"Down Is The New Up"
Writing lyrics is easy and hard. It is easy to spit out a bunch of unrelated words like magnetic poetry and call it a day and people will still praise you for being mystic - yes and no - because down there at heart you were trying to get to something when you were writing it. If your brain was empty, wasted and aimless, then the words will sound the same. If your brain is tense, ambivalent and self-critical, then the words will also be critical, but tense as well, like the words are pushed together by some dark matter ready to explode any minute.
"Down Is The New Up" is a working title of LP 7 of the band Radiohead. I am browsing for design idea and came across this. At first glance of the words it sounds like yet another megalomaniac way-too-much-depressant poetry, like you have been down for so long you took it for granted you thought it was just normal progression of life, thus up. But then I saw their new artwork:
...and somehow all in a sudden their songs make a lot more sense. It almost sounds as if Thom Yorke is doing the urban critic job here in these songs. It also makes me wonder, do they come up with the drawings first, or the words first, or the music? Probably something happening symbiotic and simultaneously, wouldn't it?
Because if you work on all these artistic components in a linear order, it means the one component being worked at last would be the most compromised by the ones at first.
I wondered because normal bands work in a mundane manner: You come up with songs, then record them, practice for tour, and ask the art department to come up with some merchandises with your logo slapped all over the place and some crazy fans will buy them anyway. (It also relates to a separate issue: Spoiling your fans with too much faceless junk.)
Radiohead is probably my most respected band for their artistry because they are the only one of those bands that care about elements related to the whole performance other than just the music, and they develop them in a symbiotic manner (not forced). The way they play the songs on the stage, their crooked music videos, the fragile voice and sound, and all the choatic artwork are strongly related - in the way that they all share the same character, and share the simultaneous process.
Yes, I know many 80's bands care a lot about their hair and pyrotechnics, or a lot of pop singers have a whole dance team to go with them, but they are all unrelated to the music and the whole experience, they are all come up with after the fact like a last minute fix, and I would just call those extensions as gimmicks but not part of the art.