[ellius]

I think maybe the only way to be a good artist though is to explore the things that resonate with you. If rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass speaks to your soul, and creating that music fulfills you, then who’s to say exploring those genres is a mistake? There are other measures of success than recognition.

Austin Kleon puts this especially well in “Steal Like An Artist.” He says that you can cut off some of your passions, and try to focus on one thing, but eventually you will “feel the pain of the phantom limb.”

[folksinger]

Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art needs an audience.

Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it.

So who do you want to make art for? Who do you want making art for you? Random strangers peicing together art from fragments of digital audio they stumble across while surfing on an endless stream of information?

[ellius]

I think ultimately we’re going to go back and forth about an unanswerable question: what fulfills people? You can’t answer it for anyone else. One artist will need the audience as a foil; another will be perfectly happy to toil away in obscurity. To my mind the best advice is “try a lot of things and see what feels right to you; don’t be dogmatic about your approach until you have a very high level of confidence based on experience.” Beyond that I’m just not sure this is a question with a meaningful answer.

[folksinger]

This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.

The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!

[ellius]

Recognizing that people are unique does not immediately equate to solipsism. That would be like me saying that recognizing any kind of commonality immediately implies collectivism.

[icebraining]

Just as a reference, Gangstagrass already has 18 scheduled live shows for the next five months :)