Where to Find the Good Stuff?

This post is partly inspired by a recent Subway Take that I watched where the guest said that his take was that non-viral things were good — he enjoyed discovering things with only a few likes on them.

Although he was maybe being slightly ironic — considering that he was on a massively viral instagram account — I don’t think he was wrong in what he was saying.

K. Leimer — Music for Land and Water, from 1983

Sometimes, all the good stuff is not where you think it is — or are told by platforms and advertisers, where you should think it is.

There is basically an idea that if a creative work has found its way onto a legitimate platform/publisher/broadcaster, then it must be of a high standard. Netflix, Spotify, Audible. NBC, CBS, ABC. EMI, Universal, BGM. Harper Collins, Amazon, Doubleday. It’s an implicit bias, that even if we bitch about large corporations, they are still considered to be the gold standard of our society, and by the very nature of success, they have a reputation to uphold, so therefore, they will not let crap onto their platform. It’s a weird kind of gatekeeping that has evolved out of capitalism (similar mindset to if someone is willing to pay for something, it must be good).

But what about all the creative people that withhold their work from these mega-corporations? The strange outsider artists, who have developed a moral disdain for the corporate monolith? Or people who believe in fairness and fair treatment, and not art as a commodity for mass consumption. Or worse — as a ruse to attract an audience to then handover to advertisers.

There are many people who rebel against this system — and it’s not just because they have a lack of talent, or an inability to succeed. There are hundreds of thousands of quiet achievers, millions probably, all around the world, making art for art’s sake. Making music for the sake of love; writing for the sake of passion; creating art for the sake of friendship; making love for the sake of life. (And maybe drinking some saké, too, while they are at it!) That was a dumb play of words, but you get what I mean.

It’s almost impossible to challenge that belief; that if it’s not on a platform, it mustn’t be good.

Everything we do that once belonged to the community — art, sport, festivals, music and dance, storytelling — has been turned into a commodity to be traded — and therefore corrupted. Sport is rife with advertising and gambling, storytelling is full of ideology and product placement, art is for the elite and high-end auction houses, festivals are sponsored by alcohol conglomerates . . . dance seems to be the only thing that hasn’t completely been co-opted by the corporates.

But all these things we once did as part of communities; they brought the community together, after hard times, to reconnect. A festival at the end of harvest with music and dancing. Sport between neighbouring towns on weekends as a way to unwind with families. Storytelling from parents by a fire at night — or from community elders who wanted to pass on a special message to the next generation to help them face some of the challenges in their life ahead. Drugs, drinking, gambling, business messages, may have always been on the periphery; but they were never the dominant feature.

If you think about what happens when you watch a movie, you almost disappear into a dream, where you lose yourself for 90 minutes, and become enthralled in this (hopefully) wonderful thing that is unfolding before your eyes. It’s like a dream. But to have an ad interrupt this, is like being woken up every fifteen minutes by your neighbour’s barking dog in the middle of the night — the tranquility of the dreamstate is disrupted, and your dream becomes disturbed, and shaped at a subconscious level by this incoming signal — you might even begin to incorporate the dog into your dream, and have a nightmare about someone breaking into your house.

Creative people don’t want this kind of thing latching onto their work; it’s one of the reasons they may have set out to create in the beginning — to make an alternative vision of reality, or capture a beautiful moment of their own reality. A deep belief in the power of a story to help someone, or give them a new experience, or to share something brilliant and wonderful and surprising.

Quietly hiding on Bandcamp . . .

https://bafflegabble.bandcamp.com/album/vince-cosmos-glam-rock-detective

But the other thing a creative person doesn’t want, is to have their work languishing in a backwater. They spend thousands of hours to make something; and to not share it, is like an apple tree holding back its fruit. The fruit eventually rots and drops off the tree, without anyone having tasted how delicious it is! The seeds may go on, but it is usually the fact that someone eats the fruit (or a bird or animal) and the seed is then carried off to a new location. Art and creative ideas move around in a similar way. They are not bound by the rules of commerce and copyright. To withhold the fruit is artificial, and against nature.

So, this is a difficult dilemma for creative people. They rely a lot on finding a community of like-minded people, other creators who understand what’s involved in making a creative work, and who then in turn, support each other through a sense of solidarity. But that’s still not the same thing as finding an audience.

And the audience are usually the ones who do not necessarily understand the idiosyncrasies of taking a creative path in life. That’s not to insult the audience, but to say, that the average person is too busy to think about these sort of things. They are focusing whole-heartedly on making their own lives successful, raising families, and getting the best out of their job — as well as squeezing in some enjoyment. Movies, and music, and TV shows are entertainment; a break from stress, and sometimes, a chance to forget about what’s worrying them. They don’t want to spend too much time hunting out some obscure and un-vetted DIY creative project. They want someone to recommend to them what’s good and worth watching — and commercial platforms are a way of achieving this.

So, that’s us back at the start of this post, a commercial loop and bind, and all I’ve done is waste some energy complaining about it. But they are things that I have thought about for a long time, and thought is still worth sharing in a post.

I would say that you have to hunt high and low for the good stuff in life. But also, like a nice sunset, sometimes you are suddenly surprised by something, and it catches you off guard, and even better, takes your breath away! There are maybe a few books we read as kids that did this — that we have thought about often through our lives, a moral meaning or message, that has suddenly jumped into our adult consciousness, the way a photo would suddenly materialise in a tray of developing fluid in a darkroom, many moons ago. We suddenly realise what the author was trying to share with us, and we feel a tingle go up our spine, and we realise that we have connected with something very deep and powerful, that runs below the ebb and flow of what we see in our day-to-day life. There was a deep message that has been passed now from one generation to the next, and a true purpose of art (one of them) has won the order of the day.