It’s All Art
So. I have a fascinating new thing.
It is my nature to go deep down rabbit holes when I find one, often actors, sometimes musicians, and I go and watch videos and interviews, read coverage going back years or decades, and return to favorite content over and over again. It energizes me and inspires me in different ways, depending on the relationship that the individual has with art and creativity, but it’s the sort of thing that leads to a set of music videos or albums that sets the soundtrack to multiple novels.
I don’t often write about it, because there are much less fairweather fans in the world who can legitimately crow about the talents of their favorite performers, but I’m deep into this one and spending more and more time thinking about the relationships among the arts.
I’m not exactly a newcomer to Twenty-One Pilots – I actually have a full novel that was inspired by one of their songs a while back – but I have been a superficial consumer for a long time. Level of Concern, though, has changed things. It hit me at a moment, the way I suspect it has an enormous number of other people, given the way it has taken off, and it catalyzed an interest that has followed very traditional paths. I’m going through their albums and listening to them front to back on loop. I’m watching interviews and live concert footage. I’m reading articles. I can’t issue guarantees on such things, but I expect that Blurryface and Trench will be the nearly-exclusive soundtrack for at least two or three novels.
Let me first drop the Level of Concern video here, because… worthy.
Tyler Joseph is… astonishing to me. Familiar. A mind that sees mine.
I know that that’s what art *is*, but it still always blows me away when it happens. It doesn’t get old. Art is capturing the way the world feels and the way the world is at an essential level, expressing existence, and – in my opinion – if it is done right, it’s something that is awakening to other people as they relate to it.
And I’m late to the party. These guys have got a die-hard following, and I love that. I know that I am *not* that. I am something else. A fairweather fan chasing the next new high, my next fascinating new thing. I’ll get their next album. And the one after that. I’m a *loyal* fan to my fascinating things. I watch all their movies, all their shows, listen to all their music, watch their videos. But I’m not a core fan. I get that. I’m okay with that.
But it doesn’t change how intensely involved I am with this art *right now*.
With the idea of the mind who set it out.
The world is often dark, fighting with shadows, never knowing which ones are incorporeal and which ones are going to push you underwater, and some days all you’re doing is trying to crawl out of the tar. Other days you make a better showing. Geez, that hits me all the way at my core.
But my intent isn’t to fangirl over Mr. Joseph’s intensely personal art.
What I’ve also been thinking about is how much I identify with him as an artist.
About the way having people react to your work is so core to the reward of creating art. About the ongoing desire to pick up new skills and expand existing ones when you have the opportunity. About the constant switching back and forth between artist mode and executive mode and how expensive that transition is. About how terrifying it is to tie your identity to your art. About the difference between putting your head down and creating something and the way the professional industry picks a date on a calendar *way out there* and says that that’s when it’s going to be done.
I find the process of creating music – and film – very interesting compared to that of creating prose, because of the collaborative nature of music and film compared to the extremely isolated process of writing. There is also the distinction between the recording arts – creating a fixed product for consumption – and the performing arts – a live act of artistic creation for the audience, and how music and acting have their own flavors of both recording and performing art, whereas writing… The idea of doing in-person signings is a someday-maybe goal, but that hardly counts as performing. Some authors do live or recorded readings, but that’s such a distinctly *different* skill from writing. I find myself mildly jealous of performing artists, because of the feedback they get in a live setting, while I’m simultaneously *absolutely certain* that if the *risks* of live performance were a part of the natural art of writing, I would *not* be a writer. I hate traveling and I hate… well, risk. Playing to an empty theater or a dead crowd? The idea makes me feel physically ill, and I am so grateful that my medium is a keyboard and I work wherever and whenever I choose.
All of us are telling stories, though. Capturing the way the world looks and feels to us, and then discovering that there are people out there who have had shades of the same experience. Knowing and being known. This is what I want out of art and this is what I want as an artist.
Level of Control was a song written for a moment. Tyler talks about not overthinking it, about finding a way to put out the art in the moment that it fits, and it just resonates with my process, particularly with the idealized version of how I *want* to be a writer. Don’t overthink it. Create the product that feels the way it’s supposed to, and then let it out into the world and move forward.
There’s a track on Blurryface that I play over and over, because it’s so familiar to me as an artist. Lane Boy is about doing the art you want to do – that it’s *in* you to do – and completely disregarding the industry guidelines on how to be successful. Fairly Local has echoes of the same thing. The songs that play on the radio are the ones that pave your success as a musician in much the same way that writing within a big, defined genre and hitting all the tropes right is the most reliable way to find success as a writer. (Or hitting publisher tastes; an experiment I’ve avoided thoroughly enough to not be able to speak about it at all.) But there is a private success to creating things that represent the diversity of your own existence, of your own taste and your own culture, and I am just *digging* that right now. I’m inspired by the defiance of it, and the way it suggests that maybe creating everything rather than just commercially successful things is a part of artistic success.
I’ve seen – heck, I’ve *written* – commentary that says that the only real ruler for the quality and success of writing is the revenue it generates. Everything else is just opinion. Aaaaand… Objectively, everything else *is* just opinion. But there’s a counterweight to that. I’ve met authors making six figures a year. I’ve listened to authors who make seven figures a year. I know of authors making eight figures a year. But they don’t have the career I want. (And they work awfully hard at a lot of things that aren’t writing.) I’m okay going where I want to, writing what I want to, and picking up fans along the way who are just as excited as I am with the new right-hand turn.
Space Opera, anyone? Coming soon…
Not all of my readers are going to be enthusiastic about everything I write. An awful lot of them are only going to only be enthusiastic about the one thing I wrote. That’s cool. I get it. I have authors – and actors and musicians – where I really only have one series that I’m into and it isn’t the artist’s voice that draws me in so much as the details of the piece.
No hard feelings, no harm done.
But I can create what I want, I can try *anything* I want, I can collaborate with anyone I want, I can create the thing that I want it to be and let it go, and hopefully along the way I can create a body of work that my readers are going to find is a rich selection of options where they can find art that captures things about the world that are personal to them. To see and be seen, to know and be known.
Art.
Tyler Joseph.
Twenty-One Pilots.
Fascinating New Thing.
