My Pride and Joy =)
Ray Cheong
Ray,
I have alot of faith in you..so..
WRITE..!! Write with reckless abandon.
I have alot of faith in you..so..
WRITE..!! Write with reckless abandon.
Strap on your guitar, put your hands on the ivories, purse your lips around your horn, and make music. Make music without any rules, precedent or guidelines. Make music to surprise us all. Make music to show us the depth of human emotion. Make music to make us all feel human.
Don’t worry about the man who says that you must write music that can sell, and then proceed to give you a laundry list of things you need in your music to make it sell. This man has forgotten, and will always forget, that the best music comes not from a predetermined formula, but from the inner depths of human experience.
Lock yourself up in a room, away from such interference. They seek only to make money but they always forget that music as a product is not a formula you keep going back to. They forget that the best-selling music will always be something unpredictable, something fresh, something free from previous norms. No matter how many times they are proven wrong, they will not get it, as they do not understand the beauty and incredible commercial value inherent in constantly creating something new and unheard of.
Write music to pander to these marketing folk and you write without any emotion, without any heart. Like a soul-less zombie writing predictable melodies and meaningless words. And nobody will listen to your music. Except maybe these marketing folk, who only listen with an unnaturally forced optimism and excitement, thinking they can actually will people to buy music. Yes, the music might sell, but only for the briefest of moments before its shallowness makes it sink away without a trace.
Lock yourself up in a room, away from such interference. They seek only to make money but they always forget that music as a product is not a formula you keep going back to. They forget that the best-selling music will always be something unpredictable, something fresh, something free from previous norms. No matter how many times they are proven wrong, they will not get it, as they do not understand the beauty and incredible commercial value inherent in constantly creating something new and unheard of.
Write music to pander to these marketing folk and you write without any emotion, without any heart. Like a soul-less zombie writing predictable melodies and meaningless words. And nobody will listen to your music. Except maybe these marketing folk, who only listen with an unnaturally forced optimism and excitement, thinking they can actually will people to buy music. Yes, the music might sell, but only for the briefest of moments before its shallowness makes it sink away without a trace.
Write the words that swirl around in your head like a beautiful nightmare and exorcise your demons. Bring us on your journey into the stories of your sensitive heart.
Don’t worry about the man who will criticise your work. Don’t worry about the man who will say your work “does not sound Malaysian” and then refer you to some really old-fashioned melody that was popular when he was younger.
He is trying very hard to hold on to what he knows is safe, forgetting that when he was humming his favourite melodies, the elder generation then was criticising him as well, saying the music “does not sound Malaysian”. Don’t worry about “sounding Malaysian”. Firstly, who knows what that sound really is? The best writers in the world do not wake up saying “I gotta sound American” or “I gotta be British”. They write for the world. They write something the world will love.
Don’t worry about the man who says that you have forgotten your culture. As they falsely believe culture is a concept that doesn’t move and only revolves around the imagery and sounds of a certain narrow time period in past Malaysia. They don’t realise that culture evolves, and will always progress. They perceive culture as something that they only know, forgetting that our culture and our history go hundreds of years back and unforeseen hundreds of years into the future. Who is to say that our culture must be stuck in some time-warp that only a few people understand?
Never fear. Never doubt what you feel inside. Write so that we may all enjoy the beauty of your creation. And for those who only look for works of art to fit into their stereotype of what they want art to be, they are only scared little beings, worried that their safe world is being threatened, and oblivious to the fact that everyone else has moved forward.
Never fear. Never doubt what you feel inside. Write so that we may all enjoy the beauty of your creation. And for those who only look for works of art to fit into their stereotype of what they want art to be, they are only scared little beings, worried that their safe world is being threatened, and oblivious to the fact that everyone else has moved forward.
So write. Write with the ultimate fantastically incredibly super-reckless abandon. Write about the gut-wrenching journey of life. So we may ride along your magic carpet of truth and emotions, of truth in emotions. Write so we may all be proud of who we really are: a unique collective of ideals, unmatched and finally deservedly revered across the globe.
Ray, you are one of the reasons I am staying strong and playing this phase of life very hard as being around you puts a smile on my face. So never STOP writing.
Love,
Sharm..=)
Love,
Sharm..=)
Posts
3 comments:
Ray, I have heard all ur songs and I love it. Its ubber cool. I think I am secretly in love with that stingeray on youtube. Sharmila is right in saying the way you should never stop writing. You put a smile on her face but you bring life to my soul. I LOVE YOU RAY CHEONG! I am ur NO.1 FAN. Alwaiz.
that's creepy...
-L-
why stop blogging?
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