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The following is a reflection by UG2MSG Co-Director, Riley Halliday, on Sydney Nicole Sweeney’s Vibe Cheque: Contemplations on Class, Creativity & Power in Music available for purchase on a sliding scale of $22-$32.

Money doesn’t come without death.

Within a capitalist system we sacrifice pieces of ourselves in order to make a living. We sell our ideas, our life lessons, our knowledge and our literal possessions. Nowhere is this more evident than within the art and music industries, where profit exists at the intersection of originality and manufactured, capitalistic digestibility. So, when experienced organizer, music journalist, and artist, Sydney Nicole Sweeney published her first anti-establishment-in-the-music-industry handbook we had to cover it.  

Vibe Cheque: Contemplations on Class, Creativity & Power in Music, encourages death – the death of your understanding of capitalism, our collective willingness to be greedy to survive, and most importantly the death of hyper-individualism. It’s a work of art, a guidebook. A reminder that without community we are nothing. Quite literally it is a work of art with full color cover pages designed by Elana Schlenker. I texted Sydney when I got the book about how soft the pages are, I’ve never felt a book this nice! Broken into snappy essays, this 94-page mind expanding, music loving, middle-man hating manifesto will leave you  understanding there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you and you’re certainly working “hard enough”. This is a crucial takeaway from the book. Early into the text Sydney reflects on the times she’s reminded her boyfriend, producer Jaye Locke, he “can’t mistake aptitude for access” (“Exploiting my Boyfriend for Science” pgs.) and neither should you. 

Throughout, and particularly in part IV, “On Change”, Vibe Cheque encourages every reader to be honest regarding privileges as an artist. The more honest we are, the less our colleagues, comrades, and collaborators feel alone or lost in their own journeys.  How awful to compare yourself to someone who has ins in the industry, who had an abundance of time and money to explore themselves and their creations. Sometimes people are partially honest, framing their life as the ultimate struggle while leaving out facts like they married rich or inherited wealth from an estranged aunt, etc. People who are good at marketing do this quite often. I think some do this because it’ll save their own ass in the category of respect, making them look like they worked harder than they did. More so it’s a reflection of the downsides of individualism, maybe they do truly think they’ve had it the worst because they have nothing else to base their reality on. The harm caused by dishonesty or lack of collective awareness is measurable by the massive wealth inequalities between slashies, a keyword introduced to us in the first page, (noun. informal. a person who gains income from more than one occupation.) vs the CEO. Someone with big pockets and poor intentions is looking at you and your art with dollar signs in their eyes. Ultimately when you see individuals as profit, you also see individual creativity as worthless and replicable, disqualifying one’s lifetime of artistic knowledge in exchange for an extra vacation home or whatever rich people buy. Only collectively we can change this.  

Fear keeps many silent. It really keeps us as easy individual targets. It’s tiring, as Sydney mentions in the essay “Selling Out” (Part II, pgs. 34-38) to see wealthy individuals like Taylor Swift take to her soap box and complain about personal qualms with the music industry when she herself has the power and money to change it from the inside out. But even Swift wouldn’t have to do this alone, on top of her money and power she’s also connected to others with similar access. Individual complaints don’t lead to collective solutions. We, the slashies, the working-class artists, cannot fight these people alone, only together we can. 

If you’re looking to be reborn in a world that accounts for the collective art community’s differing privileges while evenly distributing them, Vibe Cheque will give you the key to access it. Make sure, in the spirit of gatebreaking (referenced in the essay “On Change”, part III pgs. 57-58) you leave the door unlocked.

Edited by: Jasper Fleming and Jo Malicdem