Raining. and Being an Artist

I’ll admit it, I have a soft spot for music criticism videos. I watch all the Diamond Axe Studios and Todd in the Shadows videos, and I’m a fan of Mic the Snare. It could just be my special interest and lack of knowledge of other media critics, but music critics seem less driven by things like rant and skit comedy (unless you’re A Dose of Buckley; I never watch his music criticisms anyways), and more set on explaining what’s good about a song and what’s bad about it.

Really just taking something apart and explaining what’s good or not about it already just scratches my brain right. I couldn’t explain it, but if you leave me in a room with a story for long enough, I’m going to take it apart and look at it like that anyways. To the point where I’ve just debated starting a story review thing on my profile, if only I read more.

It is from this land of music criticism where we get a video that has become shockingly relevant in the last 24 hours (the reason why is enough for a separate blog post).

It comes from Alfo Media, and is titled, ‘Ye, Rick Rubin, & Exploiting the Artist’s Struggle’.

Basically, the video is based around a documentary that Harrison (the person behind Alfo Media) saw. The documentary is based around a Folk Rock band who got legendary producer Rick Rubin on board to record one of their albums.

Harrison mentions that there was one particular part in the documentary that stood out to him. Toward the end, it shows the band recording a deeply personal song, pouring their heart and soul into the song, and ending up with a pretty good one.

They finish recording, and that’s when Rick Rubin says one simple thing, “What’s next?”

After pouring their heart and soul into this deeply personal song, the only response they get is a legendary producer asking them to perform more songs like that, because the song is a product.

This is where I go into a 2-hour long tirade about how capitalism has made it so that suffering is encouraged because it makes a profit… but that’s not the point that got to me here.

American Recordings V: A Hundred Highways is my favorite album of all time. That album is also comprised of deeply personal songs and was produced by Rick Rubin. It’s a look inside the mind of one of the greatest artists of Country music, Johnny Cash. It sometimes feels like you’re listening to a confessional.

However, that seems to be what the album is trying to do. It seems like the job of the artist is taking all the personal facts about life and distilling them into solid gold. At the end of the day, art is how we speak to the world, and sometimes, the world needs a reminder that artists are people too.

The original idea behind Raining. was to take a semi-autobiographical story and create something beautiful out of it. To an extent, that’s the entire Raining. series (currently numbering 5 possible entries, including the two written and published. The last two weeks of summer have been wild). The idea is to take deeply personal stories and create some of my best work out of them. Thankfully, the first story already set a high bar.

I’m not doing this because the original is a cult classic or anything. I’m doing this because the goal of the artist is to make art. Sometimes that art requires taking something deeply personal, getting your feelings straight, and painting until you fill the canvas.

Yes, pain and suffering are also marketable. In case you’ve noticed, neither of the Raining. stories start out particularly happy. That’s sort of been their brand since their inception, always meant to capture sadder and wilder moments of my life so I felt like I was at least playing a pretty song with the world’s smallest violin. People love a good conflict and resolution. Using the sadder and wilder parts of my life practically come with that built-in.

But also, they exist because I want to show people that even though my life has been relatively fine, people like me can still have moments. What better way to get that across than writing down my feelings in that moment and making readers feel them? In a way, this ties back into my whole idea around stories in general. I believe that having a story that emanates emotion is much better than having a story that’s just well written.

Why? I’m more likely to remember the story that had an effect on me instead of the one that shows the great finesse of how much the writer paid attention in English class. Yes, I know the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I think that packing your story full of emotion does more than creating a traditionally ‘good’ story that follows all the ‘rules of writing’ (whatever the hell they are).

To me, my goal as an artist is to take those deeply personal parts of my life, and write them. To get my feelings straight. To have others understand mine. To create something people will remember.

It’s taking coal and compressing it into a diamond.

If I don’t do it, who will?

And until next time; be awesome.
-Dashie