Wellll, let’s not make too much of this. As someone who dearly misses those old VH1 Behind the Music documentaries, I’m a sucker for the music biography, and the radical change is one of my favorite plot twists. Plus it’s summer, so let’s have some fun and start some conversation, right?
Having said that, I think there is value in considering the musician’s career, as opposed to her “great work” or creative zenith. The question of a “career” points to the sustainability of creative pursuits over the long-term. This raises the interesting question, what is the relationship of musical career to location?
This issue is too often overlooked, most notably, in the contemporary interest in musical scenes. Conceptually speaking, the durability of a musical scene is not the same thing as the durability of an individual career associated with that scene. Indeed, scenes often churn through careers as musicians come and go, bands form and break up. The empirical identification of musical scenes with “lots of musicians in their 20s” only highlights the conceptual shortcomings of this methodological strategy.
Conversely, musicians may intersect scenes for only brief periods of their career, as but one stop in a creative biography taking place in multiple locations. Or perhaps they sustain careers through longer-term commitments to a location, which then raises the question: what kinds of reinventions can be achieved in a career with locational stability? Do you need a “change of scenery” to make a radical artistic break? These are the kinds of questions that I hope this list can stimulate thinking on, in admittedly a very informal and casual exercise.