Los Angeles, 1991.
A 21-year-old musician is performing in a coffee shop with nothing but an acoustic guitar and no one’s paying attention.
Desperate to stop people from going out for a smoke break, he tries something he’s never done before.
He starts stomping his feet and freestyle rapping.
It gets a smattering of applause.
But after his set, a man in the crowd says he likes the singer’s rapping and that he knows a guy who makes beats for the Geto Boys.
The singer goes to the beatmaker’s apartment to meet him.
He listens to some beats and experiments with playing blues riffs on his guitar over them.
It sounds pretty good.
He quickly scribbles some lyrics designed to sound like a stream of images that paint a bigger picture – the way Chuck D from Public Enemy does.
They listen back and it sounds nothing like Chuck D.
It’s the first song he’s ever recorded…
And nothing happens with it.
He never sees the beat maker again.
He spends the next year working in a video rental store and forgets about the song.
Then he runs into the guy he first met at the coffee shop who suggests they shop the song around to industry contacts he knows.
The singer is told by the industry that the song has some potential, but no one thinks it will work as is – he needs to make a bunch of changes.
The singer refuses.
“It’s fine if you don’t want what I’m doing, but I’m not changing it,” he says.
Another year goes by.
The singer puts the song out himself with a friend – they release 500 copies of it on vinyl.
The song is “Loser.”
The singer is Beck.
The rest is history.
“You don’t need to wait for permission,” he says years later. “You can just go ahead and do it.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…
Do what you want and you’ll get what you need.
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