Creating an actual "body of work", while having so many vocabularies to use.

On 12/12/2019 at 8:21 AM, Left Unexplained said:

without pissing off Jordan Peterson lol

 

 

Amazingly, that's actually a very interesting remark even if it's meant to be a joke. Peterson's disdain for postmodernism is aimed (imo) at a lot of the rhetoric that dominates it more than whatever it actually produces artistically, cuz in the end people aren't "postmodern" people, they're just people and when they create something they do it in the context of their life and times. They can't actually escape this.

So, for example, if I argue that "Anything can be music," it's not to say that I want to destroy the meaning of the word "music," but I want to properly represent what I am doing, which is appreciating things as music that are not commonly viewed as music. I extend this stance to its logical conclusion and make the statement then that if X can be music to me, then Y can surely be music to someone else. Semantics are kind of a big deal when you're dealing with stuff which by its very nature tends to break norms. In this instance, I should be able to represent reality (in other words, my actual stance and observation about the world) with words to a meaningful degree. Someone can argue that I'd be using the word "Music" wrong, but then I could just replace it with "art" and we're just moving the goalpost rather than addressing the point itself.

But concerning the thread itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

This is a big deal. A really big deal. I learned when I was studying years ago that limiting yourself consciously in "Language" and so on is a good idea when you're trying to actually study something in-depth. It's a pretty simple principle, if not immediately obvious, you split up the seemingly "infinite" possibilities into actually manageable chunks and work on them individually. I mean, obviously, you can and should have the drive to just "do whatever," as that's the whole point, but you are your own worst enemy if you haven't learned to focus and "zoom in" on what's actually something that you want to do and what interests you.

On the other hand, you obviously still end up doing this intuitively to some extent as you will invariably copy what others are doing and, barring radical pluralist stuff, a whole lot of music (most, I'd argue) sticks to a consistent aesthetic line for its duration. All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes, so you'll get experience no matter what you do if you just keep writing long enough.