Yes I do still use CDs. I could spend an amount equal to the defense budget for fiscal ‘14 and get an ipod, but I won’t. I’ve always believed Apple products are overpriced and I’m funny, I don’t want to listen to a bunch of jumbled tunes, I want them to play in album order just like they did on the CD.
Yeah that’s why I am still using CDs.
So there I was changing out my selections, from around town mellow to hard driving, road-eating, rock stuff. Usually I listen to jazz and seldom play it above the level necessary to hear the words, but on a seven hour trip I need something to rock my world, shake me awake and get me in the zone so that I can get to Seattle in as little time as the law allows and get back.
And because of that I was listening to my baby Pink as I took the truck in for its pre-trip inspection.
Now maybe you don’t know Pink, if you are over twenty-five you might not, but she is the original, demon-child of R & B and makes parents squirm every time they hear their kids fire her music up. Course now that almost everyone listens to MP3 players with personal ear buds you have no idea what your offspring is listening to and that is a wonderful advance made possible by technology.
Pink has made her career on being the most outrageous, over the top, wild-assed rocker since Keith Moon first trashed a hotel room.
She has a public persona of the worst, wildest, nastiest, most out of control problem child ever. Even her stage name is designed to make mothers cringe and grown men shudder. Sufficient to say Pink does not describe her favorite lip gloss.
Pink has managed to kiss a girl, in public, no less than the Feminator Kristanna Loken, long before Katie Perry sang about it; she scandalized the set of her music video for Lady Marmalade by appearing ready for action except for a slight draft in the southern region. Yes, she joined the long list of starlets caught going Commando when common sense would demand at least lip service to convention.
Pink isn’t your Momma’s kind of child and I do feel sorry for Alicia Moore’s parents cause they had to try to navigate some kind of order out of this wild and crazy shooting star.
But, and this is the important part, when you cut through all of the hype and the flack and the glitz of the music biz, Pink has lived a very conventional life.
She is close to her father and even made a cut with him on her I’m Not Dead CD. She found and romanced and married a guy, okay so Motorcross racing is not the same as banking or a stock broker but I’m sure that doesn’t matter a whit. She, the demon- child of R&B married!
Now it took a coupla tries before they managed to get it completely right, but that’s not unusual even among conventional couples. Then she had a baby. Does this sound like the antisocial, gangster, doper, sexual adventurer?
Not bloody likely. It sounds just like atypical American girl doing what generations of American girls have done, making a family.
By now you are scratching your head and saying, “What the hell does this have to do with art?”
The answer is pretty simple; it is all about how what you project and how you market yourself may have nothing at all to do with who and what you are.
I’m pretty sure you don’t need to die your hair pink or create a scandalous story about how you got your stage name, but it won’t hurt a bit if you have an image that attracts newspapers and television to you. You need them to get the word out about what you are doing and maybe you have been so successful at doing it so well that you no longer have any mystery or color.
That’s not good, not good at all.
The image you project need not be wild and crazy, but a bit of dash and flair won’t hurt a bit.
Who gets the television cameras turned on his work on a regular basis? David Castleberry. Now much of that is because the work is pretty dynamic and stunning, but David can spin a pretty good yarn about his work and his process.
That should be something you are working on, finding the right persona to project élan and delight into your work. That way when the TV crews come to get a story for the local news, maybe you’ll be it.
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