Hot Take/ Musical Confession Thread!

Indymisanthrope said:
He's so unbearable to me that I refuse to learn enough about him to be able to articulate an informed opinion.

Yes & no; he was also a weird little guy that lived in Minnesota and wore purple and was effete and hypersexual, and when you're that person already, changing your name to an unpronounceable symbol is a risky move that, once initiated, you may not be able to control. I mean...think about the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. That was a case of serious injury, and reasonable conditions for a settlement. But the narrative was stolen for the sake of punchlines.

If Prince had done that in the internet age, people would have had better access to his reasons, and would have had a more sophisticated view of what he was trying to achieve. For people like me who were kids at the time, my only exposure to it was the jokes on the school bus and what I heard secondhand that Jay Leno or whoever had done to mock it on TV the night before.
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I hear you, but again, in interviews at the time he was talking about the problem with WB and his masters and also saying that Prince was dead and I’m gonna retire these songs. It was both a broad and powerful statement about the music industry and a “persona” as publicity stunt. The zeitgeist latched onto the second because it was ridiculous.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Consciously? Yes, I think there are almost certainly some that do. But I think it's also likely the case that industry norms assert themselves in a manner that this is "how things are done," you know?
What's the color scheme for this album? Okay, so how does that translate to the album art? Okay, so how are you going to communicate that on stage? Will any of the music video costumes be carried over to the concerts? What will the background dancers be wearing? What will be on the screen behind you? What are the talking points you'll be taking into interviews about the album and its significance and why people should listen to it? What will your appearance be in the photoshoots that will make people pay attention and understand this is you in the present as opposed to the hundred photoshoots you've done in the last decade? And so on. Is that the artist dreaming up a character specifically because characters = money? Not at all. But it's still all in service of selling something.
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But that’s all very different from becoming Ziggy Stardust to the public for that entire album cycle. Or how something like the Thin White Duke becomes so pervasive that people genuinely don’t know when that period even is.

Sia has been wearing that dumb wig and acting like her identity is a secret for a long fucking time.
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
I tried to avoid bringing him up but it was really FJM that had me initially think about the idea of rock star personas. When I first heard of what he was doing it turned me off, but after hearing the music and reflecting on the nature of rock stars as performance artist, I realized what he was doing was no different than Dylan, Bowie, Many rappers, Kiss, Etc... Its all part of the performance FJM just overtly acknowledged that it was all a facade up front instead of being coy about it.
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Bowie was never really coy about it. Prince and Bowie both, from all accounts absolutely loved to screw with people’s heads.
 
Lee Newman said:
But that’s all very different from becoming Ziggy Stardust to the public for that entire album cycle. Or how something like the Thin White Duke becomes so pervasive that people genuinely don’t know when that period even is.

Sia has been wearing that dumb wig and acting like her identity is a secret for a long fucking time.
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Right, and I think Bowie's success at doing those kinds of things is exactly why the industry pushes artists in the direction of deliberately drawing up comprehensive marketing strategies for it. But as it turns out, most artists aren't Bowie. There's a lot of art in marketing, but the Venn Diagram for those two things isn't a single circle.

Sia's thing with the wig was about concealing the symptoms of Graves Disease, wasn't it?
ETA: would Orville Peck be a more relevant example of what you're describing here?
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Right, and I think Bowie's success at doing those kinds of things is exactly why the industry pushes artists in the direction of deliberately drawing up comprehensive marketing strategies for it. But as it turns out, most artists aren't Bowie. There's a lot of art in marketing, but the Venn Diagram for those two things isn't a single circle.

Sia's thing with the wig was about concealing the symptoms of Graves Disease, wasn't it?
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No earthly idea… I don’t know that much about her music. I do know that it was more popular and less exciting after the wig though.
 
I’m just saying there is a difference between conceptualizing an album cycle, re: say Taylor Swift and being a different character.

Bowie did this because as Davey Jones he got nowhere. Then he did this very narrative and character driven song (Space Oddity) and then there was Ziggy and he got reactions to all of that so he just kept doing it.

With him, I think it was as much a subconscious defense mechanism as it was a marketing thing. Be different from his art to protect himself.

Like Jack White gives himself parameters for a project but he isn’t a different person.

Doom was clearly doing that but was it for commercial reasons? I don’t think so, sure he was a huge underground figure but he wasn’t super rich either.

People want to identify with their artist and if they are constantly actively being someone else it doesn’t work.

I’m sure Doom or Kool Keith could have been much bigger than they were/are but it’s not what their art was/is about.

St Vincent portrayed a different everything with Daddy’s Home and it made people bristle.

I don’t see marketing the same as putting on an entirely different facade.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Right, and I think Bowie's success at doing those kinds of things is exactly why the industry pushes artists in the direction of deliberately drawing up comprehensive marketing strategies for it. But as it turns out, most artists aren't Bowie. There's a lot of art in marketing, but the Venn Diagram for those two things isn't a single circle.

Sia's thing with the wig was about concealing the symptoms of Graves Disease, wasn't it?
ETA: would Orville Peck be a more relevant example of what you're describing here?
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If Orville does something different later, yes?

I brought FJM because of the post I quoted. I don’t see him as what @Bull Shannon was talking about.
 
Lee Newman said:
Bowie was never really coy about it. Prince and Bowie both, from all accounts absolutely loved to screw with people’s heads.
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Yeah, not all are coy about it mainly because they are much less nuanced. Bowie wasn’t really an Alien and Gene Simmons wasn’t really a demon. Robert Zimmerman wasn’t a train hopping hobo either but that was the yarn he spun as Bob Dylan.
 
Bull Shannon said:
Maybe I'm letting specific examples stick in my craw (Bono and St. Vincent, for two), but I think the whole "I'm putting on a costume and adding a layer of abstraction onto my extant, inherent persona" schtick is in conversation with "authenticity;" instead of chasing it, you're running in the exact opposite direction.

Every album cycle comes with its own aesthetic; colors, costumes, backdrops. The trouble comes when you're putting on a gas mask and bunny ears and calling yourself Trait.
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I don’t think Bono is a performance. I think that’s just him and he’s using his childhood nickname… whether that makes it better or worse I’ll leave to you!
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
Yeah, not all are coy about it mainly because they are much less nuanced. Bowie wasn’t really an Alien and Gene Simmons wasn’t really a demon. Robert Zimmerman wasn’t a train hopping hobo either but that was the yarn he spun as Bob Dylan.
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I think the yarn he spun was he wanted to be Woody Guthrie but that’s an entirely different conversation.
 
Joe Mac said:
I don’t think Bono is a performance. I think that’s just him and he’s using his childhood nickname… whether that makes it better or worse I’ll leave to you!
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I think he was referring to The Fly and whatever other nonsense he was doing during Achtung and Zooropa. There was definitely a devilish imp guy in there for a minute.
 
Lee Newman said:
I’m just saying there is a difference between conceptualizing an album cycle, re: say Taylor Swift and being a different character.

Bowie did this because as Davey Jones he got nowhere. Then he did this very narrative and character driven song (Space Oddity) and then there was Ziggy and he got reactions to all of that so he just kept doing it.

With him, I think it was as much a subconscious defense mechanism as it was a marketing thing. Be different from his art to protect himself.

Like Jack White gives himself parameters for a project but he isn’t a different person.

Doom was clearly doing that but was it for commercial reasons? I don’t think so, sure he was a huge underground figure but he wasn’t super rich either.

People want to identify with their artist and if they are constantly actively being someone else it doesn’t work.

I’m sure Doom or Kool Keith could have been much bigger than they were/are but it’s not what their art was/is about.

St Vincent portrayed a different everything with Daddy’s Home and it made people bristle.

I don’t see marketing the same as putting on an entirely different facade.
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That's exactly the thing that I think -- for me, at least -- helps to differentiate my reaction to these things when I see them. A lot of it relies on how I interpret the artistic intent. If it feels organic, or in service of the overall artistry, that carries a different feeling than if it feels like a manufactured artifact of a commercial project. Does it feel like it's in service of a larger idea, or is it a hollow means to generate publicity?

It's not a science. I can't read artists' minds, nor can I entirely separate my reactions from my preconceived notions of who these people are.

It also doesn't escape me that a lot of this is probably inextricably linked to genre, and by extension to gender politics. Women will undergo more scrutiny than men will. Is she being too sexual/not sexual enough? Is she being too edgy/chaste/intense/disaffected/gay/smart/whatever? Bowie and Prince are two great examples, but there aren't a lot of male artists doing the same thing right now.

That said, here's my "hot take." I think The National has gotten way too precious about the aesthetic choices surrounding their last few albums. The imagery for Sleep Well Beast and I Am Easy to Find felt forced and cynical, to me, almost to the point of impeding my ability to absorb the albums on their own merits. They weren't adopting 'characters' per se, but the visual themes of those albums felt omnipresent during the album cycles.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
That's exactly the thing that I think -- for me, at least -- helps to differentiate my reaction to these things when I see them. A lot of it relies on how I interpret the artistic intent. If it feels organic, or in service of the overall artistry, that carries a different feeling than if it feels like a manufactured artifact of a commercial project. Does it feel like it's in service of a larger idea, or is it a hollow means to generate publicity?

It's not a science. I can't read artists' minds, nor can I entirely separate my reactions from my preconceived notions of who these people are.

It also doesn't escape me that a lot of this is probably inextricably linked to genre, and by extension to gender politics. Women will undergo more scrutiny than men will. Is she being too sexual/not sexual enough? Is she being too edgy/chaste/intense/disaffected/gay/smart/whatever? Bowie and Prince are two great examples, but there aren't a lot of male artists doing the same thing right now.

That said, here's my "hot take." I think The National has gotten way too precious about the aesthetic choices surrounding their last few albums. The imagery for Sleep Well Beast and I Am Easy to Find felt forced and cynical, to me, almost to the point of impeding my ability to absorb the albums on their own merits.
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Sleep Well Beast was the last time I enjoyed listening to a National album. I don’t know if it’s a marketing thing or something else, but they feel spent to me at this point in time. Doesn’t mean they are, just that I’m not into what they are doing.
 
Lee Newman said:
I think the yarn he spun was he wanted to be Woody Guthrie but that’s an entirely different conversation.
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Or rather co-oped the parts of Guthrie biography to help tell the story he was looking to tell. He never hid who he was but his music was lent an air of authenticity if the fans thought of him as a woody Guthrie type as opposed to a middle class midwesterner. Fans enjoy the story and are willing to play along. It’s all pro-wrestling that way.
 
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