The Unreliability of Pure Feeling

I’ve been thinking about what makes an artist last. There aren’t that many artists that continue to make “good” or “relevant” work as they get older. Most bands make a few good albums, they stick around for a few years, then they sort of sink. But that’s pretty easy to explain, people grow apart all the time. Then there’s drugs. But you know, I’m not so interested in listening to Joni Mitchell’s later stuff, or Paul McCartney’s later stuff. And usually when you go through a Best of type of album, the later stuff puts me to sleep. Have they lost their edge? How does that happen?

This isn’t always true. Neil Young, Caetano Veloso, David Byrne, Mark Mothersbaugh still make great music. But what makes it that they continue to make good music for more than ten years? Because ten years seems to be the average lifespan.

So how does someone like david byrne or caetano continually create relevant music, while others sort of burn out in their mid thirties or what have you. I would hate to think it is just due to the deterioration associated with age, because obviously there are those who have made amazing things in their older years. Georgia o keefe. Meanwhile others have just let the weight of their lives, their compromises weigh them down, I dunno, they get soft or something.

I think also there’s something about exhausting your emotional resources. Your personal emotional resources. Wordsworth mined his childhood; for some reason when he moved away from that his poetry suffered. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is a breakup album. There is a particular kind of artist who looks at art as a way to to exorcise demons, to do something productive with the pain of life, as opposed to actually being interested in the fashioning of something artificial in order to convey or create responses in other people. Everyone writes poetry at 17, when their hearts are breaking. But what about when you’re forty and so much of that angst is gone? Because people are interested in drama, crisis. People are interested in art that feels like someone’s bleeding onto the page.

I’m starting to think that you can’t rely on your own personal dramas to create art. The reason why I’m thinking about this is due to a couple of interviews I’ve recently read in Pitchfork, from Sufjan Stevens and from David Byrne. One thing that struck me about Sufjan is that he doesn’t listen to music like a fan, but rather dispassionately, intellectually, to see how emotion is conveyed. Listening to Illinoise, I hear a sophisticated blend of technical skill and emotion, storytelling with feeling. It's pretty cerebral. What I see in him is curiosity about the world, about music, how sound communicates meaning, more than it is about his own feelings. But all this thought doesn't make it any less good; I get chills listening to "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." I think the same holds true of David Byrne. Neither of them makes personal emotion primary. They put it in their proper place. And though Sufjan Stevens is untested in his range or his lasting, I can see him being something like David Byrne, somehow remaining relevant.

Besides, personal emotion is so temporary. Once you’ve worked something out, it becomes no longer relevant to you. It’s a flash in the pan. And you become disinterested with what you’ve created. And if you keep mining yourself for tasty morsels of drama, what is left after? Not much. And you’ve turned yourself into somehow, less than human, because you’ve turned yourself into a mine. If you sacrifice so much of yourself to art, well, you’ve got a lot less to live on.