Quitting Music
Tags: Sibling Loss, Music, Journal, Grief And Loss, Siblings

I was making a lot of music with my band in Jakarta from 2004–2016. We were young, stupid, and poor — still in liberal arts college in Jakarta from 2004–2007, so we were reading a lot of Marxist and feminist theories, and our worldviews were so idealist it was quite beautiful. We were against Indonesia’s capitalist creative control in the music industry, so we created what we wanted to create. Like Patti Smith’s book title, we were “just kids” trying to make music we love and believe in. We started before social media era, before spotify and all that jazz, so we still experienced distributing our records (we had two!) independently. It was very limited CD, so it meant so much when we received great reviews and acknowledgement from music journalists and music critiques. We started performing in one very underground (and illegal) gig in Jakarta back in 2004, and one gig led to another, and another, and another. After that, there were several TV appearances. And in 3 years, we were headlining on the biggest rock music festival in the Southeast Asia region. Great times.

Indeed, times has changed. I am now in grad school, literary on the other side of the world. I am still in touch with my band members although the band is inactive for three years (we’re too sentimental to break up). The “just kids” are now in their mid-thirties. Life as an adult is painful, and I know we secretly wish that we can be kids forever. As kids, we just live; as adults, we are struggling to stay alive. Two of my band members suffer from serious mental health illness, and both of them are going through a very difficult divorce at relatively similar times. Another decided to quit music forever and live out of town — yet remain a very good and understanding friend.

“Why aren’t your music on spotify?” Someone asks. Our music used to be on spotify, but we were too busy to maintain the account. We tried paying someone to maintain the account, but it was too expensive — we were losing money and not making enough from online streaming to pay the manager. “How about website?” Same story. People no longer visit our page. Maintaining a webpage is costly if it does not add anything to the band’s production. “How about hiring a better manager?” Oh wow, that could be another story for a blog post. Long story short, our trusted manager took our cash that we saved for our third album production. Since then, we (maybe me, more than everyone else) have lost our motivation to continue the production, even though we already have live recordings of our new songs ready to mix.

“Why are you no longer making music?”

That is the saddest question, but sometimes I ask myself that. We all just drift apart. We did not choose to drift, but it just happens. It might have ended (not officially yet), but we were happy — are happy — that the band was part of our personal history, no matter how much drama involved in that decades of friendship and musical partnership.

“But there must be some people who still enjoy and love your band…” Yes there are! About a hundred “cult” followers, and we are happy to be little-known Jakarta-based “cult” band. Some more current (and successful) independent bands in Jakarta sometimes refer our band as their “influence” whenever they are interviewed in the media. Someone told me personally that they’ll wait patiently for our next release, no matter how long it’ll take, as long as the band doesn’t break up forever. Listening to that responses is one of the proudest moments in my nonexistent musical career.

My late brother was proud of me. He loved my music. He was quite surprised that I ended up a vocalist rather than a guitarist (he taught me how to play the guitar, but no one in the family sing professionally). I have never had the chance to tell him how grateful I am that he introduced me to Nirvana, Pearl jam, Red Hot Chili Pepper, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, and Beastie Boys. Had he continued playing the guitar, he would make a killer player. It’s sad that his trauma of drug addiction also took his music from him. He was in a band that introduced him to heroin, so for him, sadly, to quit heroin is to also quit music. Little did he know that his litter sister who used to mimic everything he did as a kid is the one who salvaged his dusty stratocaster from the storage room. The time he quit music is the time I started music.

But can one really quit music forever? I am still listening to the memories of his life in every breath I make.