Happy birthday to me!
The greatest gift you can offer me on this day is to share Surrender Now. It would mean the world to me if you were to share a link to this newsletter with even one single person. Thank you so much for reading.
Welcome to a new dialogue series, Inspire, which I’ll be publishing sporadically as part of this newsletter. These are not interviews, strictly speaking, as I am opposed to the format of biased interrogation that typically takes place between the subject of an interview and the person probing them for clickbait.
My aim for this series is to explore the values and ideas at work on the creative journey. It’s about the context, not the content, of creativity: the consciousness of creating, the life that moves art. The dialogues comprise nonlinear, subjective and digressive elements of storytelling to look deeper at the meanings we make from our experience.
We commence the series with a sharing from Taraka, an artist and musician whose discipline vibrates with a visionary life-force, driven by the will to expose vivid and vulnerable states of consciousness.
I first discovered Taraka about a decade ago when I saw a performance of her band, Prince Rama, at a music festival in Melbourne. I had enjoyed their recordings before seeing the live show, and yet during the performance I was blown away by the level of artistry that the band achieved and their mystic presence onstage. I spent most of the performance in tears of ecstasy and found myself unable to talk in proper sentences for hours afterward. It was a transformative experience that stayed with me long after.
Prince Rama broke up a few years ago, and as the culmination of a process of pain, grief, and intense personal and creative growth Taraka released her first solo album, Welcome to Paradise Lost in October 2021. It is a powerful offering, presenting a new vision and voice for Taraka beyond the glitter-soaked harmonics of Prince Rama.
I found Welcome to Paradise Lost in the midst of my own crisis this year and it resonated deeply on so many levels. It spoke to me of the loss of our cherished illusions, of the despair we court on the pathway into the unknown. It spoke to me of the inward journey, the return to the pristine essence of our own nature that is masked by the stories we tell to ourselves.
Most importantly, it spoke to me of authenticity, which (in Taraka’s words) is “kind of bullsh*t. Any attempt to define authenticity or to explain what authenticity is already reaching after some lofty, abstract concept.” She’s right, of course, and yet through this dialogue I am seeking to explore the ambiguous yet patent quality of authenticity that pervades Welcome to Paradise Lost. For me, it is not just an album: it is a portal into a realm in which the merger of life and art is so complete that the laws of one define the other.
The album tells a story which is re-inscribed through the narrative of its production and the inner journey of its creator. Its emotive power is driven by the relentless exposure of that which is tender and vulnerable, an exploration of the potency of that which we are hiding from ourselves and others in life. It is a perfect parable and allegory of the pathway of surrender, sparkling with glorious guitar riffs and haunting vocals that will stay with you long after the first listen.
This is what Taraka had to share about authenticity:
Instead of asking ourselves what authenticity is, I think what we should be looking for here is what feels natural. To be natural is to be aligned with your true nature. How do you know if you’re in line with your true nature? It’s actually pretty easy.
To be in line with your true nature it makes you feel relaxed. There’s this calm feeling of detachment and peace and freedom that pervades your whole body. There’s a sense of clarity in your mind, an openness in your heart.
That’s how you know what is natural for you… It’s a totally subjective, personal, individual thing that has nothing to do with anyone else or any sort of ideal of what natural is. So you can’t really judge. There’s no ideal for this, no set standard.
There is a wisdom in knowing what input from the world aligns with our own visions and values and what doesn’t; such wisdom is qualitative, subjective, and predicated on our sensitivity to feelings within. Sensations of clarity and openness flow into us when we meet something that speaks powerfully to our own nature; it’s like the synapses spark up to say yes, yes, yes when art comes into our lives that mirrors the state of our hearts and minds.
Taraka has spoken about the return to musical influences from her teenage years in writing the songs on the album. For me, the riffs on grunge-era classics that suffuse the sonic atmosphere of Welcome to Paradise Lost is part of what heals through the music; it exposes a side of myself that never grew up, that has been left to languish under the bleachers of the psyche, returning to the surface of consciousness to be acknowledged and released.
But this is not nostalgia: the ‘old stuff’ is not lifted up as some lofty and high moment where music and culture were enlightened and somehow better from the ‘new stuff’; it merely reconnects the past with the present as part of an unbroken stream. I feel seen and acknowledged by the artist in the world she weaves through music: that yes, yes, yes comes up inside me as we share what awakens in order to be healed.
Unfortunately we live in a highly unnatural world where everything about society and culture is setup to trick you into molding yourself into all sorts of contortions and shapes that are very unnatural.
There are endless inundations of all manner of noise to distract us from tuning in to our true nature. So we end up doing what’s highly acceptable, highly validated, yet completely unnatural and wonder why, at the end of the day, were so freaking stressed out and depressed.
And again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think its completely natural to be completely unnatural. I think its an essential part of the human experience. How else are we supposed to discover what our true nature is until we’ve thoroughly, thoroughly examined and understood what our true nature isn’t?
The natural and the unnatural define each other like a yin-yan. I’ve spent so many years of life trying to squeeze myself in to the most unnatural shape, and yes, all this misery and suffering was totally necessary in teaching me to discern and detect false ideas.
Taraka started an independent record label, Rage Peace, in order to create Welcome to Paradise Lost. In doing this, she has maintained autonomy over her image and identity as a female singer-songwriter and artist. This level of autonomy allows her to reveal her brokenness as part of the artistic journey, and yet to execute each element from the album concept through to its production. Her vulnerability as an artist is intervolved with her directive agency as a producer. Thus there are no compromises made for the sake of marketing.
In her words, “I see the process of starting a record label as a similar exercise in performance art, community building, and social sculpture, deepening the exploration of utopia through music, and creating a new playful yet sustainable paradigm of music-making through the lens of art. Rage Peace is a social experiment of sorts, a dream and a radical exploration of freedom… Rage Peace seeks to return to the grassroots creative process of it all, valuing the labor of music-making and addressing the need for human intimacy and ritual objects in our current turbulent zeitgeist.”
The is not the easy way to exist in the economy of influencers and algorithms and encryption and blockchain strategies that coexist alongside the concept of ‘creator’ in the digital age. It is, in fact, the path of active resistance to such an economy, and that is why it’s so important right now. The watchword here is ‘community,’ not ‘following.’ By challenging the false ideas about how music is produced and consumed in the present era, Taraka is presenting us with the gift of something natural, something real, something that resonates with a power that stirs one deep within.
Every time you let go of a false idea a little splinter of your true essence naturally arises. You don’t have to force it. You don’t have to go on some lofty spiritual quest for it. You move through by just embracing what is. So back to authenticity. You arrive at authenticity (even though I really don’t like this word) sometimes through its opposite. Through what’s inauthentic. I think instead of looking at authenticity from this polarized place of duality, you have to look at it more from a place of wholeness.
It’s true that the concept of authenticity sets up a problematic polarity, as Taraka has suggested. And yet beyond our divided perceptions of what ‘is’ and ‘is not’ authentic, the will towards authenticity points us towards the kernel of everything worthwhile and beautiful and meaningful in this world. It reveals the Paradise Lost that Taraka welcomes us back into, that place inside where we find the love and community that are going to build this world into a better place. It is the peace inside the rage.
None of us are perfect. None of us are truly authentic, no matter what you try to tell people. If you claim to be a truly authentic person, you’re definitely selling something. Instead of striving for this thing that’s just this other trap, this other prison of perfection, it’s more important to look at wholeness and to not fracture ourselves into what feels true versus untrue. Looking at all of it as part of what makes me ‘me’ and you ‘you’.
Authenticity is really the emergence of that which is left behind when all of our illusions are shattered. The pain of those illusions breaking down is profound, but a necessary part of the creative journey.
When Prince Rama broke up, Taraka shared: “I realized I had no choice but to just fully embrace death so that the music can be free to live on in a different form.” What died then was not just the band, but a way of being in the world tied into a particular identity. The grief was real, and Welcome to Paradise Lost was born out of it; the spiritual upliftment that arises from one’s passage through hell. We witness the symbolic rebirth of the artist as a rite of this passage, establishing the new parameters to build a vision for the world that is created through the journey of life experience.
Through this work, Taraka is challenging the labels and the structures that we use to define ourselves digitally as consumable objects, yet sharing the fundamental okayness of doing that, too. The generosity of this viewpoint comes from the allowance of whatever comes through the process as the goal of art, not the finished product. In Taraka’s world, it is okay to feel divided; it’s part of what is natural. It’s okay to feel uncreative; that is part of the creative process. These states of ambiguity fulfil the promise of what’s real.
So dive headfirst into your delusions. Try on all manner of false pretenses. Be the worst, most ‘inauthentic’ phony, fake version of yourself. Really go hard with it. Be extreme. Play it out to the ultimate end. Let all your empires crumble. Because trust me, if it’s truly an illusion it’ll dissolve, eventually. It may take little while. It may take a lifetime. But if it’s truly, truly false, it will fall away. And when it all crumbles, all you are left with is what you are. What you’ve always been. What you always will be: yourself.
I am a proud supporter of Taraka on Patreon. You can also support her on Bandcamp.
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