XI- When you kinda want to become completely unhinged
I have come to hate the word “content.”
Oh, sweet sugary fluffy nothingness. I’m not so above the world that I don’t happily consume it, and frankly, I appreciate the people who take the time to put it out there.
I despise the pressure to put it out there myself.
Art is not content. Novels are not content. You know what is? Fucking marketing. Get your brand out there, get your face out there. Your books won’t buy themselves. Get big, go viral, make content, make content, make content, because the people are hungry and you need them to develop a taste for you, sugar.
(Brain worms.)
***
I know why the universe dropped Sleep Token into my lap so hard. (Three hints from three vastly disparate sources is a lot, okay?) For one, Vessel’s voice could claw tears from a fucking stone, and I have been…more numb than I’d like, lately, and I can’t write if I can’t feel.
Scream break me make me bleed into the aether at your peril. It might answer.
What is it to defy genre? I think I had it in my head that it meant mixing sugar into butter and getting something else, but that’s not…that’s not the only way to do it. Sleep Token’s music defies genre; whether it’s to your taste or not, on this pretty much everyone agrees. It can’t be put in a box.
They didn’t reject genre to accomplish that. They transcended it. They took the best parts of genre and used them where they needed using, and what you get is music that is, every moment, exactly what it needs to be to tell the story. The answer to “what genre is Sleep Token?” is not “no,” but “yes.”
Do you remember what I complained about in my second post? I have too many hobbies. I’m fractured, scattered. I can’t pick a sandbox.
What if I was never meant to?
What if I needed a madman in a mask to make me remember what it means to be a mockingbird?
***
I used to participate in those DeviantArt contests, years ago. Never got anywhere, but they did force me to come up with some interesting pieces. This was one where the prompt was something like “your artistic journey,” and the only requirement was that you had to use their road template.
In the spirit of the prompt, I decided to showcase a bunch of different mediums I’ve learned over the years, paired with images that correspond to when I learned them. Colored pencil, graphite, pen and ink, acrylic painting, and marker are all represented here…but I didn’t try to do them all over top of each other, like a true multimedia piece. They each have their space, their piece of the story, and they all flow naturally into each other.
That was not a conscious choice on my part. That was just…how I naturally did it. Take the best bits, fit them together, make something new. It’s how I think. It’s how I create.
For the life of me, I don’t know how I’ve put so much thought into what mockingbirds do and how it relates to me…but not how they do it. The cycle from song to song to song, stitching them together into something that becomes bigger than the sum of its parts, but the parts are still there.
***
I think a decade of trying to break into trad publishing has turned me very cynical.
you have become the voice in my head
Comp titles. Audience. Where are you shelved? Know where you belong. Labels, tropes. Genre = identity. Get in your box and fucking stay there, and eventually, eventually, the Gatekeepers will deign to let you in.
i want to go where nobody else will ever go
I don’t want to play the game anymore. I kinda want to put on a mask and become something completely unhinged, because fuck, does that get you noticed. And if you’re good…in a world weeping content and marketing and sugary nothing from every pore, people can smell art and authenticity a mile away. They will come with parched throats and raised hands. Be unknowable, be untamable.
I feel like I’ve had a breakthrough. I feel unmasked, which is fucking ironic.
I am being so very overdramatic tonight.
You try talking like a human being with two weeks and three hours’ worth of metal and poetry running under your skin :)
