I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a lot of fun toys, but IMHO that's borderline adolescent/masturbatory. Not even sour grapes, I swear, but I bet that massive modular analog synthesizer setup gets zero use. Conspicuous consumption plain and simple. Yuck. But that's me. I'm more impressed by some poor schlub in Echo Park with an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl.
There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.
It's almost as if the first creative acts that get artists like this their fame are acts of desperation, undertaken against impossible odds.
Later when fame and money comes, the artist buys more and more tools in a fruitless chase to recapture the previous glory but he can't because the fame and money prevent him from ever again having the one thing that made his first works awesome... desperation.
Exactly. Stay hungry. Hunt outside your comfort zone. Break through your fears. Abandon that which does not serve you. Give it your all. Don't save any energy for the return trip. No bold knights can flourish in a peaceful country.
It's not CC. The scale of value is off by several orders of magnitude. Drop me in any large city in the world and I can hunt those things down in a day for less than a $1000. Heck, I could probably do a limited run of mix tapes for that too.
The story in my head is the sampler was a thrift store find or a high school graduation gift and all the vinyl is from their dad or uncle (rare 70s grooves). Poor people can have nice things too.
Sure, that's the story in everyone's head. Maybe that's not conspicuous consumption. More like "conspicuous authenticity"?
Everyone loves the story of "Well, he just got a beat up synth from his uncle's basement and was so inspired/gifted/dedicated/whatever that he then made this awesome music in spite of not having the latest gadgetry."
But, because we all love it, we fetishize it. And then people come along and productize and monetize it. And now you've got 303s selling for several grand on eBay.
Meanwhile, if you stray off script in a way that's cheap but not in a way that fits the hipster authentic narrative, it doesn't quite work. Putting together tunes using a beat up analog sampler and a crate — it always has to be a milk crate of course, too cheap to afford real shelving! — of records is hip. Putting together tunes using, I don't know, FruityLoops, your mom's old ThinkPad, and a bunch of old MP3s doesn't have the same cachet.
Comments
I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a lot of fun toys, but IMHO that's borderline adolescent/masturbatory. Not even sour grapes, I swear, but I bet that massive modular analog synthesizer setup gets zero use. Conspicuous consumption plain and simple. Yuck. But that's me. I'm more impressed by some poor schlub in Echo Park with an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl.
There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.
It's almost as if the first creative acts that get artists like this their fame are acts of desperation, undertaken against impossible odds.
Later when fame and money comes, the artist buys more and more tools in a fruitless chase to recapture the previous glory but he can't because the fame and money prevent him from ever again having the one thing that made his first works awesome... desperation.
The best art is often produced under great constraints, something that usually disappears after commercial success.
Necessity is the mother of invention?
Exactly. Stay hungry. Hunt outside your comfort zone. Break through your fears. Abandon that which does not serve you. Give it your all. Don't save any energy for the return trip. No bold knights can flourish in a peaceful country.
You know the song.
Or is it simply that public focus is limited and ever shifting. Artists cannot recapture the previous glory because it is fickle.
If only there was a morality play somewhere we could have learned this lesson /s
That's conspicuous consumption as well, just of a different flavor.
Tracking down a working vintage sampler and a pile of rare groove records is a large investment in both money and time.
It's not CC. The scale of value is off by several orders of magnitude. Drop me in any large city in the world and I can hunt those things down in a day for less than a $1000. Heck, I could probably do a limited run of mix tapes for that too.
The story in my head is the sampler was a thrift store find or a high school graduation gift and all the vinyl is from their dad or uncle (rare 70s grooves). Poor people can have nice things too.
Sure, that's the story in everyone's head. Maybe that's not conspicuous consumption. More like "conspicuous authenticity"?
Everyone loves the story of "Well, he just got a beat up synth from his uncle's basement and was so inspired/gifted/dedicated/whatever that he then made this awesome music in spite of not having the latest gadgetry."
But, because we all love it, we fetishize it. And then people come along and productize and monetize it. And now you've got 303s selling for several grand on eBay.
Meanwhile, if you stray off script in a way that's cheap but not in a way that fits the hipster authentic narrative, it doesn't quite work. Putting together tunes using a beat up analog sampler and a crate — it always has to be a milk crate of course, too cheap to afford real shelving! — of records is hip. Putting together tunes using, I don't know, FruityLoops, your mom's old ThinkPad, and a bunch of old MP3s doesn't have the same cachet.
Not German, but nouveau riche pretty well covers it.
german: neureich
He livestreams himself using the modular all the time...
Thank goodness! And thanks for correcting me.
He must just dilligently clean up the wires.
IIRC, he said (in his MasterClass series) the synth lead on Cat Thruster is an analog synth patch.
Saure Trauben
Not at all. I'd love to have any of that kit, it's aces.