Songwriting and Career Musicianship as a Technology of the Self: Autosociobiographical Reflections on Music and Wellbeing

The relationship between songwriting and developing a career as a musician is complex. On the one hand, the psychosocial working conditions of musicians have been characterised as engendering specific risks vis-à-vis health and wellbeing, and conditions such as anxiety and depression have been attributed, at least in part, to participating in a labour market typified by high hopes, high risks, and endemic precarity. At the same time, developing a career as a musician can be a source of wellbeing; it can be both highly rewarding, emotionally rewarding, and a source of fulfillment, with the practice of songwriting too being a crucial expressive medium bound up with a musicians’ self of self and identity. This chapter draws on autosociobiographical reflections of my own career as a rapper and songwriter signed to Sony and explores in more focused detail a thematic area of analysis from the recently published The England No One Cares About: Lyrics from Suburbia. In doing so, I look at the role of songwriting in my own career, drawing on Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, to look at the challenges and joys of building an identity and a career around music.