Art For Art's Sake
Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:31 am
It has struck me recently that many/most/all musical acts have a constant friction between the desire to create works of great artistic merit and the day-to-day needs of selling enough records to pay the rent. This means that sometimes an album comes along that looks like commercial suicide but is that artists need, at that moment, to put commercial desires aside and just go with what they wanted to do.
A recent case in point would be Taylor Swift's gorgeous 'Folklore' where she dumps her chart-topping, arena-fiilling gloss pop sound for an intimate, acoustic collection of introspective songs from the heart.
I've just had Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk' on (well, the first half) and that is a sprawling, confused mass of utter brilliance that is so clearly a deliberate attempt NOT to make 'Rumours 2' which was what the world expected (and wanted) at the time.
Another entry in this list is U2 'The Unforgettable Fire'. Sensing that after 'War' they were being lined up as the next hard-hitting Dinosaur-Rock formation to pick up where The Who left off, the men from Dublin hauled in ambient guru Brian Eno as producer and locked themselves away in a castle. The resulting album changed their punk-inspired sound into complex, weaving layers and improvised texts. A truly, staggeringly massive album emerged and the path to world domination with 'The Joshua Tree' lay wide open.
It is not a question of what is 'the best' album here - sometimes those 'experimental' efforts go totally the wrong way and leave the fans wondering what the hell the artist was thinking. But it is the point where a musician/group are getting into their stride and turn to the world to say "THIS is what we are capable of !"
A recent case in point would be Taylor Swift's gorgeous 'Folklore' where she dumps her chart-topping, arena-fiilling gloss pop sound for an intimate, acoustic collection of introspective songs from the heart.
I've just had Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk' on (well, the first half) and that is a sprawling, confused mass of utter brilliance that is so clearly a deliberate attempt NOT to make 'Rumours 2' which was what the world expected (and wanted) at the time.
Another entry in this list is U2 'The Unforgettable Fire'. Sensing that after 'War' they were being lined up as the next hard-hitting Dinosaur-Rock formation to pick up where The Who left off, the men from Dublin hauled in ambient guru Brian Eno as producer and locked themselves away in a castle. The resulting album changed their punk-inspired sound into complex, weaving layers and improvised texts. A truly, staggeringly massive album emerged and the path to world domination with 'The Joshua Tree' lay wide open.
It is not a question of what is 'the best' album here - sometimes those 'experimental' efforts go totally the wrong way and leave the fans wondering what the hell the artist was thinking. But it is the point where a musician/group are getting into their stride and turn to the world to say "THIS is what we are capable of !"
