Boxes… Again
I think it was a few days ago or so that I voiced my concern that I’ve been complaining too much here and softly pledged to improve my attitude… but that’s not happening yet.
People love to typecast. Hollywood does it. You see one person be the funny dumb guy in one movie and then you see him do it twenty more times. The romantic lead is always the romantic lead. The quirky girl is never the action hero. Very rarely do people get the chance to show their other colors. That’s a bummer in my opinion, but most times there are powers above those performers that have influence that prevents them from taking those riskier swings, especially when the budgets are high.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that people do it to themselves now online. I saw a video of a band that plays hip hop covers on the internet. They had gone viral with one of their covers and people used the sound from their video in their own reels and naturally, since it was successful, the band continued to do more videos of other hip hop covers. Now on the one hand, that’s good branding, right? Branding is the digital buzz word. It literally makes me want to put knives in my ears but that’s kind of beside the point. The problem is, now that’s all people want to hear from this band. Hip Hop cover after Hip Hop cover and they better be perfect. I looked in the comments on one of the videos and these people are nitpicking like crazy about one note that the guitarist played because it’s not exactly like the record. Do you think that any of the commenters considered that maybe these guys don’t want to just play covers exactly like old records their whole lives? Maybe they want to explore their creativity and try new ideas? Probably not. No room for that. The band did it to themselves to a degree by feeding the machine but the machine isn’t allowing any room for variance. Everybody’s stuck in their boxes.
So how do we build a brand that allows us to change? One where we don’t have to do the same thing over and over, where audiences and supporters will allow us to experiment, so we can feel free to do something different. How do we show all our colors and still be identifiable? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
-J.P.