The subjective pop artist

Indeed: queried on the subject, contemporary songwriters freely admit to writing from personal experience. One would think subjectivity were a kind of artistic valediction, the way artists from all genres fall over themselves to cite their own life as their inspiration. Even modern songwriters’ strained insistence on the importance of originality does not prevent them from echoing each other over and over on this issue. It is of course rather hard to resist making precisely this answer since in effect it constitutes an easy boast: my life is sufficiently eventful and the events are sufficiently extraordinary to feed my creativity. The fact that songwriters now regard it pretty much as their duty to point to their lives when asked about their aesthetics is yet another indication of our age’s artistic poverty.

Songwriters who write from personal experience find themselves, as their career progresses, writing either increasingly socio-political, or increasingly obscure songs, the latter, no doubt, because personal experiences tend to be a little boring and benefit hugely from a vague rendering. You can identify artists who allow subjectivity to impact upon their art by the increasingly long intervals between their successive albums. I’m not kidding: they have to wait for interesting events to take place in their lives before they can write.

It is an unfortunate side-effect of fame that it seduces artist into an inflated sense of self. Songwriters who abandon time-honoured motifs and archetypal considerations in favour of ‘honest’ emotional reportage are an embarrassment. Truly: an artist has let go of intelligible reality when he imagines he ought to write opinionated songs, just because a few reporters came round his house the other day asking him for opinions. It is a development that has taken fifty years, but now, because tabloids can sell millions of copies by putting their faces on the cover, songwriters feel no qualms about putting their personality on display in their songs. When Michael Stipe sings: “It’s been a bad day, please don’t take a picture,” I picture a man, so ugly and innately downtrodden (geek) that, from spite (anagram of Stipe) he is unable to resist drawing attention to his fame.

When an artist feels that his life is interesting enough to form the basis of his art, he ceases to be an artist.