For those unfamiliar, one of the movie of The Matrix trilogy was Matrix Revolutions: a film in which it's revealed that there were other Neos who had previously tried to liberate everybody, but had failed. Similarly, I've been right at the threshold of making it several times before: the 2003/2004 campaign and the 2010 campaign are good examples.
In 2003/2004 I was on top of everything. I was an underground purist, so all my songs were either battle raps or party songs made for drunken crowds. I had a couple of weekly repeating gigs, I was running The LAN Collective website (which had over 20 million visits before closing), I had a cable access show in the Greater Louisville area, I had the "LAN All-Stars" album, the "Net Beef 2" album, "Astro Train" was on the Peak Summit Festival compilation CD and the Hope and Play movie soundtrack, "Fireflies in the Moonlight" was in rotation at WLBJ 1570am and had been glowingly reviewed by Louisville Music News, I had poetry being published, and a few independent labels were biting. So what happened? Why didn't I make it then?
The reason is that many things broke down all around the same time: my aging live sound rig was breaking down from all the shows, my computer's hard drive crashed and I lost the ability to edit my cable access show and thus my show, Benk lost his studio and his producer Lil' Jay left to go write songs in Atlanta, Dietrich started dating a chick (who's dead now) that disapproved of all his creative endeavors, Fry's living situation became sketchy when his chick kicked him out, I had a falling out with Peak Summit Festival, and The LAN was running out of competition from other crews and disintegrating into nothing. I went from having unstoppable momentum to being totally out the game.
Then I got back into the music and eventually in 2010, I was standing right on the edge again: "On Lock" was blowing up, "Drinks Up" was selected by FutureMusic magazine as a reader hot demo pick on their accompanying CD, I was #1 on the Myspace Unsigned Hip-Hop chart, "Nod Ya Head Musick" had just been selected to be on DJ RPM presents The Showcase 169 mixtape, and I had the owner of JT's asking me to host a weekly repeating gig, and a few major labels had A&Rs checking me out. So what went wrong? The answer is that the recession caught up with me. I had survived it up to that point, but in 2010 the debt collectors finally cornered me and I ended up having to put everything into clearing my debts. This effectively shut down activities at Chamber of Nights Records. Also, there were a few other factors such as Fella not signing a contract after we completed "On Lock" so the label interested in signing us moved on, not to mention Darryl disappearing in the middle of "Drinks Up", leaving me with an unclearable version of the song (once again, an interested label moved on), and MySpace had their falling out with ReverbNation which eliminated about 8,000 of my fans from being counted in the rankings. All this hit around the same time and I ended up drifting out of music.
Now it's 2013 and I'm once again in a good position. I'm not taking it easy because much like Matrix Revolutions, I've been here before and failed to make it. So I'm going to continue through all of the long nights with no sleep, all of the driving on empty, all the hard work, all the family members who disapprove of me being anything other than a passionless puppet, all the collaborators with cold feet, all the equipment failures, and all the smiling faces on Pleasure Island telling me to relax and sip the champaign like I already made.
I'm staying the course and not relenting one bit this time. It's grind time. All of my tomorrows start here.
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