Okay to be Prideful?

The sin of pride is deemed the worst sin of all. Anybody can tell someone not to be greedy, envious, or lustful, but what does it mean to not be proud? In the Biblical sense, it means that it is sin to hold oneself above one’s neighbors, family, or worse, God himself. But it would be nearly sacrilegious for most rappers to "not"think of themselves so highly. Hell, thanks to Kanye it’s even become common practice for rappers to literally call themselves God.

You constantly hear people talking down on artists with no pride in their work: The sell-outs, the lazy-asses, the shameless dumb-downers, etc. So why, then, would I advise you to not have pride?

To paraphrase my high school English teacher, it’s because art is about showing, not telling. If you make something great, you have to sit back and let the world realize it for themselves. Your art is (at the risk of sounding incredibly cliché) like your child. You spend your time with it, you make it as good as you can, you release it, and then it goes off to be a part of the world.

People out there are going to love it for different reasons than you did. They’re going to watch it, use it, hate it, love it, chop it up, and make it their own in ways that will make you uncomfortable if you try to cling onto it. The worst thing you could do would be to rob them of this experience by priming their first reactions with your own opinion on the project, no matter how great you think it is. As put by Phil Collins, “Beyond a certain point, the music isn’t mine anymore. It’s yours.”

Every good parent has their own way of doing things, but there’s a healthy medium between hard-head dictator and laissez-faire. Pride is knowing that your approach might not be perfect. Pride is knowing that your kids probably didn’t come out perfect, but that they’re still beautiful. Pride is defending your family, but not going after people just because they’re not rocking with them like you are. So is pride good? Honestly, I don’t know. But at least I don’t have too much pride to admit that.


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