I thoroughly believe that the frame of mind reflected in those individuals is, sorry people but, simply immature. To reach the point where one realizes we never stop learning is only the beginning of the maturity. Don’t stifle your creative possibilities people. Understanding music theory may allow one to communicate their ideas intelligently with other musicians. It’s a win-win scenario.

I use to never take time to learn to write because I was always just writing melodies and lyrics with recording equipment.

I can see how helpful having music & lyrics written and organized before recording. Learning music thoery helps one write and organize music more accuratley.

Thanks for reeading this,
Eric Stefani

Person A: “I can’t believe you’re so stupid”
Person B: “Oh yeah, because you’re real clever” (Sarcasm)
Person A: “What’s that quote? ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit’”
Person B: “Well Oscar Wilde said, ‘quotation is a substitute for wit’” (Irony)

While the Americans clearly do understand Irony and Sarcasm (And have bread some of the great examples of it Frasier, MASH, Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce ect) I do believe we use it in different ways.
Firstly I would say that Sarcasm is a simpler more obvious form of Irony. And most Americans use sarcasm much more then they do Irony.
In the UK we have the saying “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit”. And from my time spent in America, I do find that Americans make it much clearer that they are using sarcasm, by overstating it or appending “Just kidding”.
British irony and sarcasm is alot stealthier and dry, preferring to run under the surface (probably because we are more emotionally reserved/repressed) The idea being, the less obvious a joke, the more funny it is.

Americans are much more comfortble in directly expressing emotions, therefore they tend to use irony as a comedy show piece. Where as in the UK, we tend to use it as a trojan horse, to get across some point without alarming too many emotional trip wires.

The concentration problem seems to work similarly in visual art. If you don’t create a bunch of pieces that look very very similar to each other, that at least have similar ideas tying them together, then your work is considered “not mature yet” by art critics. Although we are multifaceted creatures that have various things to explore or express, it’s too much for an audience to take in at once. They/we seem to need an entry point before we can experience art.

I’ve found that it’s best to start anywhere, with everything out there at once… then take any of the reviews, venues, demographics, etc. that brought a positive outcome and organically move with them – find similar venues, audiences, or contact reviewers with similar ideas and interests… see where that goes. If people keep writing about you a certain way, or if you appeal to a certain audience, then you can just concentrate mostly on that, amplify it – without sacrificing the art (just changing the package that it’s presented in). In the end, it seems that one doesn’t even need to look for the brand or market. It just starts to crystallize on its own, if you let it. It’s such a curious thing. It’s some kind of a weird collective social pattern recognition.

I’m so curious, Coe: With your experience, how are these things tackled and approached professionally? How does one know what kind of advertising will work for a particular product, after being introduced to it relatively briefly? It seems to take a special skill – to recognize a pattern or strong point of a product and focus on just that. Maybe being too detail-oriented is not as helpful in this case… Is it more about stepping back and seeing all of it at once? I wonder how these things are done in a shorter term, with a deadline and everything – where does one start?

For my work the most prominent brand became art/science. I didn’t necessarily see my work as particularly science-related (not any more than most of the artwork out there). I thought that other concepts were much more prominent… But the science idea didn’t bother me either – it kind of just happened, so I went with it.