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 their 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 it, 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: art as a ruse to attract an audience for 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! (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 can’t be good.

Art, sport, festivals, music and dance, storytelling, have all been turned into commodities to be traded — and through this transformation, are all open to a greater level of corruption: 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 with music and dancing at the end of a busy harvest. Sport between neighbouring towns as a way to unwind with families on the weekend. Storytelling by parents next to a fire at night — or by community elders who wanted to pass on a special message to the younger generation to help them in life. Drugs, drinking and gambling, and business chats, may have always been on the periphery of these activities; but they were never the dominant feature.

If you think about what happens when you watch a movie, you almost disappear into another reality, where you lose yourself for ninety minutes, and become enthralled in this (hopefully) wonderful thing that is unfolding before your eyes. It’s like a dream.

But to regularly have loud ads interrupt this, is like being woken up every fifteen minutes by your neighbour’s dog barking like a mad thing; 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, and give them something wonderful and brilliant!

Quietly hiding on Bandcamp . . . 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 hundreds 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!

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 give each other support and a sense of solidarity. But this not the same thing as finding an audience. The audience is the most elusive part of the relationship; and for creative people, they are definitely out there – but sometimes it’s like a lone wolf howling into a freeway of a million cars, all honking their horns at once.

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 sorts of things. They are focusing wholeheartedly on making their own lives a success, 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 coming down a non-standard pathway. They want someone to recommend to them what’s good and worth watching — and commercial platforms are good at doing 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 blown away by something! 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 understand what the author was trying to share with us, and we feel a tingle go up our spine, realising that we have connected with something deep and powerful, that runs below the ebb and flow of what we see in our day-to-day life. A significant message has been successfully passed from one generation to the next, and a true purpose of art (one of them) has scored a home run.