Today on an ultimately insignificant little black-red website, far out in the uncharted backwaters of an unfashionable corner of the internet, the ugly face of humanity again puffed up its lungs to speak. The self-appointed literati once again opened their mouths, and by doing so only strengthened the case for the defense.

On the pertinent thread of conversation, this wasn’t about whether a musician decides to keep performing or not. On the fatuous, this wasn’t even about whether Mika is worth listening to, though, perhaps much to the surprise of my usual tastes, I think he is. I even, much more to my surprise, really like a recent Take That song. When I first went to university, I was amazed by how everyone there just listened to whatever they wanted without being judged for it. There was suddenly no longer any schoolyard notion of what was cool and what was sad. There was no pack mentality for once. It was crazy being an individual for four years.

No. This wasn’t about any of that. The hot air belching about the virtual cyber-never room only highlighted a really horrible aspect of the society we live in and reminded me of something only increasingly evident. We don’t celebrate success in this country, if not the world. We just take vulture-like glee in its failure. We don’t try to empathise or understand the motives for anything when it happens. We just judge whatever the cause may have been by its ultimate and immediately visible effect. It’s so much easier to get a quick witty remark in when you don’t have to think about whether it’s true or not.

Everyone’s got an opinion these days.

And I’m not completely ignorant of several hypocrises I seem to be demonstrating here myself, such as making a blog into a soapbox, or that all too familiar line “everytime a friend succeeds I die a little”. Nor am I ignorant of my own recent ignorance regarding an erroneous report in the papers involving a man, a camcorder, a garden fence and a nude woman that I wasted no time in turning into a snide little teatime anecdote of my own without properly checking the motives, circumstances or indeed facts.

Like I said, everyone’s got an opinion these days.

But university is not the real world, anyone will tell you that. It’s less real than a forum on the internet. It’s probably naive to think you can just do your own thing and people will love you for it, so it must be foolhardy to expect people to understand when someone gets frustrated with it all. We live in a society where creativity is judged on one thing alone - how it can be sold. The reason why criticism is so important to an artist is because it’s so powerful. It’s dangerous. It has the ability to create or destroy an artist as an artist would himself create or destroy ideas. A moth can’t resist a flame. Society tells us that any artist must know how to market themselves now, or what more often happens is that an artist must become what they’re marketed to be, in order to be considered successful. Apparently. It’s not good enough to create a masterpiece if you haven’t got a marketing strategy or publicity plan to take it somewhere. You’re only as good as They say you are. If you can’t live in the market, then you’re not an artist.

Evidently.

So good luck, Patrick (and good luck Mika too). Keep the music for yourself or sing the tunes they want you to. This is the choice all artists must ultimately, then continually make.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must return to my synopsis. They say it’s impossible to market a story to anyone without it.

I should know. Aeschylus told me.