There’s a certain artistic suicide and artistic murder that takes place when you reach a certain level.
My case study is Metallica, my favorite band, my home team, as I like to say.
Their first four records were very heavy, thrash, genre-defining. They could have ridden that wave for their entire careers and done OK for themselves.
Instead, for their fifth album, they pivot by writing shorter songs, cleaner-sounding songs, still heavy, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them heavy metal anymore.
They committed a kind of artistic suicide in order to live. It was more of a murder suicide, because they knew they’d be killing off much of the audience it took them ten years to build, too.
On Rob Harvilla’s podcast about the songs of the 90s that define us, he had a conversation with the chef David Chang about The Black Album. Here’s a long quote from Chang:
I love growth in artistry. I love the fact that they were able to kill themselves in order to reach a new audience. They knew if they wanted to reach a different level, to push themselves out of their comfort zone. The hardest thing for them to do wasn’t to be more hard core and play it faster. It was how do I make someone that hates heavy metal, love heavy metal. That to me was a wildly difficult challenge and I admire that tremendously. I love when anybody tries to shoot for the moon and it could have really been just terrible. It wasn’t. I love that when you can grow and do something different and I don’t know if they get enough credit for doing that. The Black Album to me is what I always explain to someone who’s becoming a chef for the first time and they’re like getting out of the just trying to be cool phase.
The hard thing isn’t to make five people happy. The hard thing is how do you make as many people as possible simultaneously.
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And that’s the balance. How much to you scratch your own itch vs. creating art with the empathy of an end user, a listener, a reader in mind?
Again, David Chang says:
The hardest thing is to kill yourself, metaphorically speaking as an artist and you don’t have to, but that’s part of the word I resonate with, how do you tell new stories, when you don’t it hurts like hell. I think we should celebrate more things like the Black Album. I hope we have more of them.
Ibid
What Metallica did was they played to edges at first, way out on the fringe. They went super narrow, and it was only then that they could reel in a bit and become more generalists. It can never be the other way around where you try to appease the masses then get granular. The key to growing any audience is by going way out there, building trust, building true fans because you see them out on the edge, too.
Then you can backpedal into broader reach.