Musicians and emotional selfies
September 16, 2016
Soumya Radhakrishnan
One of my favorite artists in the internet world, Amanda Palmer wrote an article on guardian the other day about how artists and musicians can process grief in today’s age of perfectly filtered selfies.
How, in the age of all this perfect-image-posturing, do we process and grieve?
But fundamentally this is what we – as artists – have always done. We take our pain and we transform it into some kind of narrative, some show or story, something … else. We frame our trauma as best we can, and we offer it up. At best, it’s a gift; at worst, it’s a product. And the amount of enduring respect we bestow on our artists seems to be directly proportionate to how well, how authentically, how selflessly, they can take and deliver an emotional selfie like this.
One way musicians can express authentically is through writing songs about human conditions from their own personal experiences and ignoring critics . That is how the songwriting process becomes more meaningful.
I’ve left my most painful experiences untouched in songwriting. The death of my college boyfriend. My brother dying for no good reason when I was 21. The difficulties with bearing children, the deep-dark bloody-womb moments. These things haven’t got songs yet. Maybe I haven’t felt authorized to write them.
To be a useful artist, I’m going to simply have to to dig deeper if I want to add anything meaningful to the conversation. And it’s terrifying. All I have to do is close my eyes and see a few YouTube comments ( …flaming narcissist … who fucking cares … how totally tasteless … pure wankery …),but then again, look at Nick. He ignores all that and simply puts it out there, too preoccupied with being authentically in the moment of expression to give a single fuck.
We cannot “make sense” of anything, really, although we can plod forth with our stupid little notebooks and paints and guitars, with our pathetically small little mirror-shards of offered reflections to one another, showing the poetic debris we’ve managed to harvest from our suffering.
After all, great works of art serve as reminders about our life.
Art reminds us. That our plans are meaningless. That help is not on the way. That our children can die in our lifetimes.
The choice to make art is, indeed, an act of blistering revenge against the nonsensical, cold unfairness of this world. Tragedy strikes. We can close down, or we can keep working on finding a frame in which to house all of this confusion. A black frame, or a white one … any frame at all. We have a choice.
Also, check out a related blog post - Why make art out of pain?
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