Friday 27 May 2011

Art as expression

I'll start off first by talking about the motivation for this blog. I was reading about the context surrounding the album "Young Prayer" by Panda Bear. It was written and recorded in the room his father died in, and was written and recorded whilst his father was sick. It was made mostly for him to listen to, to know that his son was proud and grateful for having him as a dad. To quote him:

With Young Prayer, I wanted to tell him that he had taught me really well. I wanted to be like, ‘It’s been really good hanging out and learning from you, you’ve been a really good man and set a good example’.
And this started making me think about hypothetically being in a similar situation. I've always been sort of nervous about using art as an expression directed at someone specific for them to hear, because they might not like or get it. What I mean as that for example with music, 90% of what I love and would like to create would just seem so alien to my parents, I think. The Panda Bear album that sparked this thought for example is mostly just him softly strumming a guitar while singing high falsetto notes with incomprehensible lyrics. It's beautiful to me, like meditation music. But if I made something similar for a dying parent, they really wouldn't appreciate it properly.

Maybe that's besides the point. Maybe it's just the fact that his son makes music and has kind of found himself and what he wants to do with his life, rather than the actual product. I guess that's cool. I guess it's just always the sentiment that's more important, "it's the thought that counts" etc.

I just wanted to write about that.

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