YOUR QUESTION

08/27/2020 NM

How do you avoid worrying that your music is just the product of what you like? Do you feel a desire for it to be justified by something more objective or important? Have you found any justification like that?

Do you think your aesthetic beliefs are like your moral beliefs? I mean if I don't like death and like the color yellow, can I dedicate my life to painting things yellow and leave the fight against death to others? (I have done that, for the time being.)

Thanks for this.

MY ANSWER

I don’t think it’s a matter of what one likes. It’s more about being a sentient observer and expressing things that can’t be expressed in other ways. I’m positive that my music is as much informed by affinities and beliefs as by disgust and confusion. I think my moral and aesthetic beliefs inform each other but they are not the same thing. I think people should speak poetically but I also belief the merchant at the grocery store should be able to understand me. Also, hate to tell you this, but there is no fight against death. Death wins in the end (spoiler alert). So go forth and paint yellow my fellow artist. Cover the Earth! (as the fine folks at Sherwin-Williams would say). You don’t have to speak about death in your yellowness but it will be there whether you like it or not, in fact, maybe more so than you think it is. Perhaps you paint things yellow as a way of accepting (since you can’t ultimately avoid) death. Other things you can avoid. I mean, if you don’t like brown, don’t use it.