What place does public image and marketing have in music? Does it enhance the music...

What place does public image and marketing have in music? Does it enhance the music? Is it an important piece of an artists legacy?

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It doesn't enhance the music itself, but can add credibility to it

What kind of pose is this?

I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Look at the Gorillaz, they make some pretty good music, but without the characters and story behind the band it would lose it's best aspects.

>In late 1977 it was reported that he was to star in Wally, a biopic about the German expressionist painter Egon Schiele which was due to shoot in Vienna in 1978. Bowie confirmed his involvement, but the film was never made.

woah that woulda been cool

FUCK YOU

no fuck you

Yup. The cover for Lodger uses the same artist as an inspiration.
there were talks about a Thin White Duke biopic written by Burroughs.
>A long Ken Russell movie, in which Bowie plays himself, written by William Burroughs. “The script is meaningless,” Bowie tells The Sunday Times, “but the costumes are nice…”

...

>no fuck you

Since when did yupster canuck's say anything but 'sooooooooooooooorry'?

Go back to Canada while you can frenchie.
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what in the sweet blue fuck are you talking about?

Of course it is. Is Bowie the best musician of the 1970s? Hell no. Learning from Warhol, Bowie constructed a PR machine with a great team and left the competitors in the dust, including those with superior music. It doesn't enhance the music itself but it enhances the product that the music is part of.

Although to be fair, Bowie did more than that - bringing artistic choreography and 'the circus' to the fore front when before it was considered a background thing for example. Every major pop star follows his template for a reason

Jesus fuck that would have been too good

I agree with you, but I'd add that I don't know whether he would have the resources to go that far artistically were it not for his PR stunts. Before someone get their panties in a twist: no, I'm not discrediting Bowie. But he obviously understood PR, that's one of the, if not THE main characteristic of his work.
Space Oddity: folksy singer songwriter, quite hip back then
TMWSTW: psychedelic hippie
Hunky: extravagant artsy weirdo leaning towards androgyny
Ziggy: kinda obvious
Aladdin: rockstar grandeur
Dogs: theatrical grandeur
etc etc

>tumbler nose

It's everything for certain bands
Death Grips wouldn't be nowhere near where they are right now if it hadn't been for their cryptic behavior

What do you mean with music?

If you mean the record industry, it's the most important thing.

If you mean the art, not so much.

The artist needs to make a living somehow. If the artist needs to work as a waiter 10 hours a day it surely makes it hard to be productive. Lou was lucky enough to be embraced by the Factory, plus his generation had the best conditions possible to explore artistry. In 2017, if an artist goes "fuck PR, I'm gonna make art!" he might starve. This is why the "indie cred" mindset is so horribly wrong. Nobody can make a living playing bars, and if the artist can never grow his audience he'll eventually quit. Unless he doesn't care about being some homeless exceptional like Moondog

When was Yoshikage Kira a musician

Yeah, of course. I – and I hope most – think Lou was an artist, but objectively he was also part of the recording industry. Rock music, as experimental as it may be, somehow more or less must obey to the logic of marketing.

But I don't think La Monte Young or Stockhausen really cared about public image.

Stockhausen was a professor, so there's that. I don't know if La Monte taught, but he was friends with people like Yoko, which surely helps finance the music. Tbh I find it unfair to compare the reality of musicians from the 60s-70s to nowadays. We're talking about opposite realities, and just because some people could afford to be excentric in the 60s it doesn't mean the same is true today. Little Richard made hamburgers IIRC. Do you think someone in his position would make it these days? And I'm not saying making it big, becoming a star, I'm talking about surviving.
As much as it takes away from the romanticism, the modern musician has no option but care for PR. Some are better at it, some are worst, but you can't compare the reality of a musician in 2017 to that of the boomers, they were the only generation to have such luxuries after all. Such luxuries are not sustainable in the long run. For instance, if less boomers indulged in LSD and careless sex and tried to learn a thing or two and became music execs that helped the industry move forward, the biz could've been much better these days. But all they ever cared about was hedonism. They got high as fuck and fucked everyone, and when it came the time for them to become execs they were all coke driven scumbags. The irony of those who loved to shit on "the man" being much worse than the "square old men" that ran the biz in the 60s.

And let's be honest, at any point in time the artists who are good with PR are the ones who stand out. Kids thinking it takes away from the romanticism won't change that. Liszt was known as a panty-dropper Don Juan, an image that largely augmented his mythos. Debussy was the mystic, romantic Frenchie. Duke Ellington, Parker, Elvis, Beatles, Bowie... All of them might have been forgotten were it not for the PR. Don't forget a good deal of Bach's scores were found to be used as wrapping paper in a butchery in the XIX.
PR is essential.