Interesting article and thread on
NPR’s website
today, discussing when it’s OK to bail on a once-beloved-yet-now-sucky artist
and how to deal with the guilt that may arise from abandoning them. From the
comments, some people view this as a silly, absurd topic. To them, music is
simply another commodity in the marketplace, where no one owes anyone else any
loyalty and emotion is irrelevant. One party creates the art and another
consumes it, or does not, as the case may be.
At first I completely disagreed. Music
is highly personal and intimate. It becomes closely affiliated with so many
areas of our lives, providing the soundtrack to so much daily activity, that to
disregard it as merely another commodity to be bought and sold is naïve and
misguided. If you truly believe that’s all music represents, I pity you.
But then I got to thinking…
I used to be fiercely loyal to certain
bands and artists, in part because I am a very loyal person by nature, but also
because I used music as a way to self-identify with certain groups or tribes.
By liking (or loving, or hating) a certain performer, I was setting myself
apart from the rest of the crowd who was into something else. These are My Artists – those are Yours.
It’s a tribal mentality that trickles down from sports fandom into music; it
doesn’t translate quite as neatly to literature or film or other art forms,
perhaps because bands are more relatable to us as fans than individual works of
art. [Although I can get just as possessive and defensive about individual
albums…but I digress.]
Case in point: I was a big
Police/Sting fan throughout the 80s and 90s. Saw Sting on the Soul Cages tour in
1991 and he was tremendous. Sadly, I never got to see the Police live during
their heyday – I did catch them a few years ago, but only after the wind had left
their sales (pun intended) and they embarked on a lame cashing-in reunion tour
(Vowels Across America 2008 – “Eeeee-AAAAAA-Oohhhhh!”) But I bought everything
he/they released, always liking it and often loving it. I was totally on board
for Punk Sting, Rock Sting, Ballad Sting, Jazz Sting, even Olde English Folk
Sting.
But I recall thinking at the end
of the 90s, after tolerating his mediocre Mercury Falling, when the Desert
Rose, Sting-in-a-Jaguar ad was all over TV, that maybe I didn’t want to keep this
latest Sting CD I’d purchased. It was a revolutionary thought to me, somewhat disturbing
and rather sad. I had always been a fan, I had always purchased everything he
released, I would always continue to purchase everything he released because it
would always continue to be worthwhile, and this would always continue for the
duration of our lives. Right? I really thought about my musical library in
those terms; it was just anathema to think about bailing out on one of my stalwarts.
Like U2 or R.E.M., Sting was central among the core group of My Artists – these
were my tribal leaders, and we were bound together for the long haul. I just
assumed it was a lifelong relationship I’d committed to, much like a marriage –
and you don’t bail on a marriage just because things get a little rocky. Or
even soft rock-y.
The thing is, Sting and I were
never married. There’s no partnership here, it’s purely a one-sided
relationship – and in that sense, the free-market puritans are correct. I’m the
fan, he’s the artist, and while I want to be supportive, sometimes artists
produce crap art. Even good artists. Even My
Artists. Musicians go through phases of highly creative levels of output
only to be followed by periods of creative drought, and just because you were
around during the good times doesn’t obligate you to stick it out for the lousy
stuff. This all seems fairly obvious now and a little silly to spell out in
detail, but the first time it really hit home was when Sting dropped the
turdburger that was Brand New Day (two decent songs out of ten). This was not
the first time I’d been disappointed with an album – I’d been selling unwanted
CDs for years. Before iTunes and the return of the single as a viable format, I
was as frustrated as anyone else when forced to purchase 14 track albums with
12 songs of filler. So while I’d been painfully disappointed with an album before,
rarely was it by one of My Artists.
After I accepted the notion that
I wasn’t committed to purchase and retain every Sting release from now until
one of us dies, it was both liberating and depressing. What had been a
perfunctory, fairly rote mechanism (it’s Tuesday: check new releases, scan for
familiar names, purchase familiar names, listen, assess happiness level
relative to previous releases) was forever transformed. I now had to decide
which records made the cut, which ones were worthy enough to pass the velvet
ropes and enter the hallowed halls of my collection. Discernment takes effort
and focus and a desire for greatness. When you take your collection seriously,
when you entertain vague, foolish notions of future generations discovering
this immaculately curated time capsule of music after you’re gone and
appreciating the lengths to which you went to acquire each essential item, you view
it as more museum than library. Is displaying the finest examples of a particular
genre or artist more valuable in the long term than an obsession to
document each and every iteration of an artist’s journey? I suppose either
direction could be a worthy endeavor as a record collector. But there came a
time when I had to pick one path or the other, and while most of my income in
the 90s went into that wall of CDs, I reached the point where I just couldn’t
afford to collect them all.
As a collector with deeply rooted
completist tendencies, it’s like an irritant under the skin to know there are albums
by My Artists that exist but which I do not possess. So once I relinquished the
unspoken but deeply-held belief that all of My Artists are great, legendary, and
historically relevant musicians worthy of complete catalogue documentation (because,
you know, they’re My Artists) and accepted that they are, in fact, capable of
releasing utter dreck as well as works of genius? That was a sad moment. On the
one hand it’s liberating to know I’m not obligated to follow each and every
flight of artistic whimsy they may pursue, but it’s mostly disappointing – and
there’s a little bit of pride involved as well. The common fears of sports fandom
trickle down into music fandom. You worry that perhaps you erred by picking the
wrong team, siding with the inferior artist who isn’t as historic and legendary
as you once portrayed them to be, casting your lot with a fallible tribe
comprised of mere mortals and not rock gods. In both endeavors (rooting for a
sports team and passionately following an artist), I think that’s where part of
the desire for greatness enters in: you want to back a winner, not just because
it’s fun but because you want to be proven correct, for your faith to be
rewarded. You don’t want get to the end only to discover you wasted your life
on something unworthy. You want what you’re rooting for, what you’re passionate
about, to actually matter. Ultimately what you really want is to live beyond
your years – so if you can’t live forever, at least the thing you loved will survive
you.
The NPR discussion doesn’t address
the larger question of why so many artists inevitably lose their muse. I
suspect aging and the erosion of passion by the inexorable passage of time has
a lot to do with it. Or it could be that
some artists only have one great record in them, despite oodles of potential. (Looking at you, Pete Yorn.) To be explored in another post…
