Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Hanging around music production forums, it always seems like there's a strong prevelance for a rather old-fashioned romantic notion of what a musician (or other artist) Should Be if they're going to produce anything worth shit. The particular characteristics are:
1) being true only to their artistic conscience ("make music for yourself, not for anyone else"), not interested in making money, not interested in connecting with an audience, not interested in engaging with a scene except as an unintended consequence of following The Great Idea and
2) entirely in control of every aspect of their creation - although collaborations are usually allowed, sampling, using synth presets, getting someone else to mix or master your work or whatever tend to be deprecated. "Why use a sample when you can synthesize it yourself and get exactly the sound you want." "Why not learn to mix yourself so you don't have to let someone else make decisions about the sound of your music?"
In practice this tends to be based on quite a lot of wishful thinking and deliberate blind spots (people tend not to reply when you point out that Miles Davis spent a lot of time worrying about how to connect to the audience he was interested in, or that most great renaissance artists had a team of technicians and apprentices to do a lot of the less interesting bits of their paintings), but does anyone know the history of this sort of ideal of The Artist, and what the actual critical positions that it's a rather woolly version of are? Any reading (pref online) worth a look?
Has anyone else been annoyed by the regularity of this way of thinking, and does anyone have thoughts on why it's hung on so stubbornly in such a strong form when all the evidence seems to show that it's balls? Why people are capable of loving the output of Motown and Studio 1 but still claim that commercial motivation is anathema to great music?
1) being true only to their artistic conscience ("make music for yourself, not for anyone else"), not interested in making money, not interested in connecting with an audience, not interested in engaging with a scene except as an unintended consequence of following The Great Idea and
2) entirely in control of every aspect of their creation - although collaborations are usually allowed, sampling, using synth presets, getting someone else to mix or master your work or whatever tend to be deprecated. "Why use a sample when you can synthesize it yourself and get exactly the sound you want." "Why not learn to mix yourself so you don't have to let someone else make decisions about the sound of your music?"
In practice this tends to be based on quite a lot of wishful thinking and deliberate blind spots (people tend not to reply when you point out that Miles Davis spent a lot of time worrying about how to connect to the audience he was interested in, or that most great renaissance artists had a team of technicians and apprentices to do a lot of the less interesting bits of their paintings), but does anyone know the history of this sort of ideal of The Artist, and what the actual critical positions that it's a rather woolly version of are? Any reading (pref online) worth a look?
Has anyone else been annoyed by the regularity of this way of thinking, and does anyone have thoughts on why it's hung on so stubbornly in such a strong form when all the evidence seems to show that it's balls? Why people are capable of loving the output of Motown and Studio 1 but still claim that commercial motivation is anathema to great music?
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