Written Works
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Veneration of the elders- False Gods
The zen monk Ikkyu was staying in a temple on a cold winter’s night. He decided to make a fire to warm himself up, and realizing that there was no firewood in the temple he decided to burn the only wood that was present; a wooden buddha statue. As he was warming himself by the fire, the abbot of the temple came and accosted him: “This is the most sacrilegious act you can do.” cried the abbott “But the Buddha within me was feeling cold so it was a question of whether to sacrifice the living buddha within me or the wooden one.” Ikkyu responded. Ikkyu then began poking the fire. “What are you doing?” The abbott asked, “I'm trying to find the bones of buddha.” Ikkyu responded. “You’re a madman! There are no bones inside a wooden statue!” laughed the priest. Ikkyu, also laughing retorted “Then bring the rest of the statues, the night is long and cold and I want to keep the fire alive. I haven’t burned the buddha, just a statue.” - I think we have misunderstood the creative process. I think that while human beings make art, they are not completely responsible for it. We put the people before the art, assuming they were in control of the making of it. In other words, people are great and contain all of the greatness the world has to offer within them. Art, then, is simply a concrete byproduct of that internal greatness some people possess; something that great people shit out during their lifetime that we have to remember their greatness by. We then venerate these people as if everything that surrounds them is to be seen as a guidepost for greatness. If Bob Dylan used a certain pen to write all of his early classics then surely all good songs should be handwritten on paper instead of typed, and if someone were to get a hold of that pen they would be holding the power to culturally influence an entire generation. And yet, as Dylan admitted decades later in an interview, he has no idea how he wrote those songs. No artist actually knows where their best art comes from. Art is not something we are responsible for; it comes to us only when it wants to. It doesn't descren between those who have received more education in the arts, those who practice more or less, those who consume and are more knowledgeable of different artworks, or any other metric we try to measure one’s potential “greatness” by. True art comes to (some of) us maybe once, rarely twice, and once in a generation more than that. A corporate office worker’s doodle at their desk could very well be more interesting than a fine art student’s graduate final work. A video shot on someone’s iphone might just capture something so vulnerable and relatable that no director can touch it. Someone who works a regular day job and plucks the guitar every once and a while to write a song might actually be something much more interesting than a processional songwriter’s body of work. Art, therefore, is something that has a mind of its own. An external creative force that certain people channel during their lifetime. Humans are only the vehicle, the art itself is all there is to venerate. Humans are the wooden buddhas; false idols who have served to corrupt us and keep us from understanding the true nature of creativity. Artists need to make money and in order to do so they are never really able to be honest about where creation comes from. Once someone makes something great, they can charge a lot more for the next thing, and we’ve structured the world to create a demand from that person instead of a demand for comparably amazing art. The person then recognises the financial opportunity and tries to replicate the process, almost always essentially recreating their only real great work and trying to put some kind of new spin on it. This flawed system has been in place for hundreds of years and has led us to believe it is the only way things can be. If you make one great thing, you'll be able to pretend all the other things you make are great. With the advent of the superfan, the culture today is even more extreme where the consumer actually convinced themselves that everything a certain artist makes is great. If you don't believe me, try and tell an ardent Dylan fan that some of his later albums sucked. We would be better off not imprinting the old familiar capitalistic principles of supply and demand on any of the art businesses, and instead attempting to erase the idea that people have any real control of their art. If someone makes something great and receives some degree of fame and fortune for it, they should then have to return to the bottom and try again for their next works. This would not only remind them of the completely unpredictable nature of true creation but would also give others an equal chance to put their once amazing thing out there into the world. Today we miss out on too many great things. One of the byproducts of our misunderstanding the nature of art is that today the structure of the art world (from its education centres to its business framework) is completely backwards. Cramming a bunch of knowledge into young people and charging upwards of a 100k to do it is pure hubris. It is so often the case that art schools produce banal copies of other artists and industry sellouts who flood the market with utterly useless art. The ones who may have actually contributed something useful are crumbling under the weight of the debt they have unfortunately chosen to shoulder, and spend the next decade or so working off their debt and not producing to their highest potential. Some people do actually benefit from their art school degrees, but an equal (and likely higher) degree of people suffer from them. The business of art reflects the increasingly pragmatic world of today - see my previous post - and has very little interest in whether or not the stuff that sells is good or not. For an art business person, as long as art sells, it's good. We therefore try and predict what will sell and what will not. We have, to a harrowing degree, been able to control what art sells and what doesn't. We spoon feed the masses stuff that we know will be digestible; we even tell people how to consume things. For example: ‘This painting would look perfect in your office lobby’ or ‘a perfect album for a friday night out’. The art business is first and foremost a business; it wants to establish the demand and fill the supply. The artist therefore is prompted to make the perfect office lobby painting or the best friday night “banger” instead of whatever comes naturally. While targeted art may sell (mostly due to lack of good supply) it's not real art, and most of the artists today don't experience true creation. So much of this manufactured art supply is simply predicated on the framework of the past, whatever people did before that we now just want to copy. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, we (the artists) are the wooden buddhas. We are not in control of whether or not we will experience true expression at all. We cannot predict whether or not it will come, or to whom it comes. We simply have to do our best to live our lives and hope for the best. I personally believe that the layperson is catching on to the degrading quality of major works of art, and more and more people want better stuff to consume; they just don't want to pay more for it or do the work of finding it. We as artists should try and acknowledge the intangible reality of creativity, and shape our professional lives around it. We should recognize that taking advantage of the system we currently have only negatively affects us all in the end. Venerate great artworks, judge people equally based on whatever new piece they're presenting and ignore what they've done in the past. If there’s something an artist made previously that you found to be amazing, it wasn't really them that was responsible for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Aside: I know that my last piece seemed to attack the esoteric side of the arts, and this one is all about affirming it. I do believe there is some kind of external creative force that people channel in order to make amazing art, and I think it is incredible when they do. However, I don’t think someone should be celebrated or compensated for simply idling through life waiting for that force to connect with them just because they claim they have some kind of deeper connection to it. Nobody does.
The future of music as I see it Today (September 12, 2024)
For any logically-minded individual, the music industry today resembles something akin to the lottery where (in lieu of a lottery ticket) you simply cast off your newest album release into the exponentially expanding vast ocean of the internet and hope that somehow it finds its intended shore of superstardom. Its path, which once felt navigable, now feels impossible to follow even to the most experienced music industry experts. This is because the ocean between where we start and where we want to go is simply getting much, much larger. Our current north star is to follow streaming numbers, instagram traction,and tiktok statistics to chart our paths to success. Music industry “experts” who often lack real artistic taste and are far too confident in themselves need some sort of external metric to be able to justify their decisions. We as artists listen to their foreboding forecasts on how the “state of the industry is so volatile” and how “there's just no money in music anymore,” and because we are so fixated on our crafts we don’t really think critically about any of this until it's too late and we’re left with a completed project trying to figure out how the hours of slaving away can somehow turn a profit. Because we think we don’t know any better, we listen to industry experts and have adopted internet statistics as our north star too, often relying on social media to tell us if we’re successful or not. After all, what are industry people there for if not to handle the processing of our art in the industry when we're done with it. It's our job to make it and their job to figure out how to sell it. But with so many musicians flooding the market, most independent artists have to try to navigate the ocean for themselves. To make it easy for ourselves, we simply follow the social statistics model. Nowadays, we follow it so ardently that it's become something of a religion, the cult of social statistics which now are available in such cruel and stark accuracy. There’s no hiding the amount of traction you are getting anymore. This North star however is a false one. One created by unartistic minds so they can “figure out” the rapidly-changing world and whatever else they tell themselves they are trying to do to make money. Actually, following this path has led us to endless banal records and an overarching sense of artistic gloom. Most people seem to feel that our current world is cultureless compared to previous decades. We’ve entered a dark age, turning away from the paths to a brighter artistic future laid out for us by myriad artists and instead meekly submitted to our new God… social media statistics. And a very cruel, unrelenting, and deceptive God it is indeed. So.. where’s the path? The real question is what is the path and where are we even trying to go as musical artists. Superstardom as we once knew it with all of its vanity, riches, and glorified debauchery is dead; for most people anyways. And I believe it should die completely. We live in a world today where music has not only lost its physical currency (revenue) but also more importantly its social currency as well. We are in an era that is anxiously aware of how the mindless taxation of resources, flawed social hierarchies, and global corruption perpetrated by previous generations has left us in what we feel are dire straits (forgive the pun). How then can we glorify musicians who don't seem to contribute anything tangible to our crumbling societies and dying world but also expect to be showered in money and allowed to live in palatial mansions engaging in unabashed sexual promiscuity while they snort and smoke their way through life ignoring everything going on outside of what they call their “creative bubble.” The era of superstar musicians beholden to nothing and no one except when their drug budget has run out and they have to put out an album or do a tour (also at immense expense of a record company) so they can return to the couch and syringe. Why would we want more of these useless people in our world when we need all hands on deck to help tackle the endless problems looming over all of humankind. The superstars of today (what few are left) are no longer symbols of youthful rebellion but are symbols of the social and political change of the past. We want our rock stars to represent hope, a hope that despite all of the challenges in our world that we’re all too aware of, our world is capable of new artistic inspiration and the change we need for our time. At the moment, the symbols of artistic change we find most easily are people who are not White men, not those who dominated the Western world throughout history and who are largely responsible for its endless problems. If you are able to make it into superstardom today regardless of your background you will be held to a higher standard (publicly) than that of the stars of the past. Symbols cannot be what they are meant to be if they are tainted with consistent scandals. When superstars slip up today they are not easily forgiven. I think we should eliminate the superstar altogether and not give artists the ability to work their way to unchecked vanity and gluttony. The artist should work towards something else if they want to dedicate their lives to their art and make art their sole means of earning a living. In fact, they already do. As I said before, music has lost its social currency. In the 50’s through much of the 80’s, musicians ruled over regular working professionals. We idolized rockstars and lusted after their carefree lives, and pitied or dismissed workers who toiled at day jobs in banks or shops. Nowadays, however, working professionals and dedicated volunteers are the new rockstars as they contribute to our world as opposed to simply taking from it. Making art is seen as a leisure activity and not an actual viable job. When I walk into a party and I tell people that I am a musician, I get everything from eyerolls to “I feel sorry for you lot.” In response to the growing resentment of artists and its diminished social stature, musicians are currently looking to bolster their art with something that can supplement their lives to make them seem more useful to the world. Many musicians turn to some kind of activism, promising to use their following to steer their fans to good and help perpetuate positive social change. Activism then must inherently be a focal point of their careers and artistry, as it would be ingenuine to falter in their commitment. Those who do not want to permanently intertwine their careers with activism usually turn to musical academia and the avant-garde to make themselves feel like what they're doing is actually useful. This is very rarely done consciously, and is currently being done by almost every musician I know - usually with very poor economic returns. Many artists who formerly wanted to be jazz musicians, pop stars, or play chamber music are turning to the academic side of music to contribute to its philosophy (the role of music in society) while ignoring its psychology (the individual emotional responses to music). Some musicians pursue their old dreams alongside the more experimental academic pursuits while others dive head first into academia and forget about their old performance paths completely. The hope is with whatever addition they've found for their lives, they can at least be something more than a musician. Hiding within academia is not the answer. The future of music is to demand much, much more of musicians than before. Our society’s fear of global catastrophe has entered us into an age of staunch pragmatism. We can try (and fail) to continue spouting the usual arbitrary nonsense about the power of music and its innate ability to heal the world, but the bluff has been called and most of the “artists” today cannot back up any of their grandiose activist caterwauling in any concrete way. Whatever energy transference, divine divination, or subliminal message channeling we think we’re doing through our art is meaningless to the public if you can’t back it up in some other concrete way. And why shouldn’t it be? If someone was really healing the world simply by writing songs in a mansion and being paid immensely while doing little or nothing else for the world around them, then wouldn’t we all be healed by now? Generations of the past set the precedent that musicians are to be praised for their artistic endeavors and compensated amply for their work, And as a result, their children have grown up thinking this will be the case. Immense amounts of young people today are shooting for this old model of music success, spending thousands of dollars at universities only to then cast off their projects into the ocean of the internet and never see anything come of it. Ironically, the pious older generation of art patrons and champions are the strongest critics of music today. They refuse to accept the direction art has taken and will only support music that resembles what they knew when they were young. We, the young generation of musicians, are still stuck in their aging ontological societal structure and seemingly have never thought to question why the general feeling of the music industry’s falling state of today doesn’t align with how we were taught to think about it as children. In other words, our parents and grandparents’ ideas about music are just as useless as those of music industry people. We need to erase these false ideas and come up with a new epistemology around music that reflects the current state of the world today and not that of the “Beatles generation” or any other antiquated viewpoints. But we too have a path for success. If you're a young artist today and you're feeling hopeless, confused, and upset about the way things are, here are the steps you need to take to find some peace. Shed all of the ideologies coming out of record labels today concerning social statistics and streaming numbers. They’re meaningless and do not reflect anything concrete about art in any way. Shed all of the big ideas your parents or grandparents told you about the importance of the arts and how somehow getting a degree in the arts will make you better. In their time musicians were cool, now they’re not. And besides, they don't care about yours’ or other contemporary artists’ art, they only care about what they grew up with. Those big ideas don't extend to you. And even if they do, that generation rarely puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to dishing out cash for musicians. Find out what you are besides being a musician. Get out of the practice room, bedroom, parents’ couch, or laptop and go experience the world. Travel. Live life to its fullest. And when you're ready, find out what your actual contribution to the world will be. Recognize that nobody is exempt from this, not even the fake rock stars of today. Everyone HAS to be something alongside being a musician. And that's fine. If you’ve made it this far you’ll notice I haven't talked about how these changes will actually turn a profit for you as an independent artist. That is because in order to shift the ailing revenue in the music world we need first to initiate the epistemological shift I've outlined above and bring the music industry into the 21st century. Only then can the reliably behind and stubborn music industry drag itself along to try and catch up. Practically, we need to establish an industry that doesn’t look at meaningless figures and statistics in order to see if someone is capable of being something that simply doesn’t exist anymore. It's obvious to see why it doesn’t work, right? Kill the rockstar, ditch the social media, and value the artists who are caught up and are actively pursuing their art in a new multi-faceted way. Value the experimental musician (part time works too), film composer, music therapist, music academist, musician activist, music teacher, and whatever else over the mere musician. And listen to our music, watch our videos, and attend our performances - support us because the world is no longer in the 50’s - 80’s, and music has changed along with the rest of the world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------