Authoring/Othering Self: Topical Art, Self-Expression, and the Art of the Vibe
Gabriel Jenks
What role do we assume when we author topical art? How do we profit from any social capital we may generate from such an act? Is authoring ever selfless? Does the question shift when an already well-known artist uses their visibility as a platform for an issue? I’d like to examine the relationship of art to artist: considering performance as an axis between them, with context or audience determining the balance of weight.
I have generally held the belief that contemporary classical composition—the corner of music in which I have spent most of my life—is not the best vehicle for effecting social change. Much of this feeling is based upon its somewhat niche status in the larger social context. From a “market” perspective, there is undeniably a wide gap between a contemporary classical composer’s relationship to a social issue, versus a creator’s like the singer-songwriter/poet/comedian Elle Cordova, with her more than one million followers across social media platforms.
Someone like Elle Cordova is positioned to reach an enormous audience as she turns a witty phrase at her guitar with the refrain: “oo-de-lally oo-de-lally, golly what a bill,” using a kind of homespun and nostalgic style referencing of the likes of Pete Seeger. The social media algorithm brings her reels even to those who don’t follow her. It seems possible that she might influence the way people think about those issues she raises with her art. Or even impart information that might otherwise go unnoticed.
There is a chicken and egg question here: are those artists like Cordova who gain significant popularity simply in the right place in the right time, almost part of a chemical reaction with their audience, or do they win their fans slowly but surely? It depends upon the maker-product-audience chain within time and place: who, what, where. Trends, even ones that seem universal, always start with a particular demographic and in a particular moment. Like humor, a trend cannot survive out of context. A trend that gathers viral status may eventually seem to outgrow its context, perhaps even to the extent that people who buy in and participate do so wholly unaware of the trend’s origins. But it is, nevertheless, rooted somewhere.
A song that sounds a little like Pete Seeger, or Peter Paul and Mary, or Woody Guthrie appeals to an audience who may see themselves as the kind of salt-of-the-earth folks, the farm-to-table, sustainable living, crunchy rural Yankees. We might make this kind of regional guess based on a number of factors: lyric pronunciation, topic, rhythmic feel and meter, pacing, voicing, any use of dissonance, instrumental figuration, etc. Just distinct enough from the music of rural south or southwest whose roots we might trace to The Carter Family, Jimmy Rogers, even Elvis. Obviously, we very quickly run into some serious overlap. But regional flavors are a little different.
Fanbases overlap. Styles overlap. Ideologies overlap, issues overlap. And yet the image—the vibe, if you will—that is being projected by Elle Cordova feels very different to us than that of say, Sierra Hull, a singer-songwriter (and crackerjack mandolin player) whose music and chipper, cute persona feels decidedly less edgy. Sierra’s isn’t the music of resistance. An audience is drawn to an artist in whom they can see, hear, or sense, themselves, or a version of themselves to which they aspire. And we tend to vibe with art that mirrors back something we already feel, at least latently.
How we perceive ourselves tends to shape what we believe, and we are more often than not born into our worldviews, at least to a large extent. It is natural to agree with someone you trust. This is how corporations sell us beliefs and values. This is why Taylor Swift—an artist seen as uniquely positioned to bring disparate groups together—being explicit about her political views seemed as though it might have a real impact on voters.
The anatomy of social media and the way influencers can strike gold with no help from presenters or live audiences, is an interesting element in the mix. It may not essentially change the way the model worked prior to these platforms, but it does seem to shift the timescale and volume somewhat, and perhaps the locus of value. Streaming services have demolished the record industry, and perhaps social media has demolished the live performance. Certainly, the idea of social media as the main medium for the consumption of art, entertainment, and even information, has changed us. A presenter, a record label, a newspaper, are no longer the primary curators of what gets our attention. Instead, it is an algorithm based upon what we engage with. Our choices, our attention, our idle scrolling and random curiosity will determine our experience.
And that becomes the game of the aspiring influencer.
But what about the artist whose very ideology hinges on being unpopular? The artist whose work is so esoteric as to seem off-putting to an uninitiated audience? Only an elite and educated class understands this work. It isn’t for everyone.
Catherine Liu, a professor at University of California Irvine and a cultural theorist and author of several books including Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class[1], describes the credentialed elite a class who feel “an unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.”[2]
Liu argues that this professional managerial class (PMC) is playing into the status quo of society’s stratified economic classes, keeping the rich on top and the poor on the bottom. They partake in and perpetuate an ideology and lifestyle that is available to them by dint of their privilege, and which tends to alienate those who don’t have access to those same privileges. Their values concerning everything from parenting to diet to education take for granted a baseline of comfort. They feel that their lifestyle, choices, and beliefs indicate their moral rather than economic standing.
A lifestyle includes many facets, including what kinds of music you listen to. While it is true that with the democratization of information by the internet, anyone can consume any type of music, the cultural access to different types of music is still a very real factor to consider.
There will always be outliers, of course. And there is no literal firewall standing between anyone with access to the internet and a shockingly thorough education in even the most esoteric musical areas through several online platforms and forums. But the truth is that most of the time, education and economic security go hand in hand. And even when they don’t, even the most motivated and devoted of learners can be derailed by a lack of their basic needs being met.
This is an aspect of having spent my life as a classical musician which has long troubled me. Although my family when I was growing up was far from wealthy, I was given access to the nourishment, clothing, and time I needed to pursue music. And somewhere along my growing up journey, a nascent belief took root: that my success was due solely to hard work and talent; I therefore built my self-worth on these things.
I don’t mean to discount the hard work I put in. But something a little more toxic than pride in my hard work began to seed itself in me around this time, too, and this was the idea that my accomplishments and knowledge gave me a kind of moral standing. And from there, I can readily follow the desire to seek out the esoteric, the difficult, the rarified, since their attainment is an indicator of self-worth.
This is another aspect of Liu’s argument. She speaks about the PMC producing and reproducing ideas that are generally not popular or easily graspable. While I don’t mean to overly simplify the matter by suggesting that difficult ideas aren’t worth working for, believing in, fighting for, and that the journey to understand and accomplish difficult things isn’t well worth taking because not everyone can take it, I do mean to point out that there is a risk that difficulty or esotericism itself can determine a thing’s value in the PMC mind. In an interview on the podcast Doomscroll with Joshua Citarella, Liu goes so far as to say that there is a cultural tendency in the PMC to “create vanguard positions that other people have to follow.”[3]
To come back to my earlier points about branding and advertising as a creator, the practitioner of an unpopular art will perhaps use their art’s esotericism as a determinant of value, which could seem paradoxical given the social media landscape and how going viral works.
I was recently on a doomscroll of my own when onto my screen popped a young person seated in the middle of the screen pointing to captions as they appeared one by one, accompanied by music for strings in a style somewhere between Mahler and Barber. The captions (which I can only paraphrase, the video itself having been carried back out to the vast sea of Instagram never to be recovered by my algorithm) read: “If you are watching this, you are part of a very small group of people who care about classical music. I wrote this piece of music you are listening to now. It is my dream to write music for the biggest concert halls in the world. But in order to do this I need your help. Please comment below how this music makes you feel. Then hit like and follow to help me make my dream come true.”
Now, encoded in this entire little vignette are several pieces of information which I immediately decoded (partially because of my own implicit biases): firstly, this is a somewhat naïve attempt at success in the classical music world. Secondly, that while this creator claims that if you are watching this video, you are part of a small group of people who care about classical music, the music in the background would indicate that that’s not really the culture he’s aiming at. At least not in its most “hardcore” iteration. He’s aiming at more an “America’s Got Talent” scenario, if you catch my drift. He’s appealing to the demographic who are fans of classical music (as in The Classics) and who feel that their musical tastes set them apart from the rest of the crowd, as it were. They like thinking of themselves as part of a small group of people. It’s a calculated, targeted advertisement, with at least some—even implicit—research having been conducted. You get a vibe. The vibe tells you who the audience might be. How they might view themselves.
Now, what becomes interesting is when the “hardcore” crowd (to whom the creator I just mentioned was not appealing) decides to engage with the question of advertising, branding, and how they want to send their art out into the world and what types of things will increase their capital. The same video would not have landed if the music had been in a different style. Picture, for example, the video I just described being accompanied by something stylistically more adjacent to Berio’s Sequenza for voice, or Lachenmann’s Pression. “Comment below how the music makes you feel” would most likely either not elicit any responses at all, or the video would never have made it beyond the small orbit of already subscribed followers. Or, supposing for a moment that it had reached non-followers who felt compelled to comment, those comments might not help the creator towards their goal of “writing music for the world’s biggest stages.”
Perhaps there is a tipping point. Maybe you can appeal to your audience’s self-image as being part of a vanguard or in-crowd only if there is exactly the correct ratio of familiar to unfamiliar in your product. You have to gain your audience’s trust before you can convince them that what you are offering is valuable.
To come back to a point I made earlier, the idea that a contemporary classical composer might potentially be using a social issue in their music as a means of gaining capital makes me very uncomfortable. Again, it becomes a question of balance. Let’s imagine an audience of 1000 people. Let’s say that of those 1000, 10% of them are concertgoers who might be likely to attend the premiere of a new piece. But let’s say of those same 1000, at least 90% of them care about a given issue. So if you write a piece that centers this issue, and then go out and advertise it to this particular group of people, you have a chance of growing your audience significantly not because of your music per se (although it’s possible that the non-concertgoers who care about the issue and therefore go to your premiere will come to love your music), but because of the issue you are taking up.
You are not bringing about social change through music but rather using an issue as a way of branding yourself and your music in order to appeal to a larger audience whom you know exists.
Let me be clear: it’s not a sonic issue. It isn’t that Berio or Lachenmann are so sonically “rarified” that they never can be appealing beyond a specifically educated group. In fact, certain types of progressive or experimental rock, metal, ambient music, etc. have a devoted following from a very different target crowd and yet share certain sonic and even gestural elements in common with what we might describe as “academic music.” I had a student once who thought he’d found the cheat code to being a commercial success as a composer of noise-based music by writing for fashion runways: he said: “they eat it up. It’s suddenly trippy and edgy, not forbidding and difficult.”
Style is, as the above example would indicate, largely social and situational. Of course it isn’t totally porous, or else we would not be able to detect stylistic threads running from one type of music into countless others and vice versa. But attempting to describe style in abstract terms becomes impossible because style isn’t abstract. It is contextual. And to evoke a style is a matter far more intricate than to take a few conventions of harmony, voice leading, gesture, or rhythm and apply them to one’s compositional process. It is an irreducible combination of these things along with nearly countless others. To evoke a style well requires a high level of fluency within the style, and significant familiarity with existing examples. Unless we have grown up steeped in a certain style, the acquisition of fluency will be a laborious process involving study, practice, and close observation of patterns, conventions, and a knowledge of their historical, cultural, and social contexts. Depending upon the style, the road to mastery might either be well-charted by others or somewhat shrouded in mystery.
I have mentioned the word “vibe” several times in the foregoing discussions. I find myself referring to the “vibe” of music quite a bit when I speak about stylistic influences. I like the term because of all its cultural and social evocativeness as well as its many problematic aspects. I’d like to spend a few minutes unpacking these. I’ve seen examples of a generational clash around the concept of “vibes,” pointing towards the frustration felt by Gen X or Millennials about Gen Z’s reliance on “vibes” to justify a choice they might make. For example, there was a reel on Instagram featuring interviews of Gen Z voters about whom they had voted for in the last presidential election. Many of these first-time voters were unable to answer any questions about their chosen candidate’s policies. They answered instead that they voted based on vibes.
Catherine Liu gets into the matter of vibes in another interview she gives with the same podcast several months later than the one I cited earlier. She speaks about the elevation of vibes in terms of a “reaction against the Enlightenment as the sacralization of immaturity and polymorphous perversity, which means that you are just a surface of feelings and vibes. And if you’re vibing wrong with something, you’re having a nondialectical relationship with the other, whatever they say. But there’s no differentiation.”[4]
While I don’t disagree with Liu that the rejection of maturity, reason, and the kind of thought that is capable of differentiation is ultimately quite harmful not only to those who are doing the rejecting but also to anyone around them, I find myself unwilling to discount the realness of vibes. Worlds are conveyed, created, or destroyed because of what we say between the lines. Vibes are more powerful in many ways than arguments. And yet, if you have no real understanding of them—if you rely solely on your inchoate, undifferentiated feeling about them rather than doing the hard work in figuring out what and why you are picking up on—you can never evolve intellectually, emotionally, or creatively. And any mastery of vibes will be gained in a purely savant-like way rather than through an articulable and useful understanding.
To me, getting a handle on the stylistic vibes you are interested in is an extraordinarily refined aspect of compositional craft. If you’re able to do it, you are essentially free to move about in any number of musical spaces with whatever materials you choose to use. You no longer need to imitate to evoke. I like to think of it as being able to build entire worlds with vapors. It sounds mysterious and very counter enlightenment, but in fact it is one of the most elaborately acquired skills I can imagine. It is not a matter of “trusting my intuition” and vibing with whatever strikes my fancy (although obsession followed by trial and error is a vital part of the labor that goes towards mastery).
So, what exactly are “vibes?” To me, they are what place something socially. They signal with whom you are speaking, who you consider yourself to be, and how what you are saying might land. This can change by process of accumulation, but the erasure of the past is never possible. Language works this same way. For example, the word “Queer” was used derisively towards homosexual individuals before it was subverted and claimed by the LGBTQIA+ community as an empowering term and a way to signal belonging. But its power for us comes partially from the pain it carried before it was repurposed in a positive sense. In fact, if we forget this, or never learn it, we will have no idea why the word has a certain vibe, and eventually it will cease to be vibey at all.
The songs I have been writing aren’t contemporary classical music. But they also don’t represent a unidirectional shift on my part or an epiphanic creative awakening. I was curious about something I didn’t know, and I wanted a musical rhetoric which I felt could easily accommodate a topical approach.
So, I sought to enter a world inhabited by songwriters I admire writing in a genre that might be described broadly as American Folk Music, or maybe indie-folk, or Americana. Music that tends to be lyrically based, acoustically produced, and can be traced to a number of different influences including Appalachian folk music (which itself is a fascinating amalgam), and the group of singer-songwriters active from about the late 1950’s into the following decades whom we often look to in describing the roots of our current “folk” music: artists like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Biaz, to name just a few.
What struck me in my process of exploring the craft of these songwriters was the directness with which an idea was conveyed: musical directness, lyrical directness. Not only that, but the fact that many of these songs are somehow able to be both complicated and direct at the same time. To be direct does not mean to be predictable, or even simple. It means rather that whatever needs to be said is put as succinctly as possible, unobstructed by layers of poetry upon poetry. It is music that explicitly acknowledges its influences, its symbols. Denaturing the familiar is not part of its vocabulary. Recontextualizing the familiar is, like using a mirror to refract light in a room we all know well, causing us to see it—quite literally—in a new light.
I took up the banjo about a year ago, and then the guitar this past February. Part of the joy of finding these songs’ idiom has been tied to grappling with these unfamiliar instruments and getting to know the physical parameters of how they speak in my hands. Which is somewhat par for the course in this tradition: the uniqueness of Joni Mitchell’s guitar playing is due in part to the physical limitations imposed on her by her childhood polio. Most of the other songwriters I mentioned received no formal training on their instruments; technical ceilings can provide a fascinating challenge to be accommodated.
I am not suggesting that music in this style is the only, or even the best, or even a superior, means of writing topically. But it was the most attractive means to me for what I felt I needed to do. I don’t expect to go viral anytime soon, nor is that something I am aiming at per se. I don’t imagine that I have a broad enough reach for any of my songs to come to represent a call to action in any real social sense, nor can I count on any sparks being ignited that will cause any of my work to gain the emotional conduit status that we recognize in songs like Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluiah.” What I can do, however, is learn to be as fluent as I can in writing lyrics and music in a style that strikes me as being extraordinary for its directness, positioned as it is for a complex of reasons— social, musical, historical, and more—to be able to use the context of familiarity to deliver something particular, personal, and pointed.
[1] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-6645-8. OCLC 1235762749
[2] Ibid, pg 2
[3] Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue, and Liberal Elites; Doomscroll (podcast), Joshua Citarella, host. July 2024
[4] Catherine Liu: The Psychology of Liberalism: Doomscroll, Joshua Citarella, host; May 2025