American culture is constantly about winning, even in my work environment (just a small school) I am surrounded by people who want to compete and win, and I don’t even have the terms competition and success in my vocabulary! I swear. Why are people more and more eager to win? To earn more money? To be able to own more stuff? It’s so stupid and pointless. We educate our children and mold their brain with this winning-damaging culture, we teach them competition at an early age because, let’s be honest, only ‘successful’ people matter. And successful means rich means powerful…. What a shame that our current heroes are Donald Trump, Mike Tyson, corrupt bankers, doped sportsmen, and billionaire rappers just because they have succeeded no mater how they got there… I doubt it is possible to change this culture, but if we could, we would need to praise failure and losers!
Art and music do this very often, although these talent TV shows, the X Factor, the Voice, would try to let us believe the opposite. If you are an artist truly attached to perpetuate this winning culture, if charts, sale numbers, award shows are the only things that matter to you, I am not interested. No, art is not about winning, it is totally ridiculous, and we have to praise many musicians for bringing back this humane and sane vision in the culture. Actually, I realize that my favorite artists have been the poster-boy/girl of losing and failing.
Here are a few examples. Of course the first song that would come to mind would be Beck’s ‘Loser’, with the triumphant line ‘Soy un perdedor/ I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?’,… It has never been so good to be a loser, Beck told us to celebrate our loserness, and put it back in the cool department.
Cat Power’s ‘The Greatest’ is another one that should be put in the pantheon of songs celebrating failure, there is so much defeat in the way she sings the line ‘Once I wanted to be the greatest’, it’s an ‘homage to humanity’ as she said in an interview and a survivor song.
Aren’t all Tom Waits’ songs about loveable losers who say brilliant life-changing things? ‘It’s all an act’ he said once on TV, but he can’t have made up all this, and I even believe he entered his songs a little bit too much at time. He is a freakish character himself, just like any of his songs and has always known how to turn the underdog into a folk poetic hero. He is certainly the champion of losers.
Of course there is Elliott Smith, who has championed failure more than anyone else, so that most of his songs are ‘about taking a fall’, ‘getting lost’ and ‘make the same mistake twice’,.. failing at relationships, but trying again, failing again, failing better as would say Samuel Beckett.
This loser-celebration culture is all over the music, and it’s a long tradition from Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen,… Why can’t society learn from this? ‘You will always be a loser and that's okay’ shouts Titus Andronicus, and I applaud it.