Noise / Industrial Artists and Generational Wealth

[John Cagefight]

If anything can be learned from forum past, to activate people, there needs to be someone to starts new interesting topics that stir some discussions. I often find it curious that there seems to be challenge to start one. This topic should not discourage anyone. Sometimes you get criticized or ridiculed, but not that bad thing.

The recent AI thread seemed to be overflowing with the want for new / fresh discussions - and this is a topic I'd been wrestling with internally for a bit, so I thought I'd like to see where other people stand on this phenomenon.

In a handful of cases, either through word of mouth or other means, I'd discovered that noise / PE / industrial artists whom I hold a tremendous amount of respect for, come from substantial generational wealth. The type where working a day job was / would never be a concern for them.

Perhaps in part of jealousy towards their good fortune, and the time it affords, I have to admit it shook my sense of identifying directly with their work. I find myself wondering what impact it might have on my own art if I were at once afforded the time to truly indulge my passions without the interference of a day to day workload occupying the bulk of my time - and also whether being divorced from this common, human experience of needing to dig ditches in order to sustain a roof over one's head might change the humanity of the work.

In no cases have I stopped appreciating the work of an artist when finding out they might be Trust Electronics, but it would be hard for me to say it had no impact on how I experience it, also.

[FreakAnimalFinland]

I would think there is perspective that sets Finland (or scandinavia) quite different from USA. Even if Finns have very little visible "generational wealth" in the scene (at least seems to me), what we have here is social security system.

It is not wealth, in ways of luxury of having huge funds at disposal, social connections and whatever, but it really is this safety net of some sort, that one can fail miserably in life, in just about every aspect of it, and still trust it'll be all right.

My own background is at some sort of (Finnish standard) very normal lower-middle-class, totally normal family. Salaries combined with seemingly endless debt enable normal life of two parents and kids named with most popular names of each year of birth. Hah. No cultural ambitions, no business ambitions whatsoever. In other hand, there is no dysfunction and no serious opposition of someone heading totally opposite direction than everybody else.

Someone might have generational wealth, but I do wonder how big role it is within work in general? I remember reading Jojo Hiroshige interview where he dismissed Juntaro for being from wealthy family and because of that habit to "make a mess and not clean it up". This habit of making mess and have funds to do it, may have resulted the exceptional art?

[Balor/SS1535]

This seems to be a big topic of discussion in at least the portion of the American scene that I am most closely connected to (really, it's stemming a lot from a particular power electronics veteran).  While I am not as vehemently offended by this as him/some others in the particular context of noise, I am extremely frustrated by it in other portions of my life.  I can't say that I blame artists for taking advantage of the opportunities that they have---I would love to just dedicate my life to doing this stuff, after all---but I do think it divorces them from some of the struggle that can take good art and make it great.

On my good days, I tell myself that dealing with this makes me more authentic.  Or something like that.