Caramel and the Vindication of Fear of Success

As many of you know, I quite like Sleep Token. For those of you who don’t know, Sleep Token is a genre-defying band that has had a recent meteoric rise in the music world. This coincided with their release of Take Me Back to Eden, an absolutely brilliant album and the one that made me aware of their existence. There’s a lot to this band, but the big thing to know for the purposes of this blog post, is that all of the band members wear masks, and go by monikers that are not their actual names. These are Vessel, lead vocalist, lyricist and composer, II, drummer and lyricist, III, bassist, and IV, guitarist. There are also the Espera or Vesselettes, depending on your preference, who rock the backup vocals.

All of these people are people, but they’ve chosen to remain anonymous while bringing some of the most innovative, experimental music into the scene. They’ve made it plain that they want everything to be about their music, not about the musicians.

For a long time, while they were relatively unknown, it worked. But following the incredible success of their album Take Me Back to Eden, some things happened, things I only learnt about following the release of their new song Caramel. Folks started discussing the song, and how it is a very blunt, very obvious call out to the folks who have behaved poorly indeed.

You see, some people discovered who the members of Sleep Token were. I kind of get snooping to satisfy one’s own curiosity. I admit my own curiosity (but it’s not stronger than my desire to enjoy the mystery and also respect their wishes for anonymity), but these people took it far too far. They posted the names online, and even when so far as to dox them entirely - names, birth certificates, addresses… the whole lot.

And now they’re all faced with the very thing that they didn’t want - attention not on their music, but on their persons. Cameras in their faces. Fearing answering the door. Lack of privacy. Angry entitlement of fans that has found a genuine target.

And I feel for them. So very much.

Because what they’re now going through is my personal nightmare.

Like Sleep Token, I don’t particularly desire fame. But I do absolutely want my art to be widely enjoyed. I want my books to sell millions. But I also just want to be able to go grocery shopping without people making demands of my time. This profound loss of privacy would drive me around the bend.

I’m terrified of it.

And that’s the lion’s share of why I’m terrified of finding any success as a writer.

There are other reasons, like feeling utterly undeserving of success… you know, things that are intensely personal and that I’m currently working on resolving.

But the fear of losing my privacy has been gnawing at the edges of my desire to be a successful writer. I almost said famous writer, but I don’t want the fame. I want my books to have the fame. I want to be left alone, thank you very much.

And the behaviour of these Sleep Token “fans” has done nothing to appease this fear of mine.

I can say that thankfully what I’m attempting to make successful is not music. It’s novels. And writers, though often quite public facing, are not subjected to the same horrific, malicious entitlement that musicians and film stars are. However, there are some really terrifying parasocial behaviours of “fans” of content creators… and in this day and age, it really seems like writers have to be content creators in order to sell their books.

And that is terrifying for me.

Anyway, I’ve said all this before. This is nothing new. I will leave you with the Sleep Token song that inspired this post, and a message.

First, the song: