…beat the haters off with a stick…

I’ve had some ideas brewing for a while now about how the most raw, meaningful art is made by people who live and die for that art. People who have nothing else. Rolling Stone’s cover story on the Black Keys this month struck a chord with me on the topic. Here’s an excerpt. It’s pretty funny, too.

Auerbach and Carney each dropped out of college to pursue music, and didn’t have family money to protect them. “We don’t have any other option,” Auerbach says. “We don’t, we never did.”

“I can still wash dishes,” says Carney, who’s on his third vodka Greyhound of the evening. “I have really bad eczema, so it’s going to be a little bit of a holdup, but I could probably get through it. I can fucking teach you how to wash some motherfucking dishes… When we were in ninth grade, we were well aware that if we wanted to go to a good school, it wasn’t a possibility— that we didn’t have the money. So it’s like, what do you have from there? You have rock & roll! And you know what, no motherfucker who knew that they could fucking get bailed out of the rock & roll dream could really play rock & roll.”

Carney is picking up steam now; Auerbach is just watching him, quietly amused.

“You get shit when you don’t pretend you’re fucking too cool for school, and we are not too cool for school! We are just basically teaching the class people don’t want to attend, and the class is, How to Fucking Make a Living Doing What You Love 101. And also, How to Fucking Beat the Haters Off With a Stick and Let Them Suck Your Dick. That’s the 200-level class.”

“That was very poetic,” Auerbach says.