Sometimes I wonder what kind of artists I would have been in the 70’s or 80’s or being a bit older in the 90’s.
It was the age of analog. There was no YouTube or simplified self production and self distribution tools. But there was also an abundance of attention.
People didn’t have as much pulling at them from all different directions and so if you made something truly cool, you’d be able to see your work have an impact, even on a small scale.
Now my friends and I send each other videos of people doing incredible things, a man paragliding with his dogs, a 4 year old playing amazing guitar solos, home made instruments, people painting 4 paintings at once with their hands and feet. And we are all like “yeah saw it already bro”
What a crazy world where nothing is all that crazy anymore…
I am not one of those old timers who just complains about change all the time. I recognize the improvements. I take advantage of them and I’m not passive aggressive about it.
I love certain things about social media. I hate other things about it. It’s not black and white.
I love that I can stay in touch with my friends from different parts of my life easily and make new friends from around the world. I love how I can get information on demand. I love how YouTube can teach me more than school could have in a fraction of the time.
I don’t love the corporate incentives to make these things as addictive as possible or the data collection or the algorithms which oversimplify our habits and encourage to be mindless in our scrolling.
I love how everything has become so accessible. Spotify will recommend me unknown artists from Mali and Sweden because it knows what kind of sounds I like even beyond genre. If I travel to a new city I can try to use social media to find a music or art space I might like based on which friends have followed them. I can use google maps to find an eco village in the hills and hitchhike there.
AI to remove static noise from a podcast, cool! Deepfakes trying to convince me that someone said something they didn’t? Not cool!
So much of progress is a double edged sword, and people act like it’s inevitable, and to some degree it is inevitable, but to what degree, that is not inevitable. That depends on us and what we support and how we decide to live.
I probably would have been a very serious artist in the 70’s or 80’s. I would have only out out an album when I knew it was ready, after years of trial and error. That’s how I released my first EP because I grew up with bands like A Perfect Circle who did just that, sat on an album for 10 years before releasing it because they wanted it to be perfect.
But when attention is so scarce and my creative impulses come at such a high rate, what is wrong with just flowing and showing everything that I can create?
The funny thing is, sometimes I feel my garbage is almost as good as my gold. Something about the fast pace of this overwhelming endless array of stimuli, combined with being in the moment AND having access to all these tools people before didn’t have, I feel I could create the greatest album of all time in a weekend, from scratch, if I were in the right state of mind.
So maybe my frivolous instincts are the ones to follow. I wrote my novels in about three takes. With each chapter, I sat down once to write it, and another to edit it. Then when the entire book was finished I reread and re-edited. That’s it. I didn’t read it 7 times and tweak things for months. I didn’t worry about perfection. There might have been a typo or two. I didn’t care.
And the result is a book I’m ultra proud of, something that I feel is powerful and will really hit with the people who it resonates with. I love it, and that’s really all that matters in the end when it comes to whether or not it’s worth sharing.
When media is in such abundance, perfect isn’t even valuable anymore. In fact it never was, but we wanted to keep the illusion that the things we liked were perfect because we didn’t have as much access to everything in existence and we were disempowered to think that we could never be Jimmie Hendrix or Bjork or Hunter S Thompson or whoever you admired.
People are still disempowered in their mindsets, but the tools are all right there. You can create your Sergeant Peppers alone in your living room, in a single take. You can self publish it and earn most of the profits yourself. You can print merch on demand and earn money passively if you can find people interested in it.
But now the problem is visibility. When it’s so easy to make stuff, no one knows you exist and even if they do, they may not care. There are 1000 other Sargent Peppers being created every weekend.
This is not to belittle the magic of an album like Sargent Pepper. It was much harder to create something of this level back in the day, and so it deserves its place in history.
But what deserves its place in the history of the future?
I believe the future will be decentralized. Our attention will go to different places based on our interest and algorithms rather than what everyone is listening to. This has been the trend for years already and it’s not slowing down.
Giants still exist but the attention they get will be continuously chipped away at by whatever else people happen upon.
The algorithms are frustrating though. The starving artist of the past was incentivized to optimize for quality but had less competition. They had one chance to hit and they had to hit hard. The starving artists of today are forced to optimize for quantity.
It doesn’t even necessarily have to be quantity of art, it could be quantity of interactions and engagement. Play as many shows as possible, post as much on social media as possible. Do as many outlandish things as possible.
And so I could spend half of my time trying to promote my art by turning social media into work….
…But if I have endless songs being channeled through me and I’ve got to keep sharing something to get attention, why not just share everything I create? Why not throw it out for the world to do with it as it pleases since I can’t compete with the dude playing bagpipes with his butthole and electric guitar with his nose.
I can’t be the most fantastic guitar player. But I can write a song a day like Prince, and although I can’t wail on guitar like him, I can be much more consistent with quality than he or anyone else sharing so much art. That is my strength. Consistently channeling powerful emotions and sharing it in different ways.
And so with this I’ve decided to stop being a perfectionist. My first EP took 10 years to come out and would have taken another 10 to become what I hoped it would become but before I released I was allowing myself to be constipated. Its release was the end of the constipation. And my second EP will come out sometime this year, no question.
I will release a ton of videos and experiments between now and then. Some might be more likely to catch people’s anttention and some not so much. The algorithms have abandoned me, and my 50 likes per post on instagram have become 5. I know that doesn’t mean it’s worse, it just means the algorithms probably changed or were giving me a boost to encourage me to use the platform more.
It does kind of suck to put 3 hours into a little experimental video and feel really proud of it and then get 3 likes when you got 50 for a picture of yourself making a funny face, but at some point some people are bound to realize that I shit gold. I may not make the best stuff on the planet but I really believe that I might be able to make the largest quantity of good stuff on the pla…ok maybe not on the planet, but at least out of everyone you know!
This is just me, if you can play mad drums with your feet while singing like an angel, maybe you’ll have a different path. If you want to be a perfectionist and find your inspiration in that then go for it! There is a place in the world for perfectionists, as long as they don’t get constipation.
Follow what excites you! And what excites me is taking an old song and rewriting, recording and making a video for it in a day or two and not thinking about it again for a few months when I rewrite it again.
Here is my latest experiment!
Here is my first EP on Spotify, on Apple Music, or other services and YouTube if you search “Sun Shone Blue”!
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