Congratulations on Your Brief Tenure as the World's Most Famous Africa American Washtub Bass Player!

If you blink you just might miss it.

You’ll be on the Today Show, Matt Lauer asking you some bullshit soft journalism questions about your music and you’ll be high as balls on it. You’ll keep talking about expanding what it means to be a jug band, about trying to allow pieces to develop organically and about how it isn’t important to know anything about music in order to make shitloads of money creating it.

He’ll be nodding and praying for a terrorist attack so that your interview could be interrupted and he could cover something engaging instead, even at the cost of countless American lives, but nothing will come. You’ll be there, throwing back your dreads occasionally and discussing just why it’s not only not important to not know how to read music, but how it helps “free you from preconceptions.”

In short, you’ll have totally forgotten all the lessons you learned over the last few days, about how the bands you liked and the music you thought you were making all proved to be inane upon even the most general of inspections, and Lauer won’t give half a shit.

He’ll be staring blankly at you, wishing that beetles would start pouring at of your mouth so that you could stop talking about the intricacies of playing washtub bass without any formalized lessons as if formal washtub bass lessons were a real thing instead of something you created to make yourself seem like more a rebel, when he’ll receive an index card from just off camera. Then he’ll make a cutting gesture across his neck to the camera man and the “taping” light will shut down and the crew will resume its standard business of hanging out around the craft services table trying to get into that one hot PA’s pants.

Lauer won’t even tell you what’s up, he’ll just get up and stagger to his dressing room, still mentally devastated from just how incredibly boring you were. You’ll just keep sitting until the other not-so-hot PA comes up to you and tells you you have to get up.

“Sorry man,” she’ll say. “You’re not number one any more.”

You’ll fix her with a baffled look, tossing your dreads back once again for good measure. Then she’ll point to a television monitor which will display an image of “famed” African American games journalist N’Gai Croal playing washtub bass in a press event for a new game called “Rock Jug Band.”

You’ll be crestfallen. Even his dreads will be better than yours. Heartbroken, you’ll leave the studio, dragging your feet as you go and deeply regretting your purchase of a solid gold motorcycle earlier that day. As the doors close and lock behind you you’ll absent-mindedly wonder if the novelty motorcycle store accepts returns. You certainly hope they do.

Congratulations on your brief tenure as the world’s most famous African American washtub bass player, though! You probably should’ve realized this couldn’t last.