Confession

On the eve of my last tour as a Sandeman's New Prague guide, I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to look back on the last 11 months.

The job I have being doing for close to a year has fulfilled many a quota on a perfect job list, but there's no such thing as a perfect job. They are called hobbies.

I must have given over 200 tours during this time and easily over 2000 tourists, and there very few that I remember very well.

I of course do remember some and I bet those people that I remember now will be images that stick with me when I remember this time in my life 40-50 years down the line.

But even though the job is the reason I came out here, it's not the reason I stayed. I could have left several months back and there were many a moment that I thought I should have. I stayed because of my friends of course. Within the confines of the job I outlasted a helluva lot of them. Some people who were only here for short periods, some who were here for several months, some of them who still are here and have moved on to bigger and better things - but not always.

Considering the amount of my friends that have been forcibly removed from their position as SNE guides, I consider myself lucky to have been able to keep this job for so long. According to Daddy himself the average lifespan of an SNE guide is 5-6 months.

I will be going home to pursue my love of writing, but who knows maybe you'll see me on the streets of London giving tours through the Big Smoke, but otherwise I guess Confessions of a Tour Guide, like I've said in a previous post, won't be Confessions of a Tour Guide for much longer. I will keep writing as I've landed an internship with altsounds.com so I will be reviewing music there that you can check out.

Maybe I will continue to blog and just change the title to Confessions of... the unemployed I'll have to see when I get home but otherwise...

... like I said right at the top of today's tour, me and my colleagues at Sandeman's New Europe, don't receive any other funding for this, so if I have entertained and informed you guys enough today, if you feel today's tour was worth paying for, then I will except your tips, but if you wanna help out in other ways, go back to your hostel, your hotel, whoever recommended you and give them a big kiss on the lips and say thanks, if not, then take a flier slap in the face with it and say why not!

Music

Music should be written for yourself, no one else. The term ‘selling out’ derived from artists and musicians going against their natural sound and style of music. When an artist naturally changes their sound over a certain period of time, it’s less about selling out and more about progressing.

Green Day are a perfect example of a band progressing. Those guys have been playing music together since they were about 14/15. Their original punk style, stuff that you might hear on 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Faces in which their songs were about wanking alone in their bedroom because no one understands them is the perfect lyrical content for a teenager even if their musicality could have been a bit more intelligent.

They then slowly progressed into the classic works like Nimrod, in which the two combined. The music started to get a little more intelligent and even though they were still singing about the same sort of stuff it was all put together slightly more intelligently.

Then Warning had them expand musically and their lyrics became slightly more out there but you still had the sense they were Green Day.

Which brings us to today, even though I am not a fan of their new work as much, I don’t believe they have sold out. The band are trying to do things musically that pushes boundaries, and the lyrics seem to have resorted back to them being teenagers in a nostalgic sense. They are still Green Day but they are far removed from what they started out with but it has been a natural progression of music.

Then there’s bands like Good Charlotte who had two albums about angst and growing up on the mean streets without their father and the struggles they’ve had and writing songs about how they hate the Rich and the Famous. Next thing you know they are rich and famous and are the people they used to sing about and make fun of, dating rich daughters of famous fathers and openly calling their style ‘emo’. What artist willing wants to be placed into that category unless you’re so far up your own arse, you are willing to sell out.

If Jay-Z still rapped about how much coke he’s selling these days he wouldn’t still be around, subject and talent progresses, it’s the heart and soul that stays the same.

But my original point was that you should write music for yourself, not people you hate, not people that hate you, not for someone you love or someone that loves you. You should write your music for you, if a song is about those people, grand, but it shouldn’t be for them. The moment you do that you have no heart or soul, no passion, and if you lose that you will never become the artist you want to.