Artifacts: Jessie J “Price Tag”, Tori Kelly “”Unbreakable Smile”
For my first project, I’m planning on creating a CD pamphlet/literary magazine hybrid through Canva (not to be confused with Canvas. I currently have around 500 words of it written and 3 pages of my CD pamphlet/literary magazine hybrid completed. And in case you’re wondering, the hybrid is due to the fact that I’m dealing with several music artifacts and added a bit of an anecdote about my own experiences in the beginning as a sort of Editor’s letter. Below, I will attach a link to the hybrid, and then the actual words in more of an essay format so it’s easier to read. This is mostly just word vomit so bare with me.
Money likes to pop up and start trouble with human creativity every now and then. As a writer, I’ve taken a lot of advice in my career. Technical advice consisted of “show, don’t tell” and “don’t have the character look into a mirror and describe themselves for half an hour because that’s boring and no one wants to read that.” Business advice went something along the lines of “don’t do it for the money.” Eight-year-old me thought that was alright. I wasn’t doing it for the money, so there’s nothing to be worried about. Unfortunately, adult life brings with it a host of monetary issues, including bills, student loans, and insurance costs. The idea of a starving artist becomes clearer and clearer the longer a person seeks out their creative endeavors. As Lanham states in “Stuff and Fluff”, we are living in an attention economy, where sellers must cater to their audience’s limited attention span. The attention economy has started to leak into other sectors for a long time now, but one might consider that it’s always played a role in our society. Art, after all, needs an audience, more so than other industries. We can write without ever intending for anyone to read it, but even then, one might say the writer is their own audience, and it depends on whether they’re willing to explore and push their art further that leads to something becoming successful. Perhaps it’s our reliance on an audience that leads so many artists to poverty. Art has become associated with a mandatory suffering, bringing to mind images of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, authors who were mentally or financially troubled for much of their life. This is because attention is an unstable income. It fluctuates regularly, and with it, so does our actual monetary income. So, it makes sense that we’re told not to do it for the money, because neither money nor stability is guaranteed.
Beyond that implication, there’s also the notion of money cheapening the quality of the work. We all hear of artists “selling out”. Recently, this has been a trend against many song artists and content creators. Let’s start with Jessie J’s song, “Price Tag”, which debuted in 2011 and had played on the radio when I was going to school at age 12. On the surface, “Price Tag” is a relatively straightforward song about the importance of writing songs for one’s own happiness rather than for money and sales. Ironic considering it eventually went on to be one of her greatest commercial successes. People seem to have romanticized the idea of a creator or an artist being so engrossed in their work that they do not care about the business side of their industry, and the only reason they share their vision is to help others. In a way, this relationship between creativity (music, in this case) and the economy is similar to what Cottom had described the Education Gospel to be: An industry where many people are working to pay the bills, but are often criticized for being money-driven. Even Jessie J comments on this, criticizing her fellow artists with lines such as, “Seems like everybody’s got a price/I wonder how they sleep at night/When the sale comes first and the truth comes second” (3-5).
Note: I’ve yet to put in citations, but never fear, the final version will have a full list of resources and in-text citations.
Writing and Money 