So here’s a problem called to our attention. Whereas there used to be almost no art at all, now we have too many artists for this small patch of audience. This complaint was posted yesterday by a musician in our town, same as your town -- it’s happening all over. They're thinking maybe if there was more money from the city, state, wherever, and maybe another commissioner in city government, an art czar, we could turn this thing around, set some priorities, maybe even keep a lot of musicians in marginal dependency by paying scale in empty venues.
Don’t know a thing about popular music but it’s art, right? Some artist or group of artists is attempting to create something fellow citizens will identify with enough to support them in their independent lifestyle. This alternative to hitching up to the corporation paycheck is so appealing there are too many enlistees. We have so many bands with rather small core constituencies the club owners can’t afford to pay them much, and don’t. How does this play out -- I wouldn’t know but it does sound like a healthy if harsh required step in evolution, and in the end the best musicians will wind up making their best music in a community that supports them, if they hang around.
Should we intervene? Can we hasten evolution by nurturing progressive favorites, bands with consciousness-raising lyrics or proportionally diverse personnel, for example? Well, if your goal is dysfunctional mediocrity, if you want independence and creativity denied access, if you think a bureaucratic refuge for pointless degrees is something we should all pay for, go ahead. Visual art provides the template for what goes wrong. Public money should be moving traffic, providing services, making sure everyone eats, and investing in the future with what’s left.
Did anyone think art was easy? It’s a sad fact the soldiers who stormed Normandy were not the same smiling GI’s who kissed the girls in Paris, and being on the front lines of art can be gritty. At some point citizens in all similar places to where you live now will begin to recognize the work of area artists and soon after that to have favorites, all on their own. With an audience the shoot gets to blossom, the art gets a lot better, and an artist could live pretty well in the not too distant future.
Can’t say what this means for musicians, but there’s the music, the collaboration, and the drive to get better. Decide what you’re worth and insist on it, play when you can. Expand your audience by demonstrating that live music is better, by speaking to the inner ear, and by being tight and responsible to the craft. Whenever it happens, it happens on its own.
1 comment:
Spot on. I especially agree with you about public money and art. I've seen that from the inside of an arts organisation and it's not worth it.
I have both friends and family who are in the music world and their struggles are quite familiar to this visual artist. I agree it's a nationwide problem and not merely local. A Facebook musician friend of mine took the advice of your last paragraph to heart in the mid 1980's eventually forming a record company to issue his band's records and then signing on others in the same genre. (darkwave) He isn't starving but he isn't wealthy either. The band is Black Tape for a Blue Girl and the label is Projekt Records. He's fighting a two front war-the first, the one you describe; and the second, the world of downloads, streaming and how no one wants to pay the artists what they're worth online as CD sales decline. I'm old fashioned, I'd rather hear the band live and buy their CDs. He still follows the advice of your last paragraph.
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