Author: iknowthemall

"Freaks my balance out..."

Why, and for whom, a great song going mainstream is bad

I don’t usually write propaganda articles, it is not my forte, but I have recently seen a lot of hipsters going under the blade because they say things like “another song ruined by mainstream”, or “fucking sellouts”, or “I heard them before it came on House”, without any proper defence. I am here to say that they have a point, and that they are totally justified in letting their wrath out on songs or bands that get mainstream.

First up and most importantly, exclusivity and the feeling of being cheated upon. There is something about having your own little discoveries that no one else knows that are reflective of your dedication to discovering new music. And when you have searched long and hard for a gem only for it to get mainstream a month later, it can piss you off. It’s no longer your baby, it’s a whore now, playing everywhere. You cannot share it even, because everyone knows it already. This feeling is crucial to the enjoyment of any song, and without this, a lot of the juice of the song goes away. When you spread the word about a lesser known band and everybody appreciates them, they are not just a band whose music you listen to, but you now become a member of their band, obviously not musically but emotionally. This is critical to any band getting recognition. Once the band becomes famous, you no longer are a crucial member of the band, your appreciation and word is no longer important to them, you are just one of the crowd that oh so loves them.

Secondly, for the artist, displacement of motives and dilution of quality. In most of the cases, art is created by an inspiration from within, a feeling that is alien to anyone without this sensibility. But artists are human too, they need love too, they need appreciation too, they need money too, they like fame too. When a particular song gets a disproportionate amount of success compared to their other songs, they are tempted to make more music like that, and though it may be great for the new labels and the new fans who think that this sort of sound is cool, it is no longer a genuine form of art but insecurities and desperation masquerading as new art. This is loathsome to the fans who loved them from earlier days, because they are more discerning than their current followers, and know they are being cheated. This boils to foaming rage in some cases.
While I do acknowledge that going mainstream is not necessarily bad and creativity can still flow, it is very difficult for naive artists to avoid such traps. I am quite sure that if a band manages to retain its strengths, the loyal and intelligent fans will still stick around, albeit with pouted lips about they no longer being as special as before.

There are two type of hipsters, one who have no choice and the others who choose to be hipsters. Needless to say, the second type are the ones that are generating all the flak hipsters receive. It is just like artists, some people have no choice but to be artists, the ones I call genuine artists, and some choose to be artists because being an artist is “so fucking cool, right?”, the ones who, even if they produce something valuable, are disgusting in a stomach churning, vomit inducing way (Andy Warhol, for example).

Maybe, as Don’s mother in law in Mad Men says, a hipster is a person with “the artistic temperament but is not an artist”.

My shoes and I

do my shoes walk at night

when I sleep

making no sound
without access to the world outside
wanting to go places
am I dreaming with my shoes on
going to work for example
or just lazing around on the grass
or thinking
and thinking
of treading a different path
how fast life makes us move
towards some redemption
around these familiar corners

(I will add notes to this poem later, if anyone is interested.)

The Killer who wasn’t there

I’ll tell you a story full of love,
only so much that there can be.
Their eyes met and none blinked
their hearts fluttered when they touched.

They kissed and made love on the couch.
It was all love and lunacy.

It all goes downhill from here
like mountains of wax in the sun.

There is nothing left to see here,
love has killed two more souls.

The Painting with no Perspective

The old man with a broken guitar sat in a corner, admiring the picture from a distance, so intently that he forgot only an hour ago his guitar had fallen on its neck and broken into a miserable two. His head was aching with an ache that seemed to move inside his head from corner to corner, but his sweat was drying up and he felt better. He had an odd condition due to which one of his eyes grew larger than the other when he was immersed in something and wasn’t paying attention to control his condition. So the old man with the broken guitar sat in a corner admiring the picture with no perspective intently with one eye larger than the other feeling fresh from the evaporating sweat, a feeling that surely interfered with his interpretation.
A little kid was looking at the picture closely, the painting so large and real that he seemed to be a part of it. Everything seemed big to him, he couldn’t understand when the voices around him discussed how the painter had paid so much attention to painting such small boats and people. A house in the painting lay tilted at an odd angle but when he tilted his head to see it better, the house was overwhelmed by the strange and horrifying face that was now staring at him from a corner. He seemed to have a broken neck and oddly shaped eyes. His hands unclasped due to an onrush of fear.
A journalist was taking pictures of the gallery, staring into the camera’s viewfinder with the eye that he trusted would be a good judge of the picture’s composition. He thought of including some people staring at the painting in the picture, and was looking at different angles that would show the reaction the painting generated in the audience. He caught a particular girl staring at him, he thought he would flatter her later if he had a picture of hers in his armory. He took a picture of her staring into the viewers’ eyes with the painting as a backdrop so she looked like the Monalisa, only a bit more real and sorrowful. His neck was now straining with pain.
The artist was in his studio, thinking of how a self-contained painting could be drawn. He thought about how ones in the painting had to be watching the painting and those would be the most honest judges of his work. He was wrong, of course, they had no perspective. He then thought of removing perspective altogether and make a painting that was floating in space and frozen in time.
He had the skill. But he couldn’t do it, his wrists were sore from holding the brush at a certain angle all the while and his eyes strained from staring at the painting for so long.

All Alone

I look up and down
and it scares me so
I could explode tomorrow
and no one would hear me go.
We are all together
in life and eternal death
with no watchers
and no listeners.
Sentient species, like cows,
my children that roam around
feeding on freedom
trapped eternally.

I wish I had hands
so long they could reach the sun
so I could pull myself to it
and get done with all of it.

I can bear this loneliness no longer
I can go around in circles no more
I want to feel no gravity
I want to travel tangentially.

I am not like everybody else…

I am a strange guy. I have my heroes, and I like to watch them grow big, and then I like them to implode and become abominations and nobodies. All so I can relate to them better, so I can think that they were indeed what I would’ve been if I had wanted and tried as hard. Perhaps.
I am an arrogant man with such an impenetrable shell of ego that I rarely get hurt when the cause of hurt is outside me. I cannot be hurt by anyone other than myself. I often assume that there was no way to change the course things took and all I can do best is to dissect the ambitions and actions of others. I love the ‘equal to’ sign, or its extension, the ‘implies’ sign.
I often think that people like to hear me talk, because I often like what I say, it is funny, critical, fresh, not stale like the opinions of everyone else (which I consider to be half chewed, half understood, mechanical statements of mass media, or their cult leaders). I also assume that when I turn my back to a group of people, they pause for a few moments to sink in all of what I left them with to think before they resume their insignificant and mundane conversations. I often want a background track for such moments.
I like chains of logic, and creating clouds of rationality where everything is connected to something else and all makes perfect calculable sense. I find emotions to be the height of mathematics, the mathematics of infinity and recursive loops, and deducing, predicting or understanding them an honor.

Then sometimes, doubt creeps in. It plagues me. It bangs on my head like a small plastic hammer which doesn’t hurt but just is really annoying. Repeatedly. It makes me feel like I am one of them, I am like everybody else. People don’t change conversations after I leave, nor when I enter. They understand emotions and people just as well as me. That their choices are just as informed as mine. I get afraid. I start to feel alone and in the dark and it starts to affect me and makes me feel weak and worthless.
Then it just leaves suddenly. Just like it came. And I try to look best in the mirror and go outside and start to impress people again in the way that conforms with me.

I am not like everybody else in that I know that I am like everybody else. I am a snake that eats its own tail and grows bigger. Or smaller, perhaps?

Dirty Attempts at Dirty Desires

There are, on the luscious pink lips that you so want to kiss, grooves so tiny that can be seen only when you’re very close, such proximity granted only when you are eligible to kiss those lips, that have within them similar tiny grooves invisible to the naked imagination, filled with thick and slowly moving saliva which often contains a residual of nearly everything imaginable, and thus is an alive cesspool of tiny microorganisms moving about and procreating and excreting. That’s what makes them so tasty.

Her breath, that often sparks a fire in your loins, has traveled a trachea filled with mucus assigned to collect most of the dirt that it comes into contact with, before passing into a jungle of nasal hair, swaying them inward and outward, all too often drying them up and drying the thin layer of thick mucus glued to the nose by sapping all of the moisture, which mostly would contain a colony of alive microorganisms moving about and procreating and excreting. That’s what gives you goosebumps.

I am the Mad King

When I become the king of the world

I will ensure Justice with a capital J
and Freedom with a capital F for everyone.

I would ensure that everyone is free,
and that everything is just.

I will ensure that none become prey
to self-grandiosity, and trample others’ freedom.

I will ensure that everyone is equally happy
for that is how it should be in a just world.

If someone gets unhappy, I will persuade him to be merry
and if he doesn’t, I’ll make everyone else equally unhappy.

If freedom ever gets in the way of justice,
or justice in the way of freedom, it’ll be tricky.

If I am judging, I will choose justice,
but if I am judged, I will choose liberty.

But I find something hard to ignore,
though it might be the solution itself:

If I have my way, I will be the happiest,
and would have no way to maintain equality.

This would in turn make me restless, unhappy,
and counter the problem of me being happy.

But this vicious realization, would again lead me to raptures,
leading me to torment, leading me to raptures, leading me to insanity.

It would have then come full circle,
mirroring my search for justice-
my delusional search for mathematical symmetry,
and my quest for freedom-
my narcissistic quest for guiltless vanity.