MADONNA, MONEY, MUSIC AND MAGIC WATER

So Madonna spends about $10,000 per month on bottled Kaballah water. Shock? Amazement? Jealousy? Thirsty? Let’s wade into the velvety spiritual liquid and find out how special water can make all of us better composers. Ohh! It’s cold. And deep.

I have no idea why this headline moved something in my naughty bits prompting a long over due blog. I apologize for not writing more but one can only fit so many “not for profit” ventures into one’s schedule. I’ve over committed to the whales who can’t read, bald llamas, goats with VD and American Idol’s without a record deal retirement home fund raisers. It’s the holiday season and it’s been nothing but give, fucking give, fucking give for me. But I’ve been feeling the pressure about the blog. I know how many of you had “more blogs from Scooter” on your respective Christmas lists and I’m ashamed that, unlike Santa, I didn’t bring it on Christmas morning. Copious tears were no doubt shed, crushing disappointment at an all time high, raging side by side with unsupervised doses of Prozac just to make it to New Years. I could ramble on about how every project wants to finish up before the holidays so the lazy producers won’t have to work, or that I was busy readying my new retro jazz CD, available at Amazon and CD Baby, or that I was just totally jammed up scouring the internet reading about how much Kaballah water Madonna uses every month.

The story goes that Madonna pays about $5 a bottle for the blessed water, rumored to have healing and energy potential, and that she exclusively uses this water to the tune of about $120,000 a year. Set aside for the moment the sort of implausible math involved, $120k divided by $5 divided by 365 days a year and you get almost 66 bottles of water a day. Enough to cause at least minor abdominal cramping. Outrageous you say! And yet it’s coincidently about the same number of beers your average classic rock cover band downs between Freebird and Stairway To Heaven on any given Tuesday nite no cover spectacular. And they STILL rock the house. Unbelievable! What talent.

Set aside the quantity and talk about the money for a minute. $120,000 divided by 365 days. For those of you who don’t have that many fingers, it’s almost $329 per day. Out-fucking-rageous, right???!!! Well, dig deeper my cheap friends. Madonna earns about 20 million a year from her various ventures. Almost $55,000 a day. Or the equivalent of the bass trombone player’s cut at a wedding casual after he won the Powerball lottery. Percentage-wise, Madonna is spending about half of one percent of her salary on water. Let’s say one of us makes $100,000 a year selling our souls to the musical devil. Your daily take is a whopping $274 – mind you, $55 less than Madonna’s water budget – but hey, you’re creating art! Not just sitting around drinking holy water and pissing all day. Half of one percent for you is $1.37.

Reader uprising #1: Hold on now, Scooter. You’re fuckin’ crazy if you think I’m buying this malarkey. You probably flunked math in school.

It’s right. Had it checked by the great and powerful Oz - my daughter.

$1.37. You’re damn near homeless at this rate. You’d be spending a bigger percentage of your income than Madonna if you walked into your nearest Starbucks and bought a Tall Coffee of the Day for $1.40! And God forbid you craved a Venti Iced White Chocolate Mocha ($4.15). Greedy capitalist swine.

I’m mixing apples and oranges here. Unfair to compare coffee and water. What’s the price of a bottle of your beloved Evian?

(INTERESTING FACT ALERT – There are more than 119 different bottlers of water in America alone – tell a friend!)

A very quick, unsubstantiated search on the internet puts Evian at $.99 per bottle. Aquafina $1.49. Fiji $1.99. So to stay even with Madonna, you can only have a bottle and a third of Evian per day. Or spread your Fiji over 2 days. That definitely cuts out washing your long gorgeous “80’s rocker” locks with it. You’re not getting enough water in you to work up even a mild whizz. Forget race horses. You’re dribbling like a 90 year old with a prostate the size of a basketball. And take your monthly colonic off the appointment book. Even with tap water you’d be blowing (literally) your budget right out your ass - so just get used to that dull aching wad jammed in your intestines or hope for the flu.

Reader uprising #2: What in God’s name does this have to do with me making more money or writing better music??? I don’t come to your blog just to read your exaggerated takes on negligees and farm animals. Oh, wait, yes I do! Please continue.

The point of this math lesson is that we all spend money on different things. Things that make us individually able to accomplish what we have set out to do. You may feel that what I spend money on is absolute shit (you’d be wrong) and I know for a fact that what you spend your dough on is absurd. But it’s what makes us tick. And how much you spend is your right. Your choice. I like The Four Seasons. You bask in the glory that is Motel 6. But don’t rage on me about it, it helps me to write.

I had an assistant years ago at Disney who amazed me at how she spent her money. Everyday, the Disney cafeteria would offer a “special lunch.” It was priced for the economically challenged Disney employee (there were many). Each and everyday my assistant would complain that she didn’t want to eat it. But she bought it anyway because it was cheap. I asked her why she just didn’t spend the extra $1.50 and get a burger. She loved burgers and she’d been working hard all day. Didn’t she deserve a meal she liked? No, to her it was a waste of money. Food didn’t matter that much. Then came the weekend. She would hop in her car with her friends and drive to Vegas. Come Monday morning I’d ask how her weekend was. “Fantastic!” she would say. How much did you lose? And she’d tell me $400. Lunch came around again along with her usual complaining and bitching. I pointed out that her loses on one trip to Vegas would cover her having a burger for every workday of the entire year. She looked at me like I was crazy and said “But I had FUN in Vegas!”

So as I look around at what I choose to spend money on and just as importantly, what I choose NOT to spend it on, I’m trying to pay attention to the actual outcome – the results, if you will, of my investment. I love new toys in the studio. I love new software. I get all jittery during Steve Jobs’ announcement of new products at MacWorld (and I wear a safety diaper just in case.) We all love gear and technology and cool shit. We all love cheap hookers and free beer. It keeps us writing. Keeps us creating. It allows us to justify spending 3/4ths of our lives in a room banging on plastic keyboards. Spending money on frivolous things, crazy things, hocus pocus bullshit fake whacky energy infused Jesus juice things keeps us creative. And that’s a good thing. It is a necessary thing.

Put aside the moral implications of Madonna’s water allotment. Think of it in pure economic terms. At the level at which she delivers commercially viable music product, requiring no doubt a huge staff, does $10,000 a month sound like too much to keep 100 people employed? If that’s what it takes to keep the Madonna money machine turning, is it worth it? What about the Kaballah organization she buys the water from? They make a nice tidy profit on their tap water and then use the money for worthwhile community causes. Maybe Madonna should actually drink more of it. Maybe she should fill her toilets with it. The world might be a better place.

I’m saying that it is not only good, but it is critical that each and every one of us spends our money on what makes us create. More people creating makes a better world. Creativity makes a more tolerant world. It makes a more interesting world.

So go out and buy that double headed dildo with the ice maker attachment or the magic pen that makes you write like Hemingway. Indulge yourself. Eat grass or dress only turkey skin. Treat yourself like the artist you are and allow your environment, your mind, and your idiosyncrasies to reflect you. Reward yourself and you will enrich your creative output.

Me? I drink Sparkletts but my accountant says to cut back on my budding collection of used celebrity underwear. He obviously doesn’t understand my creative side.