The other thing I wanted to say though was I suspect the Carr and Tyler book had a deeper impact on me, in that it gave me ideas about what was core and non-core, and what was interestingly non-core, and how artists did things sequentially but not necessarily with everything in the canon or in the A-list. So, to pick one example, George Harrison made two 'solo albums' before he made All Things Must Pass, but the two which came before that huge triple album with hit singles on it and so on, were kind of minor works no-one needed to pay attention to (and one of them was substantially swiped from Bernard Krause anyway, though that’s irrelevant right now). The fact was, Artist A could be spending his or her time on drawing a picture in nail polish on toilet paper on Monday, composing masterwork Tuesday and Wednesday, writing her or his novel on Thursday, and propounding a famously mad conspiracy theory on some chat show on Friday. If you want to understand those component parts – the development of the artist’s work – don’t you have to know them all in context with each other?
Truth is, I don’t know if you really do, but I do want to know if it’s necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment