors blanketed in air conditioning looking at clear, pretty weather through a window. It never seems to go how you want it to does it? That same dizziness of freedom only gets compounded when the days themselves are longer. Am I using my time correctly? It’s so nice out, am I doing enough? It always feels like you could be doing more, or something else. You’re always one secret thing away from that perfect summer you imagined a few months ago, you’re sure of it. Social media definitely doesn’t help. There’s always someone on a beautiful trip, or eating some great food, or whatever you’re not doing. But the fact is, most people are experiencing the same thing as you. Obviously there will always be outliers, the bouncy, extroverted summer lovers will find a way to make the most of their short window to thrive, but for the rest of us, we are met with an abundance of not much. Large blocks of free time sound good in theory, but a lot of the time you’ll find yourself at 3:20 PM scraping the inner depths of your brain trying to come up with something new to do. Everyone is either busy, or out of town, or broke, etc etc. All that you’re left with is yourself.

This summer however, as mentioned in a previous newsletter, I got really into revisiting some classic blog era mixtapes with a new, adult lens. When I was younger, I admittedly did not listen to a lot of Curren$y like that. I was one of those annoying “scared to smoke weed until after I got accepted to a college just in case” types, and his hazy delivery just wasn’t for me at the time, especially compared to the sea of absolutely mind blowing amount of music there was to discover at the time. I liked when he name dropped cool clothes and shoes, but the rest flew over the head of 13 year old me. But now I’m an adult, I buy my own weed, sneakers, and all the rest, and let me tell you, I get it now. In an age of endless Hustle and Grind culture, I’d argue that Curren$y’s music provides a much needed rebellion against it through an emphasis put on Chilling. Additionally, I believe the almost militant independence he has adhered to over his career has been not only extremely influential, but is the blueprint to leading a truly fulfilling life as an artist. Curren$y just might be Camus’ Absurd Man.

Slacker-core

Is there room for “slacker” rap in the 2020s? It seems to have been something that vanished alongside the middle class. Upon revisiting these late 2000s, early 2010s tapes, it was hard not to get somewhat nostalgic for a time when one could afford to just do nothing for a bit. In the modern age, the Grind takes top priority. We’re all guilty of it whether we admit it or not, the stranglehold of postmodern capitalism is too strong to let yourself enjoy some deserved slacker time. Unconsciously, our time is no longer ours. It belongs to everyone we are in abstract competition with. Every second we spend not working, hustling, plotting, grinding is one that someone else will use to their advantage and take opportunities from you. We are primed to become soulless machines. Think of how many men online are currently dedicated to or romanticize the Finance/Fitness grind, with things like their meals being seen as nothing more than fuel, their job as a means to an end, their life as an investment portfolio. Grinding reduces life to nothing but labor, putting off leisure for some imaginary later date. The trick of postmodern capitalism however, is that the work never ends, relaxation never comes unless we will it to be so. When we have been coached to exploit ourselves, there will always be something new to grind and restlessly strive towards, some new emptiness in us to fill, until one day we realize we spent all of our life waiting for the right time to relax and reflect.

Curren$y’s music flies in the face of this. I’d like to continue this essay by highlighting some lyrics of his to further explain how he is representative of this active rebellion against the existential angst of modern life. There is a quote from one of his more recent songs No Yeast featuring Boldy James off of his 2022 collaborative Continuance project with The Alchemist that has stuck with me ever since I heard it, and was probably the catalyst of writing this essay. It’s a short, almost throwaway line, not even a complete bar, but it speaks volumes and sums up exactly what he represents: “Carved out my lane and chilled.” With this one half-line, he embodies exactly what Camus and the other existentialist thinkers theorized decades ago, even if unintentionally. Early on in his career, he established exactly what he wanted out of both life and his art, delivered independently, and kept it that way. In a postmodern capitalist world obsessed with pimping every aspect of yourself out, constantly craving more, it is a statement of radical chilling. It is taking a stand to enjoy what you have accomplished up to the present instead of sacrificing it all to some abstract divine future. Even the use of the phrase carving a lane brings up the Sisyphean metaphor from before. He is not creating a meaning to life, but rather his own reasons to live and becomes fulfilled through them. Cars, shoes, snacks, weed, if the boulder on the mountain had wheels, he’d give it rims. One must imagine Spitta happy.

Another example of this manifesting ones own reasons for life comes from his song The Count with Wiz Khalifa and Harry Fraud. “Famous enough to get in there for free/but not so famous that people keep bothering me.” Again, this is an act of rebellion against the unending slog of a culture that teaches you to constantly climb. In a world of stoking egos to their maximum, of black and white polarizations, it is an introspective, contemplative meditation on what success means. Essentially, you define what success, or any other of the important things in life are yourself. This attitude allows him to never feel desperate or trying to exploit something for the sake of more and more gain, and just chill. Even things like the Intro to his tape Fast Times at Ridgemont Fly, (just one of the SEVEN free monthly mixtapes he put out that year) paint a laid-back picture of just hanging out on the couch with friends. His fans recognize that the relationship being built is real and never exploited, and they respond to that. We support the artist so they can chill and give us music to enjoy and chill to. I would argue that a large part of what makes this attitude so ever-present in his music is a product of the time and way he made his name: independently and in the Blog Era.

Pilot Talk

At the risk of returning to the dead horse to give it another whack, it is very hard not to put rose tinted lenses on when thinking about the period of time referred to now as the Blog Era. It was pivotal in discovering new music, clothes, writers, and so much more. It was also a time of relative freedom on the internet, almost like the wild west, before corporatization and the tech bro boom of the mid-late 2010s. It allowed a real sense of organic (dare I say) community and experimentation. There was no reason to fake what you were into because you had to seek everything out with intention. You knew what sites to find good free music, you knew what clothes were cool and which weren’t, you didn’t have to explain it to people who thought they were too cool for it, or out of touch industry suits that wanted to know about it. You just felt it. Most importantly, it wasn’t cool to everyone, just the people that knew that it was the future. In a very insightful interview with David Dennis Jr on the Rap Stories podcast, Curren$y reflects on this era as one of its central figures, “I was surprised there was a whole realm of people that thought like me. The world didn’t see us and we weren’t concerned with that ‘above ground’ fame, because we only wanted the credit of the actual Real Ones. … There wasn’t room for posing because we were the outcasts of everything! … then it became lit to be like us.” Again, the idea of manifesting your own ideas of success, your reasons for life, plays a huge role here. It allows ego to be put to the side in favor of accomplishing a common goal, an idea that we can do it differently this time.

However, this attitude of being in these spaces because you shared similar ideas of what the future could or should look like is something that is entirely vacant from our current ways of doing things. Posing went from something that was unnecessary and frowned upon to the new mode of operation. “Fake it til you make it” becomes the new gospel. Now, you really only have a good 1–3 weeks to do something new or unique before it is quickly seen, imitated, diluted, and flooded into the market by trust or VC funded urchins. There is a ton of nostalgic longing for these previous eras and scenes like “Indie Sleaze” without any of the desire to create the environment to make new versions of them possible. It’s worth asking if you really miss these moments or you just think a throwback picture of a drunk, emaciated brunette looks cool. (which is fine!) This forced synthesizing of the past for the sake of our generational feeling of missing out is the ultimate sign of the times. It’s preferable to try and crawl into a comfy diorama recreation of nostalgic half-memories rather than try to face the disgusting state of the present. Also the fact is, a scene that was primarily based on mass indie talent cannot exist with the way we operate today. Rents are astronomical for both residents and businesses. The days of bumming around chasing dreams and schmoozing are romantic to think about, but you better be or befriend a rich, connected shithead, and fast. In turn, everything needs to be part of an ongoing portfolio. Every party needs to have a corporate sponsor or be a brand activation or a “moment” to write about to add to a Condé Nast application. In the age of the IG story, word of mouth organic growth can only go so far when there’s an inherent need to show that you were somewhere or did something next to someone. Now it is easier than ever to slip into a costume, claim you’re a part of a “movement” for some photos, and abandon it in a few months. In order to establish a new true indie scene or Blog Era or any of that, there needs to be real foundation, real collaboration, and real support. In 2024 “indie” projects seem to be treated as startups, hollow proofs of concept vying for the attention of one of the bloated industry whales to get scooped up into the world of homogenization. When indie talent becomes aware of the power or leverage they actually hold over the various industries, they can either unify and create a movement, or sell out. From that same podcast, “We were the ones that were watched by the ones everyone else was watching. They were cool because they knew to watch us.” Why wouldn’t we take the agency, the talent, the support that we know we have and use it for each other instead of giving it to gluttonous, lazy entities that have shown time and time again that they don’t deserve it.

I preach indie so hard because I owe everything to my independence. My rent, my ability to grow and develop as a designer, learning that I have a love for the way products get sold, everything comes from real support that can’t be synthesized. Big moments working with brands and co-signs are great for short bursts, “viral” attention from people enticed by those things, but nothing tangible actually comes without consistency. In order to remain consistent, I’ve learned its best to have as much control and agency over your work as possible, so you can truly build a trust with the people that support you. A big brand didn’t help to pay my fucking jaw surgery bills, real people did. An organic rhizomatic network made up of authentic collaborators, supporters, and participation is invaluable in an algorithmic ecosystem where giant tankers are forced to throw anything out to see what sticks. The reason I speak so critically about the laziness of big industry and the virtues of indie are because I lived it for the last 5+ years. Big companies are towering effigies of gluttony, more profit, more production, more domination, and a lot of care gets lost in that size. Remaining indie teaches you to work lean. Limitations breed innovation, and it forces you to have an acute attention to detail for everything you do. Whether it was someone saving up for months for an engagement ring or a billionaire pop star that wanted a new hat, it was just me making it, and I was able to give them the exact same amount of care every time. I also believe that other people can do it too. When I first started making jewelry out of my apartment in 2018, I was constantly told about how things actually worked, how it’s “just the way things are”. But the truth is, nothing has ever come to me in an orthodox way or through trying to follow the “way to do things”. Why would I care about the “way things are” if I’m actively trying to change that? If I’m deeply unsatisfied by my experience of that? It all came from necessity, from being tired of seeing ideas get pissed away, or lost in an email chain, or supposedly ignored only to pop up way too late with any remaining soul diluted away. At a certain point you have to trust your own ideas, especially when you don’t see much proof that how things actually work actually works.

There is an entire world of frustrated talent out there that is fed up with “how things work.” As we’ve seen from movements like the Blog Era, talent has the ability to reclaim that agency and use it to create something truly new, something non-exploitative, and something mutually beneficial. This extends to the consumers and fans too. Supporting artisanally made anything usually finds a way to be a two-way relationship. It leads to intimacy instead of exploitation. Think of some of the recent indie or underground movements that have made the most waves in the last few years. MIKE and 10k, Xaviersobased and Co, maybe Eldia Summit? All groups of people that prioritize organic collaboration and not competing for some imagined “top spot.” They recognize the supporters as a crucial part of the ecosystem, so it never feels exploitive compared to a major label artist’s rollout. It still operates at a ground level. You know exactly what your spending power goes to, and the artists know it too. Even people like Nipsey Hussle or Mach-Hommy have shown that DTC can not only be a viable way of making a living as an artist, but also strengthen and deepen the relationship between artist and consumer. Relating this all the way back to Sisyphus on the mountain, we can reclaim our agency and in turn, our future. Pushing a boulder feels more like punishment when you’re doing it to appease someone you can’t even see. Through building real support, we can have the freedom to determine and will what we want the future to look like, and enjoy the work that comes with it. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t feel like work, it would feel like building something real for the future. We aren’t constrained by and limited to the people telling us “how things work” if we change how they work ourselves. To quote Curren$y one last time, “When I got by myself I found myself and realized/if I was a child in these times, I wouldn’t want to follow in the steps of these guys”