Last April I decided that in order to become happier, it might help to become healthier. I had been struggling with a shoulder injury (annoying when playing bass!) for over a year, and back pain was just a part of daily life. I was in my thirties and not overweight, but still I had to take every opportunity to sit down—I felt like an old lady and I was getting quite fed up with that. “There will come a time in my life when I will get plenty of opportunities to feel like an old lady, so lets not get ahead of myself now,” is what I told myself, “I’m cleaning out my piggy bank and hire a personal trainer at the gym.” I had not expected it to make such a drastic change…
All my life I had told myself that I was just not the sporty type, and I remember clearly that the first time I had to run 1 kilometer I gave up before the finish and sat down in the grass, crying: “It can’t be done!” I also hated cooking and if I had a choice, I’d eat nothing but take-out and chocolate all day, every day. Now I work out four times a week and I can run half a marathon without any problems. In order to get the energy needed for all this exercise (carbohydrates for running, protein for muscle regeneration, fat in moderation and as little sugar as possible) made it a fun challenge to cook food that’s filling and tasty but not fattening. That started when somebody pointed me in the direction of the B.U.F.F. dudes YouTube channel. In those videos, two buff dudes explain recipes that are healthy and quite simple to make, like “buffins” (muffins with protein powder in them) and healthy pizza with a cauliflower crust. And once you start with these things, you go clickety-click and before you know it, you start to realize that the internet is absolutely riddled with video channels and blogs dedicated to health, and slowly it dawned on me… Oh no, health is a hype, and I’m consuming it!
But you guys are Californians—the phenomenon “health hype” was invented there, might even be old news already. I visited California twice in my life so far, in 1995 and in 2008. On that last visit what struck me was that it seemed there had been no upkeep whatsoever on the main infrastructure (holes in the road, paintwork peeling off the walls) and that the fastfood restaurants still looked like they did in the ‘90s while in the Netherlands most of them have gotten updated designs (for example, MacDonalds—at least over here—changed its color scheme from bright red and yellow to “nature” dark green and wooden brown and ditched the clown). But in the midst of all the decay grew delicious organic biological portobello mushroom burgers—it would still take another year before the bearded, flannel-shirted hipsters would start opening their pop-up stores, micro-breweries and famer’s markets on this side of the Atlantic.
So I wonder (and now I’m finally getting to the bluegrass part): what do you Californian grassers think about the relationship between bluegrass and an (un)healthy lifestyle? One thing I notice in the Netherlands is that bluegrass generally needs to be paired with insane quantities of alcohol (beer or whisky). This leads to fun evenings with friends, but also to grown men behaving like children in public and having to deal with the embarrassment afterwards, their bellies growing, along with the risk of illness and early death. I also think that it couldn’t hurt most European grassers to eat a carrot every now and then and to do a bit more elaborate exercise than just moving a pick up and down at 200 BPM.
Another thing that puzzles me is how the universal bluegrass scene deals with its expectations of the artistis’s stage appearance. On the one hand, bluegrassers seem to pride themselves in completely separating the music from the looks: no matter how much the musician weighs, or how crooked his smile is, if his haircut went out of style decades ago or if his shirt that he never irons is hanging out of his trousers, we will love him for the solos he plays. I think this is a fantastic sentiment and it is one of the things that attracts me to the bluegrass scene. On the other hand, it also seems to me that this “anti-popstar-look” has become somewhat of an ideal in itself. I don’t know if this applies to you, reader, but I’ve heard many of my friends demand their country and bluegrass artists have a beer gut, a hideous moustache and a shaggy outfit—hell yeah! If a goodlooking young person in tight-fitting clothes that show off their slim figure and muscle tone (and, in case of a female artist, with make-up on) steps on stage, I always hear some people thinking: “Here comes another one of those wannabes.” And it seems to me that these people have to work twice as hard before the audience is convinced into thining: “Well whaddayaknow: this person has looks AND skills. How is it possible?”
Like I said, I think one of the most wonderful things about the bluegrass scene is the audience’s intent not to judge based on appearance. But while battling prejudice in the music industry, bluegrassers have to be careful not to lose a war that is strictly personal because it involves their own bodies. OK, great if you can be overweight and nobody judges you for it: but how do you feel? Great if you can drink yourself into a stupor and the crowd still cheers you on as you stumble up the steps of the stage, but how does it make you feel, in that moment, and the next day when you wake up with your hangover, or when you have to take your morning drink to prevent the hangover from setting in, possibly combined with your medication for your heart condition? I have lost a few musician friends to the effects of long-term alcoholism and obesity in the past years, and it frustrates me that there seems to be so little that I can do to help. The only thing I can do is share my own experiences and hope that it motivates others to put in the same hard work—it sounds so simple but it can be extremely hard—to drink less alcohol, eat healthier, and exercise regularly. What helps me is that in my other line of work (I teach music at a circus school!) there are superfit people who inspire and motivate me every time I see them. I would wish for people in the bluegrass scene to have the same positive reinforcement. A bluegrass fitness club… ha, unthinkeable right here and right now. But maybe in California you’re miles ahead of us in that department?
