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The Creator and the Critic

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Joseph Mitchell - My Ears are Bent

Part 3: What It Means to Be Internet Famous, or if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

I spilled hot tea on my laptop last week and despite how important it is for me to be actively in process of finding a job (will you hire me? thx), that wasn’t the first thing that crossed my mind when it seemed that the whole machine was rendered inoperable. I was worried about two things simultaneously: the first that my laptop was the only way that I could record music and what was going to happen when I suddenly wrote some insanely good guitar lick and needed desperately to throw it onto some track that I’d been writing for years; the second was that I’d be missing out on the latest and greatest in cultural criticism that endlessly circulates on my radar, all of which I found difficult to read on my three-year-old phone. The way I accessed digital media would be stifled forever if my laptop died, all at my own hands.

I love reading criticism — music criticism especially because it’s a world that I’m a part of and try to understand — and I think that has a lot to do with the desire to feel connected on every level with the medium that you’re working in. It’s more than just about ‘being in the know’. It’s about learning the perspectives of the people who might be one day critiquing your music while also getting a read on what the ‘competition’ is, if that’s what you want to call it. I was at a loss when my computer fritzed out because I might have lost access to reading about the competition while trying to compete with or stay relevant toward the competition. If I can’t post new songs to a website, then how is my music relevant in the grand “conversation”? Why create art if no one can stream it for free on his or her laptop? Surely no one just writes music for the sake of it existing on his or her computer***? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The bottom line of either creating art or critiquing it is that at this point in the world’s 30-year relationship with the Internet, there’s no escaping trying to be one without the other. When you’re a creator, you’re bound to get caught up in the critiques, and when you’re a critic, you’ll eventually try your hand at being a creator. There’s nothing wrong with this exchange except that the critic-turned-creator title seems to be less and less a thing, and more young minds are honing their talents in the field of criticism before ever really learning the foundation of what it takes to make the art they’re critiquing. To use a metaphor, it’s like a baby trying to paint a world-class portrait simply because they were born with hands. It’s not enough sometimes — the foundation needs to be there. Is a superfluous, underwhelming but overflowing stream of content enough to build that foundation? Likely not. But I’m starting to realize that it’s unclear what actually constitutes a good foundation anymore. The library? Your local record store? Shows? All well and good, but ask me again in 10 years. Will those things even be available as resources then?

The legend of the great writer Joseph Mitchell is that when he was working for the New Yorker in the mid-60s, he would come to work every day, close the door to his office, emerge for lunch, then revisit his office with the door closed, only to return home at the end of his days without having produced anything. He is the most famous case of writer’s block that I know of, and he wasn’t even a musician, nor a musician in the mp3 days, either. He was just a guy writing for a magazine. And not to get all doomsday, but look at what happened to that industry.

When there is an influx of content, criticism, information, details, write-ups, reviews, and analyses to be read, it can greatly impede the progress and expansion of art. Suddenly, without even realizing it, it is seven hours later, all you’ve done is read reviews, then you’ve read reviews of reviews, and your mind is so gone that the only thing you know you can do is to pick up that guitar and let out the emotion through your fingers and onto the fretboard, whaling on it until you’re revived enough to return to the digital world.

And yet, here I am, writing this. On my laptop. For the Internet. For you. And around we go again.

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*I actually met Bethany at a show around this time and gave her our demo. She said they needed “CDs to listen to in their van on tour.” What a weird thing encounter seems like now.

**I was surprised to see that when I typed Beyon, my computer didn’t auto-correct add an accent to the “e.” Why is this the world we live in?

***Clearly, some do. I did. I do. Why do you think there are only 3 songs on the Bandcamp but over 80 on my laptop? It’s a weird supply-and-demand process that I can’t really figure out.

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