(I wrote this earlier today to be posted elsewhere, and just edited it down for use in this newsletter because I don't have three hours to write another whole new thing today. I think the points in it apply to the music business as well, and hopefully you find something helpful somewhere. And if not, see you next week. Anyway, here we go...)
Social Clubs are the dumbest things imaginable.
In my city there are two that I know of: Soho House and Franklin Social. Like Hell they are exclusive, and membership costs are high.
Their websites are laced with vague wistful spurts of language, designed like heat-seeking missiles for a person’s insecurities. Things are “curated.” Members are part of a special “class.” Those initiated are “creatives” and “entrepreneurs” and “doers” and “go-getters.” They believe in “the power of possibility.” The imagery and decor is vaguely high-brow: there are literal trophies (victorious?) and old books (literate?) and Greek busts (philosophical?) on the shelves.
Needless to say that if you were to chart the meaning of all this into a mathematical formula, an eighth grade algebra student would be capable of doing the cancelling out and seeing that it amounts to zero. And it should amount to zero, seeing that it is a game with no bearing in reality. But the grossness is in the fluff of it all, the masking of the fact that it is a game, and the consequence that this masking costs real persons a fair bit of emotional capital, and nearly as much money.
Allow me to crunch the practical numbers first. At the two Social Clubs in my city, membership at the lowest level starts around $500 a month, and it grants a person access to precious little but more paywalls. It is a restaurant that costs money to get into. If you expect food, that will cost you even more. It is a queue that costs money to stand in. You may or may not make it to the front, and even if you do, you will still have to pay for whatever it is they are selling there. I have never been, but I expect I could not afford the door to the door to the door to their toilets.
But all that is merely hardware.
What really makes it go is the heat of the social and emotional capital behind it. And heat is generated by friction.
This is the power bank of the Social Club: the friction between those inside and those outside. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.” Like any game, the Social Club claims to have rules. But the mystique (and the chief dumbness) is maintained by this: that the rules are assumed by the insiders, sought after by the outsiders, and actually defined and spoken by neither.
Membership requires an invitation (actually), but if you are invited, you must not be pleased or surprised about it. It is necessary to act as if you expected it all along, as if, as soon as you are inside, you have forgotten that you were ever outside. Once in, you have put aside folks like them and become “folks like us” (another real blurb from one of their websites). The old has passed away, and you are a new destruction.
The friction between the outsiders and insiders is fueled by mutual insecurity about this unspoken division. The outsiders resent the insiders; what do they have that I don’t? The insiders are still out of breath, shaking with relief and terror at the close call. The line is a precarious cliff on both sides, and there is always the danger of falling.
It is easy for someone in my position - undoubtedly an outsider - to call it dumb. This is a Social Club’s greatest power, that it is unassailable from the outside. Of course I think it’s dumb; I’m on the outside. If I were invited, if I were to become a (gasp) insider, then I would see the ten thousand charms. But as it stands, my opinion does little more than confirm the suspicions of the insiders: that they are part of something special and “curated,” devoted to “curiosity” and “success” in a way outsiders can only jealously faugh at.
If you don’t live in Nashville or a city like it, the whole concept of a Social Club might sound too dumb to be real (again, it actually is too dumb to be real). So here, I guess, is my main point: you cannot escape from Social Clubs. In fact, you are reading this on a Social Club right now.
Lord knows I am jealous of people who are more successful than I am. My Instagram algorithm condemns me in that regard. It is a tsunami of people who are cooler and better than me at the things I do, and the game I play is an analog of the game played by those in Social Clubs. It is all curation and positioning and comparison, name-dropping and hem-touching, being in and being out, going viral enough to gain respect so that, algorithm-willing, people will pay attention to me and let me belong.
This is the greatest need of the human heart, to belong. And we cannot escape it, and the games we play to satisfy it.
All we can do is laugh at it.
It’s so, so dumb. It’s the dumbest imaginable thing in the world to want to belong. Because why want what by grace you already have? Hahahaha
-Tom
Tom Anderson
Artist & Strategist @ Two Story Media
Jon's (Taller) Brother
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