when did something being mediocre become a problem
Why do we always say that "xxx album is mediocre"?
Like, for music, we talk of artists as having fallen off, or that their music isn't as good anymore, and hear me out, that's what we say about brands and products and services.
And when you think of art or writing or music as a whole, you think of it as self-expression. We always talk about it as the artist trying to express themselves and so on, but the thing is, we don't treat it like it is.
We don't treat works like they're art once they come into our hands because suddenly we're consuming it and we need to create a review of it. And by creating that review, we're creating a basis for if it's good or bad.
While that in of itself isn't bad, we've pushed it so that the original fact that the product was made in an attempt at self-expression or some other purpose is lost completely. And it's become a sort of, "is the new thing good or bad".
Like, when you dissect an artist's life, especially for older ones that are really famous idk Picasso, you split them into like... stylist periods. We don't really say, "Picasso fell off", like sure, we'll say "he peaked at xxx time period", but we don't really go and say that at some point in time his artistic valued fell.
We just say it's a new period.
And we sort of do this for like... some modern day artists. But in a very annoying way where it only occurs when you retroactively talk about them. But whenever a new album comes out, it's treated like a product and I don't really know how to explain it, but it just feels rude. And it causes like the artists themselves to do this sort of comparison as well.
I feel like a lot of new artists have this pressure to always be getting better, or that there is a standard of improvement that people have to get to - when the inherent principle of like art or making stuff in general, isn't... to make it better than the older one.
Like I write fanfiction, but I don't... write fanfiction... thinking that the next one is going to be better or as good as the previous one. That's just... that doesn't make sense. I might try something new, but it's not... better or worse, it's just something new. And yes, over time, you'll see change and you might perceive yourself or what you write as being technically better, but it's not... you don't write stuff because it's "better".
Like, yeah, for drawing there are things you can do to get "better", but like, I think it should be the same thing.
I too can read a dozen books and try to mimic something to get a certain "style" of writing.
But when it comes to actually making something, I'm not making it in mind of making it better than the one I made previously.
However, I feel like when it comes to speaking about works by others, a lot of the time, especially for music, we always talk about it in terms of a comparison to the artist's older works. Which, idk, to me, is just weird because that artist 100% didn't use the same frame to write the music.
How can you like... really comparatively judge something or someone's works like that... is kind of weird for me. And I'm not saying "don't judge music" - if you like something, you like something, it's well within your right to critique. It's more of the general... ig community behaviour.
We are creating things from a sense of expression, but it's being consumed and evaluated based off of things that have nothing to deal with what is actually being expressed.
Like, there ARE such things as literary studies, but you study the work itself for meaning. You're not evaluating it for whether or not it's worth your time, which is what a lot of what consuming has to deal with.
Idk, I just don't like this culture, especially surrounding music, where we always have to judge a new album, or we're always trying to push an artist for a new album. It's weird to me.
I think if there was someone telling me, "oh, yeah you're recent fanfiction was kind of mid compared to the previous one" in some shape or form, I would actually print a copy and burn it in front of them.
（￣へ￣）
