Looks like the correlation between rock bands & startups got you all kicked up. Great. It makes me feel happy, because I wrote that piece only to catch you on the wrong foot – to hold that yearning artist (within you) by its balls and throw its malnutrition-ed carcass for the vultures to feed. OMG, why so serious, dear reader don’t be? Don’t curse me, but tell me why you never gave fine arts a chance in your life?
Well that’s how I come to this post. And why does this post, have a title called introducing ‘Tam, Fine Arts & Entrepreneurship‘? First of all, Tam is not your Total Available Market. Tam is Tamagna Ghosh, our latest writer on Pluggd.in. He will write about fine arts, under ground music movement, bands and entrepreneurship i.e. about the real risk takers on the field you otherwise would have chosen to ignore. Well not all of you, but most.
With this new breed of articles, hopefully, we will resurrect the artist within you.
And now you’d still ask – duh – why? Our answer: Because your artistic skills suck big-time. No, no, no it is not just that. It’s not only because you never groomed that painter within you, or you always found learning music an obscure and irrelevant activity for your career but also because you are at loss today w.r.t your own startup. We are covering fine arts because you don’t realize the difference between a piece of art (say Apple’s iPhone) or a piece of sh** that you (& I) dole out from Asia. A truly consumer’s perspective.
Dead artist is the reason why you code it so well to get an awesome back-end (ass) in your software, and you leave the (inter)FACE as a piece-of-shit. And that’s when market screws you from behind, coz all you got in there is the back-end – i.e the ass and no face to show off :-).
So here, meet Tam, who is a Marketing Manager for a major national FM Radio channel. He is an ex-IITian and an MBA from MDI Gurgaon. He also holds professional degree in arts and professional photography and loves to follow the underground music scene & cryptic art.
Over to Tam:
Hi all,
How many of you have this strange urge of collecting music memorabilia? To be precise, I have this grotesque thirst of buying original music CDs if the artwork/packaging or bundled exclusive merchandise catches my attention. Are these small pieces of art some cleverly thought tactics that the music labels deploy to increase their CD sales? Being an artist myself, and an avid listener of music my condescension toward beautifully crafted CD covers is normally an aye. But does it mean that the value of an album is enhanced by the art on top of it. And simply, does it motivates people to buy more because of it? So in the first post, let me introduce you to a concept called Song Art.
People who see CDs in my drawing room (even yours), actually see me (the person inside) as a whole. And the artwork I show to them plays an important role to raise my aura.
Do you remember the day when you first saw the cassette of “The Wall” by Pink Floyd? Particularly, the readers on the last post by Arvind? The Sony Music cassette had a thick roll of multiple folded cover along with lyrics. The black uneven lines showing the bricked wall along with “Pink Floyd the Wall” in a typical psychedelic font. It instantly caught my eye and coaxed me into shelling Rs. 150 during college days. For your information, the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has designed the concept & album art by marrying all characters of the psychedelic theme by Floyd.
That’s how great art (and great product) convinced me to buy a piece of Floyd.
Music Art actually welcomes you to the world of Visual Music. Where you associate Floyd with the flying pigs, the painful shout of a distorted face or may be Iron Maiden with a demonic Eddie and so on. Each band, its album and product theme is matched to band’s persona, and then the visuals i.e. Music Art encapsulates band pneumonic, album art, band member, musical concept, art portraits, music – mood/album emotions etc. The same strategy is applied to merchandise too. In other words it’s all about transforming an aural medium into static visual representation. However, there is also another level to it. Let’s call it Song Art.
A song art is a visual representation of the emotions, feelings, story that one song represents. We are not talking about the entire album art or a cover art, but only one song – singles. The magic of Song Art (visual) form is when you as a listener create an impression of your own corresponding to what you hear & interpret from the song. But your interpretation might be besides the actual meaning of the song. For example, in the latest album of Indian Ocean there is a song called “Chaand” whose inherent meaning can never be judged by listening to the lyrics alone.
Trusting the ear at the lyrics would make you believe that the poet is talking about the imperfections in the moon and the dream world. However little would you imagine that Chaand is about a boy in a remand room and how his hypothetical references to the underworld, that is totally ignored by the other inmates, come to life all of a sudden. When I spoke to Rahul Ram, the bassist and vocalist, Indian Ocean he narrated the entire story which is a part of a 12min documentary by Anurag Kashyap.
This song is the OST of the same. The art below shows what Chaand and it means:
What is your opinion on this topic, and perhaps my first post?
