The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.
Perhaps an analogy to songwriting will make things more clear: how well received are the works of someone who writes rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass songs?
It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
I think maybe the only way to be a good artist though is to explore the things that resonate with you. If rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass speaks to your soul, and creating that music fulfills you, then who’s to say exploring those genres is a mistake? There are other measures of success than recognition.
Austin Kleon puts this especially well in “Steal Like An Artist.” He says that you can cut off some of your passions, and try to focus on one thing, but eventually you will “feel the pain of the phantom limb.”
Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art needs an audience.
Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it.
So who do you want to make art for? Who do you want making art for you? Random strangers peicing together art from fragments of digital audio they stumble across while surfing on an endless stream of information?
I think ultimately we’re going to go back and forth about an unanswerable question: what fulfills people? You can’t answer it for anyone else. One artist will need the audience as a foil; another will be perfectly happy to toil away in obscurity. To my mind the best advice is “try a lot of things and see what feels right to you; don’t be dogmatic about your approach until you have a very high level of confidence based on experience.” Beyond that I’m just not sure this is a question with a meaningful answer.
This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.
The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!
Recognizing that people are unique does not immediately equate to solipsism. That would be like me saying that recognizing any kind of commonality immediately implies collectivism.
I can't see why a bluegrass songwriter wouldn't benefit from learning more about rap, funk, metal; bringing a stronger context to their understanding of their own genre (which is sometimes an arbitrary delineation) and perhaps some techniques.
> It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true.
> The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.
I think both extremes are harmful. But my experience comes from dabbling in Jazz music of all sorts; 'Jazz fusion' is such a broad moniker that it extends from funk to rock to swing to rap.
While I don't disagree with the author on his points, I find them premised on faulty logic. His thesis assumes that depth and breadth are zero-sum pursuits. I suppose they are if time and energy are limiting factors, but to those who read and write for the love of the game, those limits are lifted.
When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.
Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.
Perhaps an analogy to songwriting will make things more clear: how well received are the works of someone who writes rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass songs?
It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.