Triumph In Blog

Who wants to be appreciated in their time, anyway?

My previous post did some self-indulgent reflecting on the nature of dying heroes, and my own impending panic knowing that I’m running out of people to look up to in art. I guess that’s a more elegant way of eschewing the “adulting is hard” mantra, that old chestnut, but with regards to art I feel like there’s more to it than I performatively, self-deprecatingly give it credit for. We stand on the shoulders of giants, sure, but as I’ve mused, they never saw themselves as giants at the time. At least nobody I respect.

So many of the people resting on the pedestals within my own personal mind palace were passed over entirely when they were young and active, some of them still remaining in obscurity now, or straight up dead. I’ve despaired over it before and still do, but there’s a sort of profundity in that idea–it’s not at all unique to the guys I like. In fact, it’s kinda common among people considered “greats,” even outside of the world of art.

Take the popular example, Vincent Van Gogh. Incredibly famous now and regarded as a pioneer in his field, with no room for doubt. His visions were singular and otherworldly, to the extent that even people with no interest in the discipline of painting hang his work up on the wall and admire it, because it can speak to just about anyone. The urban legend pedantry about him painting the way he did because he had cataracts or fibromyalgia or havana syndrome or whatever I don’t remember is about as common as any urban legend pedantry I can think of. All this, and yet: he was just some random dutch shitkicker that annoyed everyone around him, and everyone thought his shit was mad gay until, like, the months leading up to his own suicide. He only ever found success after he died, sadly, and that’s the interesting thing about him to me.

How does that even happen? Your paintings sit around in somebody’s barn for a few years, and just by happenstance someone buys it for cents on the dollar, and it snowballs into the big time. What would he have thought if he had lived to see Starry Night become an international cultural signifier for unblemished self-expression?

Of course, a biographer might be able to answer that question specifically about him, there’s room for speculation. But I think I can take a stab at it myself–I venture he would’ve hated that stupid thing eventually. I think he might’ve hit 70 or so and shot himself anyway, because people would never stop asking him about it. I bet it would weigh so heavily on him, he might never paint again. I bet he’d cut off his other ear too, just to see if people would notice something else about him.

See, there’s another common thing you often observe in this same vein; the vein of artists achieving success because of something well after the fact. You see a lot of resentment is what you see, and it comes from a lot of different places. Some people never get noticed while they’re alive and they die before anyone understands the value of their work, but what about those whose work does get noticed, and it gets noticed right away? What about people who don’t get noticed for a while, but then they get noticed for something they did a while back that they’ve moved on from?

I’ve felt the impulse to kill my darlings already, only a few months into releasing my own slop into the void. I can’t say I don’t understand it. Imagine how, say, Sting must feel, knowing that The Police stopped being a band over 40 years ago, yet people still ask him about it every day. He was a dickhead in his 20s, ruining all his best friendships and drowning in money for the sake of a bunch of music he really only could regard as sort of quaint now, after a career so long and massive after it all came out. His career after the police has been over 5 times as long as the police existed! That would be equivalent to somebody asking me right now about the cartoons I drew on construction paper when I was 5!

I feel like it comes from that. From knowing that you need to be moving on, rendering the visions as they come to you, but the stupid bullshit you did as a kid keeps haunting you for some reason. Literally suffering from fucking success, like DJ Khaled. Many of my personal favorites have complained to varying degrees of callousness over the years, most notably Danny Elfman, who infamously refuses to oversee remasters of the Oingo Boingo catalogue, or play with his former bandmates in the reunion shit (most of the time.) To us as observers it seems nothing less than conceited, the idea that what the fans want is simply unimportant and whatever dreck you’re making now is what you really want, and you need to focus on that. But isn’t that sort of a valid way to think as an artist?

You can’t control how people will react to what you put out. Not even the “free market” can realistically do that, and it’s one of the great conundrums of art, I suppose. “Do I give a shit what other people think?” Obviously yes, but to what degree? From the inside, everything new you make is something that you put thought into because it’s incessantly and undeniably weighing on the forefront of your mind until you face up to it, so it’s sort of reasonable to groan and moan when people still want to talk about the old days. Even if you still like the old days!

When Peter Gabriel made that new post-covid music that kinda sucks, perhaps it’s true as a listener that it was forgettable old-man heal-the-world-through-music type shit that didn’t fall in line with really anything he’s done in the past few decades. It kinda pleased nobody as far as I can tell, because it wasn’t exactly up to snuff with the So or Security of the past. But it’s important to him in some way, and it’s his, so why be so down on it? Fortunately I think all my fellow Peterheads agreed, because I’ve only seen a resounding “meh,” in response, which I think is the proper response to something that you don’t care about.

The central thesis of this rambling is getting to be unclear, but all these examples sort of point me to the same conclusion, as a listener of music. Being recognized in one’s time can be a painstaking, agonizing experience–having all the eyes on you, always having to worry that your next project will just get ignored, always feeling like you have to please people, or maybe intentionally displease them. Everyone who gets too famous too soon either becomes a freak, a nuisance, or a disappointment in some way or another, and yet fame is generally how we tend to judge things as successful or not. I believe there are only two ways to avoid these eventualities: to die before anyone gives a shit, like Van Gogh, or to be voluntarily very adamant about standing by your work retroactively.

That’s what I intend to do. Not that I think I’m really on track to change the landscape or anything, but eventually I may be at a point where somebody asks me about my little EP that could from last month, and why it’s produced so badly compared to the music of what will be then the present (I’m being optimistic about my learning ability here.) I’d like to say that I’ll remember my thoughts now, and tell whoever’s asking that “I was young then, and it was small, but it was meaningful to me, and I needed to make it.” And then I like to believe that I will keep my composure when they laugh at me for my answer.

Presumably in this hypothetical I’m talking to someone whose opinion matters to me, but that’s not always the case. Part of the reason I have these narcissistic thoughts about the fame and recognition I may never even face is that I often feel that I have a pesky self-consciousness about how other people perceive what I make. I lack the bravery of some of my comrades whose unquenchable thirst to make themselves into who they want to be supersedes their need to crowd please, but I’m hoping that these long ramblings can sublimate some of my cowardice into something more useful. Maybe Van Gogh would’ve hated the Starry Night, or maybe he would’ve just accepted that everyone else thought it was cool, and continued to just be who he was, because after a lifelong career of creating things, he came to understand how the game worked.

So, being famous seems to suck, is what I’m saying I guess. We all want it, because it makes things easier in the short term, but it ends up kinda sucking. So I hope I can continue to make my bleeps and bloops without going insane, or hating myself more than I already do. I also hope that I don’t have to shoot myself to meet that goal, but we’ll see how far my current day job pushes me.