everything is rent

i've been thinking a lot about rent recently.

several months ago, i woke up with finale b from the movie stuck in my head, and that caught me off guard for a lot of reasons, most of all that it's been about 15 years since i saw rent. i saw it for the first time in 2012, at a then-friend's, with our burgeoning little queer friend group, freshly dropped out of high school. i remember squeezing my friend's hand, the other trans woman in our friend group, though neither of us were ready to say that was the case yet, as angel died.

there's a lot of things you could say about rent. in particular, that it's not good. and you know what. you'd be right. there's a lot of stuff in rent that i think is just fucking awful. mark is especially bad. mark is every lameass hipster's power fantasy. you and your friend group is just so special, so talented, that you get to carve out an exception to the world. your home movies, your incomprehensible performance art, your song you compose for one other person, they don't have to be good, because you're special. you get to live outside of the system because you're an artist, and those are special. authentic expression of the self is paramount, even if it sucks.

part of what i'm thinking about is la vie boheme, the show-stopping number that ends act 1. it's a celebration of queerness in a way that i think a lot of people kind of really yearn for? it's nakedly hedonistic, it's masturbatory, it's easy to imagine yourself with mark and his friends in la vie boheme. it's almost comical the extent to which la vie boheme reads like winning an argument in the shower. "and everyone clapped" as a musical number.

but we get back to that core critique. it's utterly disconnected from reality. artists are worth celebrating because they're just uniquely more special than non-artists, and especially more special than businessmen, the people who make decisions like "do you pay rent" or how certain property falls under specific zoning laws. and i'm not about to start running defense for benny. landlords are parasites. but i do think that like…

i'm in a very unique place right now. my job for the last year has been working at the fruity rumpus asshole factory. we're a homestuck licensing label, and our job is to get fan work creators paid. we have a merch operation and a forum and it's all well and above board. but even then, at the end of the day you're not going to suddenly start making rent off the back of merch sales for a comic with the few hundred readers you have. it's hard to justify making the thing you want to make because making art like this will eat your life whole, if you let it. it's eaten mine, and while i struggle to think of how i could live any other way, i don't expect others to follow suit.

act 2 of rent is about selling out. it's about taking the job you hate to make the rent you need. it's about selling your soul to corporate bureaucracy. but even then, it's detached. these days, it's not a question of whether you do it or not. you do it or you die. the best artists i know are doing gofundmes for bills they can't make, the best artists i know risk homelessness, the best artists i know don't do art because the work they do to stay housed is debilitatingly difficult, because we aren't special.

maybe that's why i think about rent so often. it's not good, but it provides such a unique power fantasy, the fantasy that you and your gaggle of hipster artist friends will be okay, you won't need to hit it big, to see success to live, you just need each other. as success gets harder to find, as creative industries crumple into dust around us, it's a hell of a fantasy indeed.