Releasing the Notes

Selling out was a really big thing for the bands I listened to as a kid. If a band released an album that started to sound too much like what was on the radio, they were sell-outs and people quit listening to them.

It stemmed from an unspoken craving for something real, something unadulterated, something true.

I wasn’t ever really strict about giving up on bands when it felt like they sold out. If they were still fun to listen to, then I still listened; if they still made me feel something, I felt. Bands evolve and their sound changes over time, and that is part of making music. If a band’s fourth album sounded exactly like their first, I would struggle with that. Even then, it was only when they no longer evoked any kind of emotion from me that they fell out of favor and I quit listening.

That is what this song is about:

This is Noga Erez, an Isreali musician who has this sound that I have a hard time placing into a genre. The lead vocalist, who is Noga Erez herself, has a melodic kind of rap, but with a big band swing kind of backing, with funk influences. It just has some sort of je ne sais quoi, something I can’t put my finger on.

And you may have heard this song before. It has made the rounds on TikTok and Instagram, it had a good amount of traction for a minute, and that is where I first heard it. I found an interview that the band did where Noga and Ori Rousso, the guitarist and writer/composer for the band, explained what the song is actually about.

I thought it was pretty self-explanatory at first. People pay money to get fake followers on social media, which boosts their ratings and makes them more prominent on the platform, getting them more real followers, and on and on. The story behind the music is slightly different though. It stems from an experience they had with a photographer they worked with.

This photographer was new to them, so they were checking out his Instagram page before their session when they noticed something they didn’t know how to feel about – any photo he had posted that showed a good amount of cleavage had almost twice as many “likes” as the other photos on the page. While they were talking, Ori made the comment, “People like boobs,” to which, Noga replied, “Man, that’s old news.”

Ori ran with that conversation, and created the song. However, they wanted the main line to be something different than “people like boobs,” so they played around with different phrases until they landed on “people buy views,” which they felt had the same meaning.

So yes, it is about people buying views for their platform, but not with money. It is a societal commentary on how people will sell their body in order to get likes, and Noga points out that “Sometimes you say that people buy views when what you mean to say is people want love.” From that, I understand that the song is about what people will do to feel that love in their life, and how unfortunate it is that so many people have found the false love of social media.

While the story of the song is specifically about showcasing your body to feel accepted, there is a deeper level to that as well – what part of yourself are you sharing specifically to feel accepted? It just happens that the sexualization we see on social media is a huge example of that concept, but that is only one way we seek for belonging.

I have always been interested in puzzles. We had a series of He-Man puzzles that I would put together on our kitchen floor as a kid, usually when I got one puzzle out, I would do all five or six of them the same day. They were meant for kids, like 250 pieces or something, so I could finish them pretty quick. I don’t do puzzles as often, but every Christmas I get a new puzzle, and I do puzzles in that magical time between Christmas and New Years.

I bring that up, because when I wanted to find a way to make somebody like me, I approached it as a puzzle. In a puzzle, there is a collection of pieces, and you just have to find that one piece that fits. So I learned a lot of random facts, and then learned how to ask questions. That way, when I was around a person I was trying to win over, I would find one piece of information to open them up, and then when they started talking, I would ask questions to keep them going.

The problem with that approach was that I was creating a false connection. I know the surface level of a lot of areas that I have no interest in, and I would present it as something I was interested in.

In a previous post, I talked about how much I love listening to people talk about something they are passionate about, regardless of my interest in the topic. Sometimes I use this method to get someone talking about their passion, and that is not a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when the other person thinks we have this shared interest, but it was just a ploy to win their favor. It feels very “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, like I am not trying to make a real connection, but rather make enough of a connection that I can use that person later.

In essence, I am “buying” their view by showing them what they want to see.

So how do I fix that?

I don’t know, honestly. It is something I have done for so long that it is a habit, and I need to dig into my motives behind it to fix it.

Is it a bid for love? Because if it is, trying to build relationships on mismatched interests is a terrible way to do that.

It is my people-pleasing tendencies? I don’t know when those really kicked in, I used to start arguments for fun all the time. Now, I avoid arguments with people unless I feel extremely safe around them.

I want to stop doing it, though. I want to feel comfortable enough with myself to not need to build false security through house-of-cards relationships. I want to be able to share every part of myself without being concerned about who will approve of not.

I want to be able to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is often seen as weakness, but the deepest connections I have in my life are results of my most vulnerable times. I want to talk more on that, but for now, check out Brene Brown’s book on vulnerability: Daring Greatly.

I want to love myself not to need anyone else’s love.

That will take a lot of work, but for starters, I am going to focus on creating connections around something real, something honest, something unadulterated.

I am going to focus on not selling out.