Music After All

You've answered the "why" but you've only convinced yourself of it, not necessarily anyone else. The expectation is that there has to be some linearity to life deeply ingrained in our brains that controls everything top-down: Things must be linear and logical in order to mesh them with the stories we want to tell about our own lives. But for artists that work in many domains, we have to navigate these issues. As a musician with an "accumulation" of skill acquired over 50 years, I like working with those skills and is something of a preoccupation with the ability to play. It is an autotelic experience that can be done just for the sake of itself without outer approval or reward. If you like to do certain things and do it fairly well, you're inclined to want to do it without being poked with a stick. Your brain likes you when you play music--or anything you naturally like to do. The "why" question doesn't need to be answered. In spirituality, we can "just be". For people that like to make things, "just being" is all incubation of things already conceived in mind.

The German artist Gerhard Richter exemplifies the intra-disciplinary artist "polymath", who is a good traditional painter, but also works from concepts and ideas. Songwriters are essentially conceptual artists and storytellers in this regard because every song is based on some seed idea--a title, a lyric line, a chord change. Similarly, conceptual artists are like songwriters as they emerge from ideas--either spontaneous or those that incubate over a period of time. It has always been my feeling that when artists become too abstract and conceptual absent any sequential narrative things go awry and can even breed feelings of contempt in audiences: "Don't Make Me think!!" Many have made the comment that Richter's scrape paintings which are valued in the tens of millions are a "con". I can see how people would share this view, e.g. "I could do that with paint and a scraper" or "That's just texture painting I can do on my bedroom wall". In the end, after thinking about it for years, it is simplistic linear storytelling that keeps us grounded but advancing to nowhere. I like to use the analogy of the Kardashev Scale. As a civilization we have not even reached Type I. We keep telling the Type I stories, so we keep living them again and again.

Manufactured vs. Organic Meaning

After MTV, and even just plain old TV, music is annealed with image. This in itself made music more unserious. After Herbie Hancock wrote Rockit in the early 1980s (from a purely musical idea--not visual in any sense), his record company made what he thought was a stupid music video. His focus was on the music itself, organic and unpackaged. At that point, jazz was already becoming "elitist" because it pushed back against commercialization. After Miles and Coltrane, jazz became "spiritual", just as Abstract Expressionism was after Pollock and Rothko, a notion upheld to this day. Miles was cunning in that he embraced it--in retrospect for some of the same reasons that allowed Andy Warhol to exploit the new possibilities in the slippage between the organic and the manufactured image. Making a wacky video with little regard for this "spirituality" of jazz was anathema to the art form, but Miles could embrace the idea conceptually. Warhol demonstrated that you could do both with mutual reverence and manufacture a meaning just by colliding the two instead of putting them in "quarantine". That said, this is much easier to do in art than in music. We would all agree that Duke Ellington's synthesis of jazz with liturgical music is righteous and demands respect. It is organic in its meaning and can't/shouldn't be manufactured and packaged, just as we shouldn't be appropriating Rothko's color field paintings by projecting commercials on them. (This is an interesting conceptual idea, but is (now) out of bounds, for similar reasons that perhaps Herbie Hancock had espoused with Rockit. If you firmly believe that all art-making and music-making is spiritual in nature, the packaging has to be done extremely well, or not be packaged at all, or not require "signage". (Warhol and many other pop artists were so tactful with that aspect. What I think gets broadcast from pop art is the idea of The Idea--which I think exudes "spirituality" in itself because it arises from autotelic intentions and the natural excitement of objectifying and prototyping ideas. Being excited about making (or playing) is probably a more salient definition of a spiritual experience than something dogmatic or done as a "should" because the "why" is more clearly answered.

The problem music has with "spiritual" (read: "elitist") is that people view it with contempt as being somehow morally corrupted by being "entertainment" or a frivolous pursuit and not getting down to business with good packaging and marketing. Perhaps this is why we have organized religion because it gives us religion (packaging). i.e. a way to not let us be too loose with creative freedoms and get down to the business of being religious supported with pre-packaged reasons. But the side effect is that it is more of a petri dish of insanity than the crazy ideas that can go into creative work. The reason is because of a forced compartmentalization. One can believe in a diffuse idea of spirituality, but less-so with religion. Spirituality is an admission of not fully understanding it and being "agnostic", and that agnosticism (not knowing) is what drives creativity.

With all the talk of "innovation" in the business world, the result has been an avoidance of the freedom necessary for creativity, and a capitulation to the dogmatic and conservative and compartmentalized. We all want things to be taken seriously, and we do have to take them seriously in order to objectify them. That is, we must do the actual work to make them, or as a musician just "shutting up and playing yer guitar," as Frank Zappa expressed through an album title. Only musicians realize that musicians are serious about their work--and even at the intellectual level. I think they can coexist because they co-exist in me, and only those mirror neurons are firing. But the general public can't resonate until the contradictions have been removed and packaged up for distribution. This is interesting in itself because a shared "why" may make us wire and fire together.

So, an artist is sometimes at a crossroads of deciding to tamp down real creative spirit and just going with the more dogmatic version of what may have been a Self, but became the branded version instead. You might be better off, but not really. We aren't better off so far in 2020. This is the result of things being driven by the ultimate sale-ability of human creativity as a commodity, not just for the doing and letting our spiritual nature assist with the work. It doesn't matter what you do, or in what genre.

It's a mix of "Just Do It" and "Bilder trotz allem" or "Images in Spite of All" or “Painting After All"