A.V. Club Interview: The Raconteurs
The Onion A.V. Club has an interview with The Raconteurs. I haven’t heard much of The Raconteurs’ music outside of “Steady As She Goes”, but I have been listening to Brendan Benson’s excellent One Mississippi a lot over the past couple weeks.
It’s really an uncharacteristically shallow interview for The A.V. Club (I attribute this more to the group setting than the A.V. Club), but there is one interesting quote from Jack White, with an interjection by Benson:
JW: I’m extremely anti-hipster now, and I really hate the thought of it, being surrounding by them, and Nashville definitely is not in that neighborhood of their relation to music. In Nashville, those people want to sell songs, and they want to make hit records, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m so tired of playing the cool game with all those people, and just trying to go and have lunch and having to play that cool game with everybody, about what you’re supposed to do, what’s cool and what’s not. It’s a fucking minefield, you know? [Laughs.] You can’t keep up. It’s not healthy to write music that way, and I’d rather be in a town where they want to write hits.
BB: That’s just not a nurturing environment. As an artist, I think it’s really important to surround yourself with other artists—
JW: In Nashville, self-sabotage is not on the menu, and in hipster culture, self-sabotage is definitely one of the entrées.
Frankly, I don’t really have any idea what they’re talking about here, not being familiar with the Detroit hipster scene, nor being a true hipster myself. (Or maybe I am a true hipster and self-love is blind? Somehow I doubt it. Hipsters seem acutely self-aware to me.) I find the sentiment interesting, though. It’s a bit odd to read someone whom I (undeservedly?) consider an icon of hipsterism deriding the hipster scene.
I suppose what they’re saying, more than that, is that it’s difficult to be an artist in an environment where it’s cool to be cooler than everything else — everybody thinks they’re above it. This is probably what’s led to Thomas Kinkade really “blooming”: fawning customers provide a great support system to keep on keepin’ on. But by the same token, to what extent can you really break new ground (what every artist should aspire to, in my opinion) when you’re surrounded by fawning supporters?
Brendan Benson touches on this later in the interview:
“There’s something about working in adverse conditions. It keeps it interesting. I always notice if I ever sit down with a pen and piece of paper and a guitar, and I have a beverage and an ashtray and I’m comfortable on the couch, I fall asleep.”
In this case “adverse conditions” refers to recording in freezing/sweltering conditions, but I think this is true on a deeper level. It seems like the most compelling artists have had a tough, sometimes tortured life. This is my best explanation for my lack of song-writing skills: a much too comfortable life.
Although, in the summer the air conditioning in our office cuts out around the same time the state workers do, so if there has been an effect on my work, it hasn’t been a positive one.