#shhhhpolicy

I was told that when you drink, the first sense that will go away is your sense of hearing. I’m not sure but I think Science can back this up somehow. I just thought I’d write about this because I recently had an experience of this sort of thing happening right before my eyes.

I booked a gig for this venue – it was a cool venue, in fairness.  I even used it for a photoshoot one time. And the owners are pretty nice people too. Exactly why I agreed to do the gig.  Of course, it was also to return the favor.

I won’t be writing this if this isn’t a teachable situation.

So I booked 3 of my musical troops to play there.  Considering they’re a small space and they’re not open on weekdays, I didn’t give them a hard time with my technical requirements. I’m usually rigid with these things but for this one I thought I could make an exception.  Arriving at the venue and trying out the equipment they had would be a completely different story.  But I’m just going to say the equipment worked after we worked hard to make it work. It’s supposedly not the artists’ problem, you know. Our job is to simply show up and play.  A bit of an annoying situation but I took the high road, didn’t complain, didn’t say a word.

What I couldn’t get over right away was the realization of the sheer unnecessary-ness of the performers that night.  Sure, the venue had a decent amount of crowd – a mixture of expats and Cebuano elites – but absolutely not the listening kind. The artists were made to become background music – and you know how I hate that.  It’s exactly the reason we came up with the #shhhhpolicy and advocate on conscious listening.  I kinda knew it wasn’t going to be a quiet crowd but I didn’t think it would be that bad. The more they drank the louder they got. They were literally screaming at each other.  And it was funny and painful, at the same time, to see them try to be respectful – they clapped as soon as they noticed that the music stopped. Of course, it was just an obligatory applause.  It was a series of insincere obligatory cheers after each song. And I was like – who, the fuck, are you kidding?

Anyway, lesson learned, I’ll never subject my artists to that kind of environment again. I can only imagine how disheartening it was.