Is it okay to make art right now?
The world appears to be collapsing, but is renouncing expression helpful?
I have been asking myself daily if it is okay to make art? After all, isn’t the sharing of one’s personal expression taking away from the numerous atrocities currently happening worldwide? Where does this internal voice come from telling me that creativity must stop when tragedy is present? After all, doesn’t art exist to connect us to deeper channels of humanity?
And then I think about all of the art—especially music—that has been my companion during moments of personal and cultural tragedy. Did I ever pause the track because these artists weren’t directly addressing the atrocities of the moment they released their music? Nah. I was simply grateful they had the courage to put their poetry into music, spoken or not, and record it so others might find transference in their release.
Last week, Andre 3000, after almost ten years of self-imposed exile, quietly released New Blue Sun, an ambient album made up entirely of woodwinds (digital and analog). Inspired by the likes of Laraaji, Pharoah Sanders and Yusef Lateef, the album is a buoyant float in warm salt water, which is to say, not for everyone. If you were expecting bars, there are none (he acknowledges this rather comically in the title track): “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A "Rap" Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me...”
He’d given us hints before. I’d quietly followed the social media spottings of Andre over the years—at the airport, a Whole Foods, immersed in the crowd at a Jazz festival—where he was almost always photographed carrying a flute in hand. He was known to practice while out in public. There were some jeers, some confusion, but for most, a kind of comfort in seeing a once enormous celebrity just going with what brought him joy. For Andre, it was—and remains—flutes. In press for the record, Dre acknowledges his age (48) and says that he’s just not inspired to rap anymore. The man wants to play flutes and clearly just relax. Can you blame him?
There’s an excerpt from a 2005 Lawrence Weschler essay “Vermeer in Bosnia” that I came across by way of Rebecca Solnit’s book Orwell’s Roses. Weschler, a writer well-known for covering international human rights asks a judge in the Hague how he could endure the daily stories of atrocities at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. To this the judge answered: “As often as possible, I walk over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
The Mauritshuis museum, it turns out only has three Vermeers: Diana and her Nymphs, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and The View from Delft.
Solnit writes “Weschler notes that Vermeer worked in a turbulent, war-plagued time, and that ‘the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about’ but they are it by being opposite, about the peace we crave in times of war, the stillness in uproar, about the persistence of the everyday and its beauty.’
More recently, I’ve been culling my own archives for what I term “Memories of Peace.” For years I’ve recorded “sound diaries” of my travels, my daily life. A string quartet in Paris, crickets, rain, streams, my Grandmother’s voice; whatever sliver of a moment/moments I knew I might wish to return to to remember what it was like to feel truly present. They’ve rarely been shared, mostly because they existed primarily for my own soothing. But lately—during days when I feel anesthetized by the present and thoughts of the future—I wonder if these not-so-distant relics of the past might bring someone else peace too, as they’ve done for me.
Here are a few sounds that have brought me comfort. I recommend you listen to them sequentially, with headphones, taking a pause from screens or conversation if you can.
That time I listened to Will Oldham play Merle Haggard songs in a Kentucky cabin.
That time the birds in LA came out on the first day of lockdown after a spring rain.
That time I listened to Wil play to himself in the living room.
I cannot live perpetually in the abyss of doomscrolling. Nor do I denounce those that, in this moment of war and climate panic, are seeking creative comforts to balance the deluge of atrocities around us all. Solnit writes that “the least political art may give us something that lets us plunge into politics, that humans beings need reinforcement and refuge, that pleasure does not neccesarily seduce us from the tasks at hand but can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm.”
So tonight I’ll be spinning New Blue Sun yet again, grateful that this one human followed their spirit through the fog of this moment, and gave us all flutes.