Listening to early Nirvana. You can hear in their sound how they wanted to make popular music which didn’t have what was to them the bad parts of popular music. That’s a valuable way to approach the problem: from the direction of popular toward what satisfies your artistic needs. The other way is from your artistic needs to what is popular and that doesn’t work as well because your artistic needs can be too extreme – in any number of ways – to be popular without you feeling you are compromising too much. It’s easier to identify the negative aspects of something than to identify what you need to carve out of yourself, simply because it’s so hard to match what you cut out to what’s popular when you’re not approaching from the perspective of what’s popular. I think this shows up in the success of many. In some ways, it’s also what Mrs. Maisel is about: she not only learns some craft but learns that she can’t be ‘herself’, meaning the actual Midge, but rather has to fit herself to a conception that’s popular and which then fits Midge. That Amy S-P does this explicitly is pretty cool: she has an actual character who lives out a stereotype totally different from her reality, and Midge learns from that how to play the popular character once she realizes she has to step into that role in a way that preserves what she does. So she becomes Mrs. Maisel. Steve Martin became that guy who said Excuse Me. Albert Einstein became the guy who wrote e = mc^2.
It’s interesting to think about this in terms of career versus the one-hit wonders. Who Let The Dogs Out? Taylor Swift. That’s meant to be a contrast: woof-woof, woof, woof-woof versus album after album of expanding genius. The big wind from Winetka that blew back out again, versus Picasso. Is it that some have in them only the lucky shot where it all comes rtogether in an instant and for an instant, while others have in them so much more? Of course it is. That’s the gnostic gospel in one sense: if you have it within you and you bring that out, then that will save you.
jomi: playing with perception 