Cool It Now: Considering Don Music

Your head is too precious to bang!

The Supercalifragiloustiexpialidocious of its era

Here at Two Bossy Dames, we’re always encouraging everyone to learn about new things, dream big, and trust themselves to try. Just try! What’s the worst that can happen? 

Well, if you’re someone who really likes to do things well, or someone who finds themselves deeply anxious about trying new things, or someone who has quite a lot going on already, thank you very much, your tolerance for failure might be lower than you’d like, leading you to recoil from just trying as you would from a snake. Not that we have any experience with that, of course!

However garbagey the fear of failure or — horrors! — of being mediocre is, just remember, nobody is harder on themselves than Don Music. Readers d’un certain age may recall Don Music from classic episodes of Sesame Street. He’s a composer and singer always seen at his piano (atop which is perched a bust of renowned even-tempered guy Beethoven, just so we know what kind of chill and un-dramatic artiste we are working with here), trying to make progress on a song that could be a smash or could be a total flop. 

Inevitably, he hits a wall creatively and loses it, spectacularly, often hurling his head to the piano keys in self-loathing frustration. “I’ll never get it right!!!” is his plaintive, overwhelmed catchphrase, as seen here, where he’s trying to compose the ABC song:

And here, as he works on an updated version of “Row Row Row Your Boat”:

Fortunately, this tormented genius has Kermit around to encourage him to take a beat, find a way to calm down, and attempt to get un-stuck as he carries on with his composition. Kermit is the soothing, cooling weighted blanket to Don Music’s frenzied, overheated mind. [I feel calmer just typing those words – Ed.]

Don Music is also a perfect avatar for anyone struggling creatively in general. How many of us have sat down at a keyboard or the equivalent, soon to be overcome by the horror of just not having any ideas. Nothing is coming to mind, followed by tiny trickles of absolute garbage when you decide to try and start with something!, ANYTHING!, culminating in the overwhelming urge to simply slam your head down on a handy horizontal surface and yell. 

Furthermore, creating is often a solitary pursuit, so even if you’re lucky enough to have a Kermit-like figure in your life to advise you to calm down and be a little patient with yourself, they’re not always going to be standing over your shoulder as you entirely lose it. The ongoing struggle to be both one’s own Don Music and one’s own Kermit is very real. 

It’s also significant that while Don Music definitely freaks out his more sedate foils, and they might share A Look with the viewers at home via a well-timed aside to the camera, they don’t abandon him in his hour of need. As someone who relates more than a little to Don Music’s angsty, self-punishing freak out and panic style of getting things done, it’s STILL comforting after all these years to see people, um, Muppets ruefully accepting him and his chaotic but ultimately creatively productive style. It’s kind of like Winnie The Pooh and Co. accepting Eeyore’s literal sad-ass ways — that’s what friends do. They accept us and support us and meet us where we are. 

Crucially, it goes both ways. Don Music can only get to the point where he’s creating something he loves and feels proud of when he accepts help and input from other people, which is another important life lesson that, trust me, is better learned at the age of 5 rather than, say, 45 lolsob.

Don Music was created by a man named David Korr, who wrote for Sesame Street for decades. His other major contribution to the Sesame Street canon is developing Elmo and writing some of that little red jackass’s earliest appearances. It’s ironic that this guy created one of the best underrated Sesame Street characters of all time AND one of the worst overrated ones, but Elmo wasn’t for me, he was and is for the many toddlers who have adored him over the years, and both Elmo and Don Music obviously struck a chord in terms of Big Childhood Feelings representation, so, well done, Mr. Korr. 

Don Music made his last regular appearance in 1998 because parents complained that children were imitating him and slamming their own little heads into keyboards, etc. [Is this yet another example of the differences in how Gen X and Millennials were raised? – Ed.] After a twenty-year break, he has returned for some cameo appearances, including one at a Comic Con at which Joseph Gordon-Levitt mistook him for Guy Smiley THE VERY IDEA!!! The injury of Don Music erasure and the insult of mistaking him for this pale imitation of Bob Barker? As! If!

One of the more fraught than it should be leisure pursuits where Don Music has guided both of us is karaoke. We both love karaoke, and considering what terrible singers we both are, you’d think that we’d steer clear of it entirely. Showing off in public how we can’t carry a tune in even the sturdiest of buckets? No, thank you, probably? It turns out that most people aren’t any good at singing, either! Especially when singing in a loud bar, possibly after imbibing adult beverages and straining their voices to be heard over the din. Nobody cares! At all! 

Karaoke isn’t about getting plucked from obscurity and being given a record deal to become the next Top 40 balladeer, it’s about fun. In fact, a lot of people (one is named Karen) find flawless renditions of songs incredibly boring. If I want to hear a perfect copy of “All Coming Back To Me Now” I’ll turn on the radio and wait a few minutes. Our friend and past Dames guest Sarah and Karen wrote an article for the dearly departed The Awl years ago on how to choose karaoke songs and we did a weird little advice column for a while. You can take our advice or not, as we said above, karaoke is about fun and everyone has their own definition of fun. For me, it turned out to be really fun to take something that had been a source of shame and fear (what if someone hears me sing?!?!) for my entire life and…just go ahead and do it anyway. 

In sum: your emotions may be big and scary! It’s ok! Being invested in stuff is very good for you, even when you are not great at that stuff! There must be something in the air lately, because it seems like everywhere we look, there’s someone sharing an experience of being intimidated or deeply vexed by A Thing, and doing it, anyway. For example!

Once & Future Dames Guest Editor Jen Miller’s recent essay on learning to surf at 40 reminds us that we can revive and live dreams that have been tucked away for decades. (Our three-part series on identifying and following one's dreams in middle age is chock full of examples of this idea, too, btw. Catch up with or revisit Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!)

Despite her white lady locs and some unfortunate “joke” transphobic tweets several years ago that she has since apologized for, Anne Lamott popularized the extremely helpful concept of Shitty First Drafts, which I have seen referenced without credit online several times, and her book Book By Bird is rightfully a classic in the world of how-to-write manuals. Similarly helpful is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which taught us an oft-repeated motto, that anything worth doing well is worth doing badly at first (or even for a good long while).

Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:

• Having a good cry, picking yourself up, and figuring out what’s next

• Making mistakes that force you to rip it up and start again (and again) so you can get it right My owl sweater journey 

• KC Davis’s Struggle Care ethos: it doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be functional for YOU. (Davis talks about this primarily in terms of care tasks like tidying up, doing laundry, hygiene, and feeding, but it’s germane to most things in life, including how you approach your creative endeavors.)

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