What Good Do Your Words Do?*
Audience is a concern for all creators. Musicians, filmmakers and writers ostensibly do what they do so that people will listen, see or read their work and like it. But what happens when people don't get it? What happens when people don't buy it? Do you switch your style up? Well two creatives, writer David Simon and musician Queen Latifah, recently shared with interviewers their thoughts on the mainstream as artists whose sensibilities ran counter to it but still garnered them success and acclaim.
David Simon, interviewed by Nick Hornby, in the current issue of the Believer has this to say about authentically portraying varied Baltimore constituencies on the HBO series, The Wire.
DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
And the Queen, whose radicalism has certainly tempered as she has aged, proves she's a got a little gumption left in this recent AP interview:
AP: But your original audience is grown now. Do you ever worry about not being able to reach the younger generation?
Latifah: I can’t be trying to reach that generation. I can only reach them on the things that we relate on. I can’t pretend to be 15-years-old when I’m 37. All those people who I grew up with that have kids now and jobs, they need music to listen to too. The problem is hip-hop hasn’t grown up enough. Jay-Z is a great example of someone who’s connected to the youngest people and connected to my generation and older, because some of what he’s talking about I can relate to. Whoever gravitates to (my) music, they have to find it and enjoy it themselves.
While I clearly disagree with her characterization of Shawn Carter, I appreciate the sense of her musical approach, which I hope will someday extend to her representation of her personal life and her choice of film roles.
* From Latifah's Sugar Water Bud Erykah Badu's song, "... & On"
Posted on October 9, 2007 9:50 AM
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