That is a lot of work to put into a character simply to propagate your music. His fans are called toy soldiers. He writes about fun stuff like Planet X, The Fibonacci Sequence, and the Land of the Lost, to name but a few. He has an intellectual neo-goth steampunk flair that he totally plays upon, and I can't find a single link or resource that refers to him as a normal person. It's like there is an actual mad scientist making music out there.
I guess the point of this diatribe is to ask, why can't more artists do that? The closest I can think of right now is Trent Reznor and his ability to weave an alternate reality into an album (case in point: Year Zero.) I would happily attend a show that had a character performance and a musical performance. It would bring a lot more flavor back into the music industry, not to mention kind of re-humanize it in a way.
I'm not going to ramble. I would request that readers post ideas for personas, or actually make me aware of some other groups or people that do this. Examples: Gwar's grotesque costumes, or what if Five for Fighting brought vacuums on stage, so they could literally suck while they sucked?
-The0
They were fringe even by our standars, but 2 Skinnee J's always had a pretty obscure but entertaining thing going.
ReplyDeleteOne show that my brother went to, they all came out dressed up as ninjas with the Beverly Hills Cop theme playing. They kung fu'd for a few minutes before suddenly noticing that they had an audience. Then they burst into their first number.
don't groups like blue man group and gorillaz do this?
ReplyDeleteof course, your post is based on the supposition that other artists present just themselves in their shows and music. But maybe, just maybe, the "artist" that appears on stage is just an act.
I'd come up with examples to support this argument, but I am culturally inept.