Disco Workout » Disco Sunday #45: Expensive Sounding Music

Disco Sunday #45: Expensive Sounding Music

Posted on December 21st, 2008 posted by Baron von Luxxury in Disco Sunday

Why do we make things? Why do we spend hours agonizing over a beat, a lyric, a mix, or even a blog post, when there may or may not be any clear tangible benefit from its propagation?

A piece called “What is Art For” in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago details how Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book “The Gift” was inspired by Marcel Mauss’s essay on gift exchange societies.

“For nearly a decade (Hyde) had been struggling to explain — to his family, to nonartist friends, to himself — why he devoted so much of his time and energy to something as nonremunerative as poetry. The literature on gift exchange — tales, for example, of South Sea tribesman circulating shells and necklaces in a slow-moving, broad circle around the Trobriand Islands — gave him the conceptual tool he needed to understand his predicament, which was, he came to believe, the predicament of all artists living [emphasis BvL’s] “in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities.”

Most people “get” that my Fake Name is ironic. Beyond the self-coronation, the in-joke for me in using the word “luxury” is that every moment I am making music is a guilty pleasure. Because in spite of my having artistic and supportive parents and friends, our culture does not place the same value on creativity as it does on wealth creation. We deify not the most innovative artists but the most lucrative ones. Our class system is based not upon castes of birth but rather economic status, and artistic “success” is often conferred, if psychologically, on the “rich get richer” principle.

For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.”

“Bill Viola, the pioneering video artist, remembers New York artists in the 1980s excitedly exchanging dog-eared, marked-up copies. “In a society that mostly talks about money,” says Margaret Atwood, who keeps a half-dozen copies of “The Gift” on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it, “Lewis carved out a little island where you can say, ‘Life doesn’t always work that way.’ ”

I like this myth-busting article about art and ambition from a recent Huffington Post piece about Danny Goldberg who managed Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and many more.

“Huffpo: You mention that it isn’t enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for having talent.

Danny Goldberg: I think that artists that I’ve met who have been successful all had some desire to be successful. Not that they would always do things the easiest way or most commercial way, but they had a focus that helped propel them. Like Stevie Nicks doing the songs with Tom Petty at a certain time or working with a producer that, at first blush, was not part of the community that she was into. Or Bruce Springsteen focusing on trying to get a pop radio hit. The music business is competitive and having musical talent itself is not sufficient.”

“Huffpo: You’ve often stood at the intersection of art and commerce. Anything you want to say about that?

Danny Goldberg: I don’t understand the question. That’s what the whole book is about.”

Here are all the remixes and edits I made/released in 2008. Happy Hannukkah!