Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're listening to art.
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Here are three thoughts I'm going to try to connect together.
It's fascinating to watch my generation of musicians evolve and change as I age right along with them.
Musicians now have more freedom than ever before to indulge themselves with weird side projects and one-off bands.
The internet makes it all too easy to re-evaluate the past with a much more pleasant take on something than we may have originally had.
Ok. So, here's what is prompting this: draw a triangle and put the bands Gorillaz, Beastie Boys, and OK GO at the corners. All three bands have put out new work this year, but none of those new works have been records. (Also, I have mentioned two of these in recent issues. Mea culpa. I've been thinking about music and art a lot recently.)
Gorillaz is putting out new music but, thus far, what they have done is label the current collection of songs a "season" and have been steadily releasing one video per month for the, eventual I assume, record. At the moment, though, 12 new songs, no actual LP.
Beastie Boys put out a documentary called Beastie Boys Story, directed by Spike Jonze, celebrating the beginning and end of the band. It's a very good movie and it's an intriguing piece of filmmaking that defies a lot of documentary standards in innovative ways. Very good book, great movie, no LP. Further, the Beasties have stated, unequivocally, that, with the passing of Adam Yauch in 2012 there will never be another Beasties record.
And then, I just found out today, that OK GO have turned their unique, art-driven approach to music videos into a website aimed at helping students learn basic art techniques and to explore their creativity. It's a really great project that comes at an interesting time and is, in every sense, worthwhile. It's also not an LP.
I've always had a soft spot for art rock. I like weird, I like challenging, I like art that makes you think. I'll also admit that for every art rock record I like, there are at least a dozen that go right on by me without comment or concern from me. I'm also a huge fan of the side-project or one-off band that does something interesting and then fades out of existence. So, in the former category of art rock I really like, aside from the usual suspects of Bowie, Radiohead, and Tom Waits, you've got bands like Ween and They Might Be Giants, all of whom tried to do something beyond just pop and dance with their records (although they've all been known to do pop really well when they wanted to.)
This photo was among the many beautiful photos returned for the search string, traveling. Wilburys didn’t bring back a damned thing. Photo by Jet Kim on Unsplash
In the latter category, for me, this is supergroups like The Traveling Wilburys - a supergroup of famous friends who put out two records that sounded less like a band than it did karaoke night at Bob Dylan's house, foreign language records in a different genre - Mike Patton and Iggy Pop have, respectively, done records of Italian and French standards, and the occasional solo record that sounds nothing like the artist's actual band, like when Mike Ness did a country covers album.
These kinds of projects have always been around, although the ease of recording and and digital distribution has led to an explosion of all three kinds of records, which is fun to witness. And, to be fair, none of the non-musical projects I mentioned above are new either - books and films about pop music have been around almost as long as pop music itself, and while websites might be much newer, building educational or charity initiatives around your band is not. Just ask Neil Young. (For that matter, the kids record is probably the most popular "we're growing up" record to make, second only to the Christmas one...)
But it's weird to see this shift in musical side projects to art projects happen in real time. Now, the big caveat here is that I'm not sure if this is a real trend or one that I'm only seeing because I'm looking too hard for a pattern where there is none to be found, but it seems like there might be something. It makes sense, if for no other reason than we've stopped being surprised that Dennis Hopper is a great photographer or that Jim Carrey is damn near a better painter than he is actor. Creative, talented people are often good at more than one medium.
The internet gives us such a much longer memory than we used to have. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is thrown away, so I wonder how we'll be looking back at these art projects in ten years. Will we see them as interesting ways that artists transformed themselves into innovative art forms that merge solitary disciplines into collectives the same way that bands do? Or will we just look at them as momentary diversions that happened in between the bands making music?
I suspect it'll be somewhere in between.
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Stay safe, stay curious, learn something.
Joel