I’ve been a creator for my entire life. I started writing songs and plays when I was eight. The first play I wrote was called, Commercial Christmas. I’m not sure how I understood at such a young age that Christmas was an over-commercialized sales event, but I did. And there started my internal battle between art and pop.
My early songs had nothing to do with wanting to write hits. I just thought it was fun, and I used words to express my feelings. My first song, Screaming Mad, was written when I was mad at my mom.
Screaming mad
Close my eyes
Feel like crying
Screaming mad
Close my eyes
Feel like dying
Screaming mad
Throughout my teens, as the child victim of a cult, I wrote songs in my head as means of escape while working as a slave. By then, however, I was dreaming about my songs becoming top-40 hits. I was becoming educated in pop.
We are trained to follow the trends.
The entertainment and media business might just be the biggest enemy of art. Sure, if it weren’t for media, many musicians, writers, and artists would never be known. But when anything becomes mass produced and promoted through a system that reaches the majority of people within a culture, it shapes the art. The art becomes a part of popular culture.
Pop.
When Elvis and The Beatles came on the scene, what did every young American boy want? To become like them. This created imitation. Pop wins. Art takes a back seat.
The majority of my work is simply a mirror.
As a young songwriter in my 20s, my goal was to be discovered. Therefore, I wrote songs I thought would be “hits.” I was basically a mirror of everything I listened to on the radio, a reflection of the musical culture of my time.
As I continued to write, I also continued to discover new music, and old. I went deeper into the past and discovered blues and traditional country. Again, I became a reflection of what I heard. I might have been a mirror to the past, but I was still imitating. And even though I was writing deep country and blues, I still sensed more pop than art.
Even so, through the years, I was becoming an artist in my own right. I didn’t always write with the intent of getting hits, and I didn’t always imitate my idols. I slowly found my own voice in the arena of song. Still, I felt the majority of my catalog was pop. I suppose this has to do with formula. Most songs have verses, choruses, bridges, expected patterns. That within itself feels more like pop than art.
Weird songs, ambient music, and abstract photography.
Sometime in my mid-40s I started to become disillusioned with my songwriting journey. I was tired of writing songs that sounded like all the other songs ever written. Around that time, I also discovered Bill Callahan. His songs were different. They did not follow the formula. So, I wrote a batch of songs that also did not follow traditional songwriting formula. But I was still being a mirror, an imitator.
It wasn’t until I started playing with electronic music programming that I really broke away from formula. I experimented. I became a composer of chaos and drone. Nothing had to make sense. The digital audio workshop was my canvas. Sometimes, I’d recite odd poems over the top of a composition. Or I’d go sample strange sounds and program them into the mix.
I was free from formula. However, in time, I found that even weird music has its own formula, it’s just less obvious. Still, I feel that my work as an electronic music composer has been my strongest art.
Around the same time, in my early-to-mid 50s, I started taking more pictures. Although, I primarily like scenic photography, I also found myself drawn toward taking photos in ways that were very abstract.
Art.
The dilemma.
After about seven years of playing with ambient, drone, and experimental compositions, I returned to more traditional songwriting. It was exciting to feel that old rush of energy when words and music come together. Just as I did when I was younger, I knew many of the songs I was writing had commercial potential. Yep. I was back to pop.
Thus, the dilemma. If you follow media, culture, trends, you regurgitate it. You are part of an echo chamber. You are pop. From an artist’s perspective, that can feel cheap and phony, even if what you’re doing is good. It feels like a product, even if you can’t find buyers.
On the other hand, if you dedicate yourself to things more artistic, many people will not understand your work. They might say, “That looks like a blob. I don’t get it. Can’t you paint a picture?” Furthermore, art almost requires that you turn off the media, walk away from popular culture, ignore trends, isolate yourself, and get lost in your work.
In the end, all of it, pop and art, only has the value we give it as a society, as a culture. Art, however, has one up on pop. Art holds more value to the creator. As a creator, I value my work in which I took more risks, where I was brave enough to allow imagination to override tradition and popular expectation. Although I have had little monetary reward, choosing art over pop creates a greater sense of discovery in the process. It feels more true.
But like most of us, I want to fit in. I want to be understood. I want people to like what I do. And so the internal battle between art and pop continues forevermore. Although, I am giving less shits these days.
Let’s stay in touch. – dse