Michelangelo spent about four years painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Then he spent roughly five more years painting “The Last Judgment” on the altar wall. He traded nine years of his life for a masterpiece of artistic ambition that, five centuries later, still takes your breath away.
Guns N’ Roses took approximately 14 years and $13 million to record the album Chinese Democracy. Although the critical reaction was mixed, Apple Music described the album as “larger than life in every conceivable way.” Check back with me in 2508 to see if it ages as well as Michelangelo’s art, but the artistic ambition devoted to that album is undeniable.
Sure, the Sistine Chapel paint job (commissioned by Pope Julius II) and Chinese Democracy recordings (supported by Geffen Records) were both gigs. These weren’t necessarily art for art’s sake, but even though the original scope of both projects was much more limited, the artists’ compulsion to push boundaries ended up creating monuments to artistic ambition that far overshadowed the original directives.
True artists know the importance of craftsmanship, ambition and aspiration. Consider Wendy Carlos, for whom a guiding principle is “for every parameter that you can control, you must control.” Her meticulous and ambitious approach to sound provided the foundation for a body of work that’s pioneering and sophisticated.
This is very different from, “With one click, I can create a perfect EQ curve for my voice!” (I’d change that to “With one click, some algorithm can create a curve that it thinks would be well-suited to my voice, but hey, I wouldn’t know the difference anyway so it doesn’t matter.”) Then there’s, “With one click, I can master my new song!” How has the function of mastering become so misunderstood that people who upload a song and click a button believe it’s mastered?
It’s easy to blame technology for all of this—but that’s not the problem at all. The problem is humans who lack artistic ambition. They’re comfortable with setting an ever-lower bar for “good enough.”
Consider John Coltrane. His musical arc went from be-bop to avantgarde transcendence and his unique “sheets of sound.” Miles Davis never stopped pushing his personal envelope. Or take the Beatles, who wanted to top themselves with each successive album—which raised the bar for other musicians. David Bowie, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, Prince, Bjork, Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, Sonic Youth, Jeff Beck, Stevie Wonder, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, the Cure, Trent Reznor and so many others weren’t afraid to abandon their own formulas. They often re-invented themselves by seemingly treating every new album as a puzzle to solve—how could they break musical, societal or genre-defined boundaries?
Here’s what else they had in common: commercial success. Drop a pin on that.
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The number of contemporary artists who reinvent their musical language and achieve past-decades-level commercial success is extremely small. Only Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, and to some extent Taylor Swift come immediately to mind. Sure, there are strikingly inventive artists like Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent, Bon Iver, Black Midi, Snarky Puppy, Esperanza Spalding and Kevin Parker, but they’re not exactly commercial powerhouses.
So what happened?
Listeners used to wait in excited anticipation for what was next. Today, music has become the aural equivalent of comfort food—streaming in the background, feeding earbuds in the gym or providing a short clip on TikTok. Artists who reinvent themselves polarize audiences, many of whom don’t want a disconnect between what artists did and what they do. Reinvention may earn some critical kudos, but it’s commercially risky— and the music business (also the movie business, but that’s another story) is risk-averse.
The music industry’s solution is to channel artistic ambition into commercial ambition—tours that are a canned spectacle rather than a concert, multiple “collector editions,” pursuing deep-pocket sponsors (who don’t want artists to rock the boat), prioritizing social media attention over the pursuit of musical craftsmanship, and trying to please fans who are so buffeted by a turbulent society in decline that they default to choosing comfort music.
So what can we do?
For starters, forget about one-click solutions, and do some manual labor. Let’s challenge ourselves to use technology for artistic development, not just as a labor-saving option.
One seminar attendee asked why I did vocal leveling manually with gain envelopes when I could “just use a limiter.” No. A limiter won’t selectively bring up the end of a phrase while lowering the level of mouth noises. It won’t exempt certain peaks you want to keep. And it will likely add artifacts. Is it worth the manual labor? For me, yes.
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Interestingly, there’s a sharp dividing line between when I started doing that and when my vocals started getting a major uptick in compliments. My voice hadn’t changed.
My ambitions had.
The ear/brain combination craves novelty. Trim breath inhales for the same curve, and your brain knows the difference—even if listeners don’t consciously recognize it. Multiply all the ways that songs take shortcuts, and it’s no wonder the listeners’ brains aren’t getting what they want.
I’m not advocating artistic ambition for the sake of it, although there’s nothing wrong with that.
Do it because it’s a simple way to reverse a slide into musical irrelevance and, potentially, translate ambition into commercial success. After all, it worked in the past.
Maybe it’s worth a try.
