Originally Posted by HEDOfloe
ok, let me elaborate. i've been thinking about this a lot this past year or so because of seeing how artists i like have grown and what people say about their youth etc. wondering about things like what i will be like in the future and how will i look back at myself now.
and a question comes up about who will you be able to say i am when it's all said and done. if i was more successful as a youth, will that have been the real me? if i try different things as i get older that don't work out, will those just be failed experiments? and aside from artistic endeavors, will who i really am be the one that dies, the one that has experienced so much more than the me that i am now?
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I for one completely agree with your words. If someone had told me 5 years ago, that I would be doing the things I am doing now, hearing the things I am hearing now, saying the things I am saying now, and writing the music I am writing now, I would never have believed it.
Having realised this, now it makes me cringe everytime I hear something like "they are not being true to their own selves"... A band should owe no allegiance to its fans, and the fans don't owe any allegiance to the band. If a band becomes something which I cannot endorse anymore, then instead of moving along with the band, I will calmly let it pass by me.
I do accept that interference of record labels, and greedy managers does generate great turmoil and questionable music in the hands of more insecure, fabricated artists, but in the end they all made their bed and have to sleep in it. For better or worse, it's still "them", but they were never a fixed, imutable mathematical constant, to begin with.
If someone says that the "first album" shiina is the real one, then I could argue that 5 years before, shiina had a very different personality and musical taste. and five years later, she would be again different.
Albums are nothing more than a snapshot in time of what is happening in that period of an artists' life. If shiina had only been able to release her very first album today, at her late 20's, would anyone actually believe it would have sounded anything like Muzai Moratorium?
People change, and some people appear to resist to change, and in that process they run the risk of stagnating.