I’d make fun of the outdated cell phone but mine is much older.
There’s a number of bands I’ve listened to, and still do, that ended up with woefully stunted careers though their music hit all the right buttons. In every sense they did everything “correct” but ended up nowhere, leaving behind a truncated discography that only a handful will hear of and enjoy. In the anarchy of music preferences there’s no telling who the winners will be and who won’t.
Despite what was propagandized by punk rock for decades, the music industry is hardly centralized, even in the major label heydays. Those evil corporate suits had no control over what sold and what didn’t. For every two or three artists that had a hit single and went on to recoup the cost of production, there were 40 or 50 that the label lost money on. If they had so much decision-making power, why did they constantly lose money?
Our best bet is find a niche and drill into it. You can copycat everyone and maybe see some returns on it from a generally wide audience. But it’s easier, relatively speaking, to be one of the “go to” producers of art for a subculture of people, while being ignored or scoffed at by the rest of the world.
These kinds of success stories are littered everywhere, especially in the world of art, and we are all familiar with some of them. But we can’t claim omniscience of all the great artists all of the time, and that’s the point. The artists that tend to make the greatest impact are the ones that only some of us notice.
Photo by robertbanh.
4 Comments
Some people claim they just had a sense–or inner knowledge–that they would be famous. Bob Dylan claims that. But it seems awfully easy to claim it after the fact. How many others have delusions of grandeur that never come to anything? For the record, I have them all the time. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go down in history for something–I just haven’t decided what yet. I’m considering breaking some kind of banana eating record, or discovering a new kind of toad stool that thrives in deep space. I’ll sell you my autograph if you’d like.
“But it seems awfully easy to claim it after the fact. How many others have delusions of grandeur that never come to anything?”
Exactly. Because of mass media we end up with biased sampling from the biographies of the famous. We don’t hear of the people who predict their own fame but never achieve it.
Will you sell it to me now? If the price is right, it wouldn’t be a bad investment.
Hmm. I’ll have to consider the whole price thing. Unfortunately, my handwriting is bad enough that most people would feel taken for a ride if they spent more than a dime for my autograph.
I don’t the the expectations for legibility are high. I don’t recall any autograph that didn’t make my eye go, “huh now?”