My life, my awareness as a part of universe,
Thus awareness of the universe itself,
Is no more than a bypassing state.
My art is more alive than I am,
More alive than my thoughts,
More alive than my awareness as a being.
I’m already dead in the eyes of the world.
In fact we all are dead in the moment we are born.
Alone in our thoughts.
Art, my art, is a state of reality bundled together.
As a captured viewpoint.
My art is more alive than I am,
Since you at the very moment
Are affected by these exact vibrations in your eardrum.
As you experience these vibrations,
I’m indirectly more alive than I was at the moment I created this experience.
Thus my art is more alive than I am, or ever will be.
My friend, in the eyes of the universe you are already dead,
You are no more than a bypassing state.
And so am I
Captured Viewpoint (2001)
[undisclosed] / Just Another Superstar
Captured Viewpoint
Above are the lyrics for my song “Captured Viewpoint”, I composed in 2001, and which is now used to demonstrate how minute details add to the overall tone of any piece of music – hopefully evident in the video, which is just a simple capture of the original way this particular song was composed, and how it looks from a pragmatic perspective as a musician who has to put these beats, sounds and progressions into action through a restricted, but in right hands a powerful tool [1]
[1] Captured Viewpoint was originally made with (now obsolete) Impulse Tracker, and thought Renoise (software used in the video) was a good alternative to show how most of my projects before 2002 looked when producing. The video is not completely truthful take, as the post-processing work for individual tracks had often much bigger role to get to a specific sound.
It can be also said that in the early modern years of computerized composing and rapid exchange of knowledge due to rise of Internet (especially in late 1990′s), the rudimentary and limited tools dictated more than often the kind of music you could and would make, acting at the same time as a catalyst to find more and more outlandish sound seemingly not possible with given instruments at a first glance.
The subject of using modern tools for electronic music like a contemporary composer who does not bow to any doctrines, however, in its extensiveness, will be a scope of another article altogether in the future, which will dissect in detail, a song or two I have made in the past. Now this piece (out of about 1000) just sheds a bit more light on how limitations make us try harder to exceed the set standards on any field.
To shift this week’s essay to proper focus and kick it in a high gear, below is one quote from a short, but an insightful post – The flickering moments of greatness.
[When] the artist sees a vision and is compelled to communicate it, he becomes a conduit of an experience that metamorphoses with the viewer, [while] the viewer may see a completely different experience from that of the artist. - amonikabyanyuvva
So much truth in above words… The spectator ultimately decides what the given piece means to them, but I would go even further and make a statement that ideas and creations that truly surface and become a part of our cultural heritage, may be seen to manifest themselves to be in some way even more alive through other people who are inspired and affected by the said creations, than the person at the moment they created the experience.
One can make a counter-argument though that when you go through a process of creating with passionate fervor, those are the moments you feel to be the most alive, while the outcome in at instant is just a possibility of an idea or experience that may or may not live through the audience it touches.
At the same time immediately one has produced something unique, then that something becomes an object even to the artist, which turns from creator to spectator in a repeating cycle throughout the creative process, which ends after any particular piece or even part of it has been finished.
Whether you paint with your life, your voice or your words, after every brush stroke, the painter turns momentarily into a spectator – and a very critical one in the most cases.
I guess that inevitable ending of the creative process, the final rush to finish a piece of work to feel for a moment that you have once again reached the height you can reach, makes us at the same time almost immediately feel empty inside – with this questions in front of us: What now? The very same feeling most high caliber athletes often go through after breaking a record or winning a major event.
So artists are at the same time part of the audience to their own work and even that view, as close it is, may be skewed and the more people start constructing a common theme around artist’s work, franchise or a piece of culture, the more the commonly accepted idea of what it is supposed to mean, becomes the norm, regardless of what the original intent by the creator was.
This goes on to say that audience as a whole decides through their actions, thoughts and derivative works how anything we create is interpreted or adapted. Art and music in particular can be seen as a captured viewpoint, a limited window for a particular mind trying to understand and organize the reality in them and around them to not only free themselves, but to let others see what they saw, just from a different perspective.
Ludwig van Beethoven (Joseph Karl Stieler, 1781-1858) Damn, that’s intense look! ,)
What would Beethoven do?
My question to all artists out there is to choose from the following two extreme scenarios:
Would you want every single spectator to experience your creative work, performance or art in the exactly same fashion and the level of understanding you originally intended, but never with new eyes? In effect they would see exactly what you see.
Or, would you rather have those same people each have a unique, subjective experience dictated by their life and level of awareness, like we do, but never exactly the way you intended? In effect you would never be completely understood.
While the answer might be obvious and the latter scenario is almost a caricature of the current reality everyone lives in, whether we consider ourselves artists or not, I would say that the opposite is actually true what comes to the understanding part.
The more spectators there are and the more popular and visible a work, franchise or a person grows, the clearer the perception and the original intent of the raw talent behind the works becomes, despite how everything is adapted or recycled. A few correlations from the history: Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi can be seen as rock-stars of their time and their music was considered modern, maybe even radical at the time. Only after hundreds of years, their masterpieces have grown to be part of the culture as much as they have, due to digital cultural revolution. And while the minds that created these works are long gone, their work lives on with a renewed life.
Here is a little thought play for you: What you think, for example Beethoven would have had to say about how his music is used these days?
As much as copyright laws are important, even with their current ebbs and flows especially within music industry, the rise of digital era has enabled art and entertainment evolve the way it has with almost endless possibilities. Mass is needed to build a basic foundation for something greater than the sum of its parts. Same time due to easy way to copy, re-create and adapt any digital content (and soon even real products with 3D printing) the creators, artists and music makers of our generation face for the first time in human history the same pains every parent has had to endure since the dawn of time – letting go of their children when they grow up. [2]
[2] Much later I might dig deeper onto those growing pains of talented creators fighting in the sidelines scraping by and how consumers may in the future benefit directly from the success they help to create. (Just a little teaser what goes by)
Meaning that while creators have automatically the copyright for their work, we have literally no saying what people do with our works and this is exemplified the more popular artist becomes, apparent in the countless parodies, remixes, mashups and and so forth. Mass culture and viral media, as it is today, grants all people or ideas similar chances to get exposure and to be heard and logically best one’s should rise more easily to the top. This is obviously not the case always, but even the mock competition and cries to have more followers, real or not, makes us try even harder, which in effect at its best, makes a civilization also try harder to survive, evolve and expand.
This is a bit of a stretch, but from time to time somewhere, out of the blue, someone comes and says, “We can do things better than this”. Even though, the most we seem produce to enrich “culture”, is bland, boring, predictable and plain garbage. But hey, you can think it this way too – to cultivate that cream of the crop you need some dung too [pun intended].
To quote myself, I pointed out in my post “Without a surface there is no depth…“
To an outsider it often looks redundant, even counter-intuitive for productivity, to finesse certain piece […] ten hours straight […] then scrapping it one instant, because it was not good enough.
[…] what really happened, is that he essentially trained his own mind to be more attuned to the details. […] And then this artist goes on and creates afterwards a masterpiece from scratch in five minutes.
And in my first post “All good things start from somewhere“
Still, to me it has always been about constantly raising the bar in every way what comes to quality, not about quantity for the sake of it, but to get to the level where creativity is as easy as breathing you have to produce, produce, produce.
Above thoughts can be adapted to mean also our society, culture, sub-cultures and cliques within society. Without mass there cannot be contrast between ordinary and extraordinary that leads to greatness, for which without an evolutionary spirit of a civilization would drift apart.
This leads to a thought that great feats and outdoing yourself, no matter how irrational they might seem at first, serve some purpose like climbing to a mountain – why? – Because it is there. In this regard, Jackasses of this world has their place in culture as much as or high arts, high-art trash (for the record, I liked this film) or completely out of this world.
No audience equals death to a star.
I’m waking up every morning
Feeling like I’m the one
Like I’m the sun
With ego like billion tons
But when I’m out there
Bringing the show
Between the mind and a microphone
You come first, I come second
As my pleasure needs your pressure
Cos’ can lift myself only so far,
It’s the masses that make the star
Between the Mind and a Microphone (2012)
[undisclosed] / Just Another Superstar
In my opinion, every healthy human being has a fundamental born ability to be able to understand the most complex ideas ever coined about our existence or any given subject, no matter how hard. We all share similar physical characteristic to each other, thus in all likelihood we are able to see the world and us, if not completely but for the major part, the same way other people do.
Right? Seems a fair assessment, because without any common ground we would be alien to each other and unable to communicate, systemize or create new life.
Einstein on Reality
I am just throwing this out – how accurately do you think you are able match your awareness and understanding to the greatest minds from the history or even current times? - the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, Stephen Hawking and maybe even Eminem‘s and Gaga‘s and the likes of this world, even though they do not fit to this list at all. Do I? Do tell.
My answer:
We can touch, even if it is just in passing, the very same thoughts the greatest thinkers in this world, but it just takes much more effort for an untrained mind.
Which is why most of us choose to be distracted for better part of our lives and waking up right before we die. What kind of life is that, if you do not even try, I ask?
Directing back to greatness and the great artists, whose job is to paint a better picture of our scattered lives, brace and bold stomp new paths to reach the skies, to enable mere mortals to touch the thoughts of the great minds. [3]
[3] Came with that piece of poetry/lyrics on the spot, Just Another Superstar © 2012
Was Plato just lucky to be the first?
I present now an argument that Plato and his posse were not necessarily extraordinary in their thinking in modern standards, whether they were put on pedestal by their peers at the time. The giants whose shoulders we stand on, just happened to be among the first recorded, who captured in writing the existential thinking process we all go through in some point of our lives.
A curious, maybe shocking detail, I do not know: I have not read a single book from any great philosopher, like ever. Very early on I decided to avoid that world and not to bow to any doctrine, ism or set truth and rather constructed my own point of view. Only much later I realized there have been others with same thoughts and dipped in enough for my needs and then turned my passion to become a pop star.
I chose this unique approach of not digesting too much deep thoughts by others for two reasons mainly: To have first hand proof that some ideas about our existence and the way we reason reality around us are universal and available to be found by any aware being, without any prior knowledge. Second reason was more mundae, because every small bit I read from these pedestalized [sic] thinkers, felt like I had read it already and it was all too easy (thus boring) and to me ability to put those thoughts into some action has always been the end-game.
This is the reason why most of us feel an initial almost instinctive jealousy towards talented people, who are destined to succeed or are successful already. The envy derives from the fact that the very same ideas, opinions and the observations stars, celebrities or great artists present, are something we all have gone through some time in our life.
And this feeling of being at the level with big shots, is not a surprise as especially music is mostly about the ways to cope with our life or lack of it. A good kind of distraction, really. In same breath, it is hard to envy really big stars, like Eminem, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Bono, whoever, as they have already made their mark, and for the most aspiring artists it seems so out of reach to even begin to compete.
But if you see someone pushing through at the same ballpark than you, the more of a gut reaction it becomes to contempt, even if that emotion is born out of hidden respect.
You are the artist of your own life. Make it beautiful. (Courtesy of Paris Hilton)
Paris Hilton is a philosopher of happiness
She just might not realize it, yet.
Raise your hands if you are guilty to the following (I know, I am in the past), and this goes to people with ambition of any kind. Have you thought that you should be entitled, nay, that you absolutely deserve, to have a similar recognition than the more successful people in your field of work or art right now, because you feel you could have done the same they have, if you just have had the resources and the same audience to play with?
Which all actually might be true, what comes to the gifts as a thinker and a doer and you might even have objectively the greatest idea in the world.
Here is a follow-up question: What have you done lately, in order to make that desperation or dream (often both), a reality of yours?
The greatest thought without an action, as simple as writing, is in vain, and most artists fail to turn their craft and creed into a money tree, because they lack perseverance and will power to change in a constantly evolving playing field. Meaning, that if you as a creator who wants to succeed and make your mark, are not able to plant whatever the vision, beauty and perception you might have, to the soils of any given generation, or not willing to adapt to the climate we live in – to spirit of the times – reflecting and communicating with modern culture and pop culture, then those thoughts will be lost, like tears in rain.
Each distinct era ultimately repeats the same questions and the same answers and comes up with the same understanding and wisdom about our existence as a species, while the science broadens our horizons of what the universe is and what is our place in it as a human race. This is derived from a naturally born need by every generation to create own stories to reflect the state of being in the current climate, culture, technology and the capabilities we possess.
Right packaging matters
The right packaging is exactly why someone or something becomes highly successful. Sometimes all you sell is packaging, but even mere image has a purpose, since we compose our self-image from scattered thoughts and everything we perceive will enhance or redact from that image. The experiences that allow us to express ourselves better, lets us connect and communicate and most importantly to be understood by our peers, gets usually the most of our attention. We all want to be respected and loved and a few among us want to be stars.
You might agree without thinking with the statement that for example Paris Hilton or Kimye West all have very little substance to contribute to the culture, but they have as much right for happiness, than anyone else and the fact is that these people are already out there pushing their presence without a shame – wisdom or no wisdom. A world without celebrities and big egos, would be a very dull place, but if all you as an audience do, is to live through other people’s lives, your contribution to the society is even less.
On a personal note, I went through this kind of thinking about my worth as an artist, with a bloated ego and narcissistic tendencies, when I was a teen and a bit after that too (I mean, who has not?) and through time started more and more treat my personality and voice (both figuratively and physically) as a product, that can be trained, molded and sold to masses.
At the first my motivation to succeed was purely selfish and I thought, I chose this job, saying – “I deserve to be famous and successful, because I am the best, fuck the rest“, then turned the ego slowly over the years (even though I am still pretty young) into an engine, with a realization that deep down I want to do this and to be heard by the masses, because my job chose me – to inspire people through music, stories and so much more.
Even deeper reason to want to be a superstar, and I think this holds true to any great one’s out there already or gone, is the feeling of having more to give to this world than anyone else you know, and the only way you can think of living a “normal” (as normal a celebrity can) happy life is to become famous and reach the audience you feel is within your reach.
I went through the following internal dialogue in many, many occasions, until finally nailing it:
The drive that keeps me awake, the ambition to be the best at what you do – I realized that this pressure would never go away and only grows stronger the more you fight against. It would either push me down or lift me up and it was up to me to decide what it was going to be.
Skipping few beats – I then went to the depths of my mind, as deep as you could get, to embrace the fears, the doubts, the turmoil, and let it all try and crush me, or so it thought, just to understand people without hope, and then I turned that drive into a creative force that makes me an artist and a person I am today.
Strong and adamant, also content, just trying to get so much more.
All ambition comes from the following force – if you know that you have something of worth to give to the world and you do not push it out in thoughts, in action, in sights and sounds, with all your presence – the face and the voice all the way to how you look and your life choices… You suffocate.
To an ambitious mind, the only way to breath is to get heard.
There is no simpler way of putting it.
- Just Another Superstar
PS. Even though I go fairly deep here to the thinking process, when I come out as a performing artist elsewhere, it is a whole another world with much more in-your-face package that can be digested in an instant, yet leaves wanting more. But I thought to try and and become the first major artist, star and a celebrity who reveals in detail how it all was done from scratch to Grammys, while the dream is being realized.
Or at least reveal everything in a timely fashion, as long as it does not take away from the X-factor you must bring with you to the pro leagues. In some ways I consciously detach myself from the creative work – the passion that you have to experience to create something noteworthy, once it is done and treat everything like any other job.
Too many great minds burn out, I decided long time ago that I am not one of them. Thus treating even this piece of text as part of a product that helps me to sell my music and whatever it is to fans turned consumers, keeps things tangible.
PPS. One more afterthought, there are many artists who have great talent with a lot of passion and sometimes blind rage against watered down wannabes, who have a strong ego and an easily identifiable image, which has been marketed well to the masses by music industry. Very few can combine both worlds and be able to package the passion that drives us to be the best at what we do, into to a pop product and treat it like a business, which just happens to be based on art. Those who do, are true stars.
PPPS. (Wanted to use PPPS. at least once in this blog 
and my second smiley too (other one is also in this post, but not easy to find) Whatever happens, I will enjoy my journey day at the time… and hope everyone who tags along does too, because to reach even 1% of all these set feats, will be more than 99,9% people experience in their wildest dreams.
