# Control freaks, everywhere

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2014/06/09/control-freaks-everywhere/
- Published: 2014-06-09T18:17:12+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

#### From will.i.am to Lagerfeld

Producers are currently doing to music what designers did to fashion: make it impossible.

It is amazing how deep the desire to control the reality is rooted in the human 
brain. It’s like we’re fascinated about how reality just elegantly flows into existence
and we desperately want to do the same. If we can’t do it, then we invent a way 
to ruin it.

That model is visible in some forms of art. Just like models, in a wild gallop towards
fame and fortune, slowly agreed on disappearing from the catwalk, to make room for
stitch lines to be straight, so do singers, in an even wilder gallop towards iTunes
sales and Youtube views, slowly agree to disappear from the studio to make room 
for the Auto-Tune effects.

> Fashion designers cannot possibly make clothes that are more beautiful than the
> women who wear them.

This is simply because in no way ever will the human brain appreciate fabric more
than skin, or embellishments over natural lines. Frustrating as this is, they resorted
to making the woman an accessory of the clothing they create. Just pay attention
to more than the weight, that only drew a big chunk of attention, but the makeup,
the hairdos, the facial lack of expression that became the arcane art of the top
models. They, the models, are invisible, so you can see only the cut, the material
and the print and lust for it as cold and unnatural this may be.

Producers cannot sing — apparently at all. From Timbaland’s weird interventions 
in the melody to will.i.am’s embarrassing melodic talking — they are simply folks
who know music very well, but who cannot sing.

> Producers cannot produce songs that sound better than singing.

Well, frustrating as this is they reverted to a general rule of wiping away any 
singing at all and turn the singer into an accessory of the tune, as if it’s there
only for the brand, the personification of some name — all else, like voice, being
irrelevant.

Part of this is a general problem with creative industries: that the creator does
not have the actual control, but the distributor, the influencer, the organizer,
the agent, the promoter, the manager and the list could really get never ending.
Talented people or those who bask in the grace of some gift like a good singing 
voice, an unreal beauty, an exquisite or exotic way to see or talk about reality
itself etcetera, all these people live inside a container of other non talented 
humans which do all kinds of jobs that the first group has not time or talent for.
I’m not the inventor of this idea. Some critics, for example, have been repeatedly
put in the same cultural corner as envy, by cultivating the harshness of their critique
in order to compensate for their lack of natural ability. But I call this on many
other occupations and circles of influence, cohorts of folk deeply informed and 
cultivated in some area they love but without any tangible, real possibility to 
create more of the thing they know so much about.

This is not specific to fashion or music. Visual arts, such as painting and sculpture,
have been shaped by what galleries would display. But in this context the situation
is way better: those lucky selected artists are still in the spotlight. In fashion
and music, however, this is not true anymore: in music if you take the producer 
out the performer cannot replicate the performance, in fashion if you take the designer
out, the model has no clothes to cover the blandness anymore.

But the question_ _is not_ _why this happens in some creative industry or another.
After all its all normal and O.K.: creation is a yang or positive, strong energy
and it will, constantly, draw close the yin or negative, weak energy — which in 
this case is this army of intermediary folk between the audience and the message
maker. The yin is constantly killing the creation, bringing on rules and order, 
bending the creative burst into silence — until it erupts somewhere else. Its O.
K. this happens constantly.

However, aside from this natural order, i wonder what exactly, in our minds, is 
producing this tendency to kill natural beauty, born talent, genius innovation, 
clear originality and natural expression — why are we so heavily biased towards 
an artificial depiction of the world that we are gazing at inside our humble tiny
timescale of “one life”?

> The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty
> is no one has as yet discovered. Oscar Wilde of course.