Indie Syndrome: Humility Overkill
Returning to the topic of self-image and public perception (and glamour!), remember what I said in this post?
“Get yourself some bling and unabashedly pose it up for some cameras. We’re all too cool these days … You’re the star of your own show, why not act like it?”
Another way of putting that, which is the subject of today’s episode is, don’t be so sickeningly humble. I’m working on kicking this one in the ass myself. In related news, I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion my album is going to be amazing. No, let me rephrase that better: it totally is going to be amazing. But more on that later.
My point: ‘indie kids’ need to venture outside the quaint little picket-fenced psychological suburbs of indie pop/rock and start learning more from hip-hop artists. The mentality is very very different.
Keith Handy has asked that the following plea to performing songwriters be passed along for the sake of the greater good. I was going to anyway because it’s pretty spot-on:
“…stop using the phrases ’shameless plug’ and/or ’shameless self-promotion’. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch … Just say what needs to be said — ‘we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there… thanks for coming’ — and trim off the fat.
“Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.
“Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.”
“Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly ‘making them what they are’, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut…”
“…stop playing up your ‘indieness’ and just focus on being kickass.“
‘nough said. I trust you’ll do the right thing.
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That post was partially inspired by a local funk band called The Macro Meltdown. I’ve seen them twice, because they frequently play at a cafe in this building (the same one my studio is in), and their playing and presence are both rock solid. The guitar player is my hero. Who cares about the industry? It’s irrelevant. The performance trumps everything.
I read somewhere a ways back that the original reason rappers wore “bling” was so that they could store their value/wealth on their actual person instead of in banks, which they didn’t trust and which in many cases weren’t serving poor black communities at all. If you have all your wealth on your physical person, you always know it’s there, you know who has what money, and you can use it as hard goods for trade/barter
Tim: that certainly puts a different perspective on it. Of course, like with all memes or trends or whatever you want to call them, people will later be copying the visible part without knowing the original meaning. (*gives peace sign and vacant “hey look I’m a hippie” grin*)
I just wanted to say I think that there is a good Jack London quote to express what was being said in this post: “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificient glow, than a sleepy, permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to survive. I will not waste my days in trying to prolong them; I will USE my time.” I think this quote is related because it shows that essentially what it is to be an artist is not in the striving to attain an unmovable place in the heavens of stardom. The proper purpose of an artist is to be themselves and be creative openly. I think the best thing an artist can do is to gain the kind of trust from the public that allows them to fail without losing the love of their audience, or succeed and have the public want to take credit for their success themselves. Look at Bjork in Iceland. I think there is a point you can pass with relation to your outward persona that allows you to go beyond petty aspects of promotion, and just BE…and be that, PUBLICALLY. Think of Isadora Duncan, the ultimate extrovert. I would say that we do not want to be inert elements as people. We should be active and with character, even if that chemistry leads us to a mushroom cloud of an end to our careers. The purpose of a performer is to bridge that gap between what the public is interested in and what they want to be. Artists just have to BE. It can all go together though, if you are willing to show yourself unabashedly…and that does not imply the need to be haughty either. A person can present themselves most favorably when they react to the crowd, not to their own inner desires.
Great points Conductor man, especially the point about Bjork being beyond the need for promotion. She *is* her promotion, pretty much. She is a larger-than-life character. “You can’t avoid her, she’s in the air.”
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Is this something to strive for. I don’t know that you can pull it off to that extent if it doesn’t come somewhat naturally to you. But who knows? I don’t think you want to (or can) force it. But you can learn things from it and lean in that direction. Be that on a smaller scale in your own life and let it expand from there as it will, or as you want it to.
“I think the best thing an artist can do is to gain the kind of trust from the public that allows them to fail without losing the love of their audience, or succeed and have the public want to take credit for their success themselves.”
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That one sentence alone will give my brain plenty to chew on for a while. How come there’s no website I can follow your name back to, C? Set one up, stat!
I keep telling him that! He and you are my best music mentors, by the way, and I think you should become friends. Consider this your official introduction.
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He writes these amazing essay-length emails and it’s a freaking crime that only I get to read them. So actually, until I can talk him into starting a blog, I’ve asked him if I can quote his emails freely and he’s said yes. I just haven’t gotten around to it.
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I might even start a ‘conversations’ category for posting excerpts of particularly good and relevant email conversations (not just with him, but with anyone who gives me permission).
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PS: The Conductor actually is a train Conductor in real life. He’s also a musician so I thought it served as a great stage name for him. We are also all conductors of our own ’symphonies’, metaphorically speaking, so for him it’s triple-layered. I need a good nickname for you. I thought of ‘The Handyman’, but I don’t think that does you justice, especially because I associate it with the old Damon Wayons character on In Living Color. Though he was a superhero…. :)
Don’t forget that in electronics, a conductor is anything that electricity can freely flow through, like wires and most metals. So if you think of electricity as a metaphor for spirit…
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“Handyman” reminds me too much of a perverted inside joke from my restaurant/kitchen days. Not that it wasn’t funny…
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Thank you both for the re-energizing compliments!
Quadruple-layered! Man, I need a nickname that’s that awesome.
i think the escence of the subject has been put into words already… me myself have not yet made public what i do… mostly because i have works that have not been elaborated enough so as to be exposed (as i see it)… sometimes just because im not confident with what i’ve done… but i think the trick is, as you all said (thanks to the conductor who put it into words), in gaining the trust of the public so as to expose oneself without fearing not to be understood or recognized… because although i agree that an artist should just be, an artist has to communicate something to the people and be recognized by some at least to become an artist in all ways (it has to make the, as keith said, conduction of his spirit, succesfull), plus we must admit is what really makes it worth… being recognized for just being must be amazing…
i though of a cool nickname… “Cloud Seeding Co.” or “Rainmaking Co.”
i dont know if it is quadrouple-layered, but the first name of the discoverer of cloud seeding is my first name too…
if you wanna read about what cloud seeding is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Seeding
noooooo….. chemtrails!
just kiddin. i think I heard of that on coast to coast am too though.
lol no…
“The term “chemtrail” does not refer to common forms of aerial dumping (e.g. crop dusting, cloud seeding or aerial firefighting). ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
ahha i laughed so much when i read that some hippies in woodstock recalled seeing planes that were cloud seeding over woodstock, believing it was a conspiracy to mine their spirit and that’s why it rained all throughout woodstock… but who knows, maybe they were right… hippies rock! i’d never seed their clouds…