The Business World Needs Your Weird Art

When Andre 3000 announced he was releasing his all flute, non-hip hop, lyric free album, it was met with unqualified angst from an eager fanbase that had been waiting for any hip hop musical output from him for over 15 years.

?Since the album’s release, the reviews and comments have been surprisingly favorable among the critics and fans. As I listened to the tracks on YouTube, I scrolled through the many favorable comments and came across one in particular that gave me pause. It read. “This is the album we didn’t know we needed.” My pause was immediately followed the thought,

“This album only exists because Andre 3000 was not afraid to be weird.”

?Andre reveals he only followed his heart with this project with the declaration of the first track’s title “I Swear I Wanted to Make a Rap Album, but this is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me this Time.” Knowing how the entertainment industry works, no other artist without the historical success, or musical pedigree of Andre Benjamin, would have had a record company promote this kind of album with any fanfare.

The album entitled New Blue Sun, had quickly become the talking point of most music circles. Aside from music fans, and marijuana enthusiast hailing it’s praise, it has woken the artistic minds of several artist and producers with new direction, looking to sample it. Some music theorist believe that Andre 3000’s opus will be relevant for many decades to come in all kinds of iterations. In short, this album is already making history.

So the question is, if this non hip hop album is so hip, why would so many people initially push against it just on the premise before its release?

I think the answer lies in some previous musings of legendary music producer Rick Rubin. He has said. “ The audience comes last. The audience doesn’t know what they want. The audience only knows what’s come before. Make art for yourself.”

?Rubin who is often known for pushing boundaries in all genres of music has theorized that in order to be successful in your own originality, you have to focus on pleasing your own artistic desires. This is a theory I have come to hold dear in my latter years as creative person. Because not only do the audience not know what they want, neither do most people in the entertainment industry.

?The entertainment industry only know their desires in generalities. “I want an action film, a romantic comedy, a street banger hip hop record.” The problem is that they are only asking for those things, because those are things that made them money last time.

?This is how the entertainment industry operates. “What made money last month? Okay let’s make more of that this month.” They will follow this logic until box office receipts come back showing lackluster profits.

??In 1977 no one was asking for Star Wars. A film with a 10 million dollar budget, that seemed destined to be a failure, being that the highest grossing science fiction film at that time was Planet of the Apes with an 11 million dollar haul. The studio, so short sighted in their thinking, made a deal with the director George Lucas to let him reimburse the budget to the studio with his own money so he could finish making the film without them breathing down his neck.?

?Then when Star Wars was released, it and it became…Star Wars. A franchise now worth 8 billion dollars. Since its original release, competitors in the industry have copied mimicked, recopied, imitated, and recopied again anything sci-fi that resembled the Star Wars until it stopped being ?uber profitable. That was until Star Wars returned in 1999. Then the copycats were back at it again.

George Lucas followed his weird heart, ignoring the unrelenting cacophony of doubts from naysayers and blazed an entirely new trail in entertainment.

?As a writer, and filmmaker, who makes money from my art, in my career, I have been tempted several times from outside sources to rehash someone else’s played idea for a buck or two. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of those opportunities never worked out for me. At the time it was unfortunate, because I didn’t get the money, but fortunate now, because I didn’t waste my time and creative energy making the equivalent of Leprechaun part 5. (If I was given total autonomy to let my creative mind fly over a Leprechaun movie it would be amazing! I’m just saying.)

?As Rick Rubin puts it, “When you make art for someone else to sell, that’s not art that’s commerce.” Now, I have nothing against commerce, but if you are truly an artist, and you spend all your time making ‘commerce’, that is the proven path to artist burnout, disillusionment, and the killer of your weird heart that made you fall in love with what you do in the first place.

?More the rule than the exception, the way original art finds its way into the of the public is through the people with wonderful weird ideas being brave enough to let it out into the world. Because when that weird idea of yours catches fire, it won’t be so weird anymore. But, it will be copied, and recopied and recopied over and over again.

-Shannon Newby