8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: commercialization of art

Chapter List

  • Avant Garde

    For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.

    Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable. 

    I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…

    Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.

    Succeeding, to boot.

    And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.

    Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.

  • Knots Blocks

    How does one go about unlearning what society probably taught us about talent?

    I know from personal experience that almost everything I believe about what it means to be good at something is wrapped up in an expectation from an audience: an employer, a customer, a friend, or even a parent (reaching right back to the beginning.)

    As I write this blog and parse out the various topics I want to explore I realize that I have already written a lot about those very expectations and how to first recognize them and then later prioritize how much heed they should be offered.

    Even as I was sitting down to write this I had just come off a few moments of drinking some tea and scrolling through my social media feed. My favourite feed these days is a collection of photographers promoting their work. And yet noting just how rigid the conformity is within the confines of that feed has been nagging at something in my mind. Every post is some glamorously lit epic nature scene or a broody black and white bit of urban street photography or a smiling family squared into the frame with a rustic backdrop to set the mood. Kudos abounded for those posts because, yes, they were solid works of technical skill—but also, maybe, perhaps because they fit into a mold of social expectation and consumer value. 

    Are those guideposts for other to follow? Or is there something mundane lurking in aligning creative outputs with social expectations? 

    Under the category of Knots & Blocks, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Standards Unpracticed

    There was a realization about music that I recall having when I was younger. 

    See, when I was in my teens and twenties I listened to a lot of punk and metal from the 80s and 90s. And I remember finding it odd that most music from these genres still usually followed the rules of popular commercial music design. 

    I get it. Musical structure. Chord progression. Hundreds of years of music theory, blah, blah blah, but… think about it from the other perspective: these sounds and songs were supposed to be part of a finger-wagging, pearl-clutching anti-social revolution and a counter-culture apparently designed for angsty teens and rebellious youth to rage against the establishment.

    But simultaneously they were entrenched deeply within that same establishment by the basic rule-following and formula-driven style of the music itself. 

    There are certainly examples that don’t fit this observation, but from my viewpoint so much of it seemed to follow set standards: It was composed of phrases and verses, with lyrics, mixed into tracks of four to six minutes long that could be played on the radio. 

    All of it—in the parlance of capitalism—written, recorded and packaged to be commercially viable.

    And, sure, yeah, of course, no kidding, I get capitalism and working with the system and all that, too… but…

    …but the real rebellion it seems was making something that was not for sale, and breaking the rules and standards that guide our creativity towards the end goal of becoming just another product that needs to move in lockstep with the rules, too.