Maybe it’s because I’m 31. Maybe it’s because I can’t wear my hair in a pompadour without my ears sticking out like…whoa, but somewhere along the way, I stopped striving to be “relevant”
I’m an artist. I produce music, I wrote a book. I tell stories through video. So when I refer to being relevant, I’m referring to my art as my voice. My misstep was a gross misunderstanding of the word “relevant’ for 10+ years of my life.
Through my twenties, I treated this word as a gauge of my work being accepted by my elite peers and people within my age group who I identified as the cool kids. “That’s a good song, but is it ‘relevant’ to our culture?” was a common phrase out of my lips. What I was basically stating was “will my age group categorize my work as identifiable in style with what they are already accustomed to at that moment?”
I was asking if the cool kids would like my work. I wanted approval. I wanted to know that what I did was ‘up-to-snuff’ with what was already out there. It takes a special kind of jerk like me to say “I know that this group of people represents 10% of culture, but their acceptance is the only thing that will give my work, my art, validity. They matter. No one else. There’s one statement that could have made what I did for 10 years so much more life-bringing, so much more honest. So what is it? It’s this: “What does our culture hunger to become over anything else?” If you can attempt to answer this question and even get remotely close, your work will take on a life of it’s own, incomparable to anything else.
We weren’t gifted as artists to copy another artist’s take on what culture needs. We were made to answer that question for ourselves and respond with art that matters. Not art that matches.