Fred Mandel is a legendary musician who’s been in Queen, Alice Cooper, and Elton John’s band. He’s been to the top and with his own eyes seen the greatness that exists there. But when he looks at today’s artistic landscape, he’s starting to question whether greatness is still rising to the top.
“I think greatness has been diluted.” – Fred Mandel, 2023
The argument he’s making is that there’s just too much content for the great stuff to push through, and as a result is not getting the recognition it deserves. One of his biggest grievances is that the guitar player Philip Sayce is not a household name.
“Philip is one of the best blues rock guitar players, if not the best in the world. I don't know why he's not huge. He's a logical follow up to Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a lot of great players… He's just an immense talent who should be worldwide recognized.” – Fred Mandel, 2023
Now, there are obviously other factors contributing to Philip’s lack of recognition, including guitar’s dwindling cultural significance, and changing music tastes but does Fred have a point? Is greatness being diluted?
From a numbers standpoint, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Every single day 100,000 songs are released onto streaming platforms. To put that in perspective, in the 90s, ~6,300,000 songs were released throughout the decade, and in 2023, that many songs are released every two months. And assuming that the average song length is three minutes, that means every two days there are 600,000 minutes of music put into the world. There’s only 525,600 minutes in a year, which means that every 48 hours there’s a year’s worth of new music available to listen to.
It’s always been impossible to listen to every single song, but now the percentage of total songs you can listen to has shrunk dramatically. This means that in your pursuit of finding great songs, you’ll end up listening to even more mediocre ones. But in theory, if there’s more total songs, shouldn’t there be more great ones for you to listen to as well? Not if you ask Casey Neistat.
“I don't see more brilliant stuff. I just see more stuff.” – Casey Neistat, 2022
Quantity = Quality?
Casey Neistat is one of the most important filmmakers of the 21st century. You could argue that his daily vlog has inspired more people to pick up a camera and start filming than anyone else in history. One of the reasons for this is that the internet has democratized filmmaking. Everyone with a cellphone now has the ability to enter the arena. Anyone can script, shoot, edit, and distribute a movie to the world without even leaving their bedroom. And we’re seeing the outcome of this democratization with over 500 hours worth of content being uploaded to YouTube every single minute, which comes out to around a year’s worth of content every 19 minutes.
“I had a very eloquent monologue about how the egalitarianization of filmmaking is going to finally make it an art form that everybody has access to. And we're gonna get to see new perspectives and ideas shared in ways we'd never seen before because you don't have to go to NYU film school to make something.” – Casey Neistat, 2022
Prior to the internet, if you wanted to enter the arena you had to get past the gatekeepers. You had to be good enough to impress someone who would deem your art valid for public consumption. This wasn’t always the most fair system but it did act as a filter, stopping a lot of mediocre work from getting through. But now that the internet has removed the gatekeepers, anyone can release anything, which means that all of that mediocre stuff that wasn’t getting through is now flooding the market.
The thought was if there weren’t gatekeepers there’d be a creative renaissance. That without needing to conform to the desires of an industry, we'd see unique works and perspectives we hadn’t seen before. But it doesn’t feel like that was the outcome.
“We're watching it manifest and I'm not seeing new brilliant shit that's like, wow, I didn't see that coming.” – Casey Neistat, 2022
The problem is everyone is still conforming. Not to the gatekeepers, but to the market. People are so concerned with getting attention that it’s stunting innovation. Instead of getting new ideas we get derivatives of what’s already available. In a funny twist of events even the gatekeepers are confirming. It feels like a majority of what gets released by the mainstream film industry is sequels, spinoffs, and reboots. The reason for that is they know it’s going to work. Over 60 of the 75 best selling films since 2010 fall into the category of sequel, spinoff, or reboot. These movies keep getting made because they’re safe, and they know they’ll work. There’s no financial incentive for a studio to take a risk on an original film that has no precedent.
“One of the reasons that DVDs were such a useful component of the film industry is that they offered a chance of revenues for films that didn't necessarily become successful in the box office. But because now DVDs have been replaced by streaming, film studios are far less willing to take risks with things they don't think are going to succeed because the streaming revenue that they will generate off the back end once it leaves cinemas is very, very small, so they can't afford to not play paint by numbers, basically. So no executive’s going to take a risk because if it doesn't hit that peak saturation at the box office in the opening couple of weeks, it will never make money back because when it goes onto streaming, streaming doesn't generate enough of a yield to cover the costs. So that’s another reason that we're moving into this space where zero risk means highly marketed sequels.” – Mike Hill, 2023
Give It Time
If something performs well at the box office though, doesn’t that mean it’s great? No, that means it’s commercially successful. Greatness by definition, is when something is of ability, quality, or respect considerably above the normal or average. In other words, greatness will be different from what you’re used to which at first can be unsettling. We have preconceived notions of what art looks like so when something is outside of our expectations we don’t know how to interpret it, and therefore we resist it.
The Shawshank Redemption currently sits atop IMDB’s Top 250 Films list, and the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." What is today regarded as one of the greatest films ever made lost $9M dollars after its initial box office run, making $16M on a $25M budget. There’s a bunch of reasons for this including poor marketing, prison movies being unpopular, an unmemorable title and more, all of which resulted in it being deemed a failure upon release. Over time it grew in popularity through VHS sales, rentals, and cable syndication, ultimately becoming one of the most valuable properties in Warner Bros. catalogue.
“Sometimes it's as simple as that films are ahead of their time, that they are preempting a pattern, like a wave that hasn't yet hit the shore. When there's a tsunami, wildlife runs into the center of an island minutes before the wave is even visible on the horizon because they sense something that's coming. That's what [great] artists do. They sense a cultural shift and they make something, and then a handful of other people recognize and feel that thing. But most of the world doesn't even yet know there's a wave heading to the shore. If something's truly great it may not rise to the surface immediately because it's just ahead of its time.” – Mike Hill, 2023
Greatness isn’t about how fast you rise to the top, it’s about how long you can stick around. The best pieces of art stay with you long after you’ve finished consuming them. Even if you didn’t like it at first, eventually you grow to appreciate it, and sometimes even fall in love with it. But in order for that to happen, you need the time to think about it, to digest it, and to change your opinion about it.
Streaming has ruined our taste. We aren’t taking the time to fall in love with art because we have unfettered access to unlimited quantities of it. You used to have to pay $10 to get a CD with 12 tracks on it, whereas now you can pay $10 and get access to every single song ever created. There’s no time and space for greatness to develop because if it doesn’t make a great first impression on you, you throw it away, never to return. But truly great work oftentimes won’t make a great first impression because it’ll be different from what you’re used to.
“I think there is no value in music anymore. Back in the day you'd either get on the bus or have your parents take you to the music store and you take your allowance or you're at your job if you're grown and you take that hard-earned money and you spend $20 to $25 on a CD by an artist that you obviously love and appreciate. And you open it and you put it in a CD player and you listen to it on the ride home, and you listen to it in the shower, and you listen to it with your friends, and you listen to it here and there, you appreciate it, right? So, even if – and this has happened to me especially when I was younger – a new album drops and you're like ‘I don't really know that I like this’ there's a big difference between [expressing] that and nowadays which is with a comment that's just like ‘yo this shit suck ass bruh’, like [that’s] crazy, right? This is supposed to be an artist that you love and revere but yet we're talking down on them in some ways… But what I'm saying is, if you're going to spend $25 on something you're not going to go ‘this sucks ass’ you're going to be like, ‘okay, it's not necessarily my favorite’ but you're not going to then just throw it in the trash or break it, you're probably going to listen to it again and catch something you didn't before. I think we used to focus on what we liked about things even if it wasn't necessarily our favorite – that's what we would focus on like, ‘wow, I really like the way his voice or her voice is on this record, I'm not really a fan of the production but it's kind of cool’ and then you can maybe slowly start to fall in love with this thing.” – Logic, 2021
In a world with so much content, we spend less time appreciating what we’ve consumed. We’re frantically moving from one thing to the next, taking no time to pause and think about what we’ve watched. We aren’t processing anything and therefore nothing feels great because we aren’t building a connection with it. With access to everything, it can feel like you have to consume everything just to stay in the loop but this just leads to you watching what everyone else thinks is good. No wonder you’re not connecting with anything you consume when it's all based on other people’s tastes.
Define Your Own Taste
At the end of the day, greatness is subjective, everyone has their own taste. The question is, is everyone’s taste valid? No. Your taste is invalid unless you can actually articulate it. You define your own taste, the problem is, you haven’t taken the time to define it. We make snap decisions based on first impressions, and have no capacity to explain why. It’s hard to find greatness when you don’t even know what you’re looking for.
When something resonates with you, try to actually put into words why. Over time, this will allow you to craft a unique palate which will lead to you having great taste. If you don’t, you’ll just keep consuming what everyone else consumes … what you think you’re “supposed to”. Maybe you have a more mainstream taste, and that’s fine. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about art, but unless you can explain your opinion, you don't have one, you just have feelings.
“Instagram has this thing where if I took a photo of you right now it has this weird algorithm thing where it could look at your shirt and you could just see other shirts like it, and I think that's fucking weird. I grew up where you see something and you have to spend the time and energy to figure out what it is because you truly give a fuck and if you stop giving a fuck you just stop looking it up. But that release you get when you find out what it is and then you find out how to get it and you have to go and get it and touch it and this and that, man that shit’s so deeply rooted in everything I do from music to clothes or whatever and now people just [go], ‘Oh it's there… cool’. It's not much inquisitive love and care in these things anymore and because of that people just buy anything now. People aren't buying pieces or shoes or a hat or clothing that they truly fucking love and want to wear every single day… We're at a time where things don't hold personal value anymore; it's now for other people. Even a conversation of music now has changed, people just say something's mid but they can't articulate why they don't like it. They don't have the vocabulary, or the energy, or the actual care.’ – Tyler, The Creator, 2022
Once you’ve defined your taste, don’t settle, keep exploring. In a world driven by algorithms it’s so easy to get caught in a loop of similar type content. If you rely on the algorithms it will just show you content it thinks you’ll like, which in theory makes sense. But in reality it just shows you more of the same which narrows your worldview to a small percentage of what’s actually being made.
You don’t want to end up as the person who thinks all modern music is trash, and is stuck listening to the same songs over and over and over again. It’s a sad life to think that no more great art will ever be made. That’s also not true. Greatness is everywhere. A byproduct of the democratization of art is that there are more genres and subgenres of art than ever before and within each one you’ll find the artists that embody greatness for that genre. It might not appear that way to you but that’s because you don’t understand every subgenre of every artform that exists. In order to understand something you have to spend time and learn about it, so that you can respect it, and ultimately appreciate it.
“Do you realize the bubble you live in? Do you realize like the eight friends you hang out with or the small city that you never leave is not the rest of the world? Do you understand that? Just because you haven't seen it, “it doesn't exist” I mean people live with that mind state.” Tyler, The Creator, 2021
This isn’t saying that you have to like everything. Building your taste means learning what you like and don’t like it. But there’s a difference between being able to articulate why you don’t like something and writing it off because it’s not what you’re used to. With so much being released into the world there’s naturally going to be a lot of stuff that you don’t like. There’s also going to be a lot of stuff that you do like, you just have to take the time to find it. But that’s hard to do if you don’t even know what you’re looking for. Without understanding your own tastes you just go into everything blindly hoping it resonates with you. Trying to figure out why you like something might seem daunting but let it excite you. There’s no better feeling than finding a new artist, and falling in love with them. There’s a world of greatness out there waiting to be discovered. Go find it.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, share it with someone else who’d like it :)
Amazing article bro. Makes me think--The 'ahead of its time' idea is a bit dangerous, because it can justify delusions of failed artists as well as it can justify a brilliant ideas of an underappreciated artist. Ahead-of-time-ness is always something you want to put your money where your mouth is--if you think a piece of art is 'Ahead of its time,' support the shit out of it. If you just say it is 'Ahead of its time,' without supporting it, do you really think that, or are you just saying it? Part of what makes something great is the people who see it as on the edge of something, and champion it.
Also, artists nowadays are their own champions a lot of times and don't sit back and allow their art to just be appreciated enough. (I am speaking for myself here) We instead feel we need to justify our own expression by trumpeting it from every rooftop, instead of just creating for the sake of itself and allowing the world to champion it if they want to. Do we do it because people don't champion us, or do people no longer champion greatness because we do that?