I have had very little interest in being an icon or visual representation for my music. I like playing music with my bandmates and I have more and more fun onstage these days, but the part where you're supposed to be a salesman for your music is pretty unappealing to me.
I studied painting, sculpture and video in both undergrad and grad school, but I've always been more interested in music and I've always admired music that can evoke a cinematic experience.
I don't think I have enough of an interest in today's cultural mood to connect with or reject it. I'm compelled by the ideas that arrive when I'm not trying, and I follow them through almost every time. I feel fortunate that these days, there are a lot of them. You could argue that they are informed by everything I'm experiencing culturally around me but I don't, for example, look online for new music or art very often, and I don't think there is much in contemporary culture for me. It's a needle in a haystack kind of thing, and I'd rather spend that time working on a new song.
A few years back, even the most commercial pop could have some artistic value. Someone who liked underground music could appreciate Justin Timberlake, too. Now, I just don't get it. Production values are boring; songwriting has gotten worse - the choruses on a lot of popular hip-hop songs are especially bad. The rappers hit their flow in the verses, then when they try to sing, it's a mess. And just like the airbrush tool in Photoshop, Autotune is way overused. It's not a toy!
Black metal - especially from the '90s - contains a certain production aesthetic that keys you into the emotive content. You feel it more intimately than, say, technical death metal, where everything is produced super-precisely.
I think it's nearly impossible to be original now. For anything revolutionary to happen again, new instruments have to be invented. A new kind of guitar, maybe, and a new way to play it. There are only so many ways to manipulate sound, if you look at it scientifically.
