What defines art and can it bow to commerce? And how do we deal with artists who no longer meet our moral standards? Chilly Gonzales is a kind of navel-gazing artist: for his new album “Gonzo”, which is being released today, he has written a lot of things that have occurred to him about his own work and the life of an artist in general. After years of mostly instrumental albums, it is now time for a lot of text.
“The first time that I entertained was the first time that I felt sane” – this is the first line of the album, the first line of the song “Gonzo”, sung by strings.
“I started writing lyrics again at the beginning of 2022 – and these were the songs that had the most power,” the Canadian musician, who has now been living in Cologne for years, told the German Press Agency. “I don’t think about my audience. I produce as much as I can, try to have a clear connection to my subconscious and then follow the lyrics wherever they take me. I don’t switch to entertainer mode until much later. Then I’m more objective and think about what can work on stage and what can’t.”
“Neoclassical Massacre”
The 52-year-old singer, pianist, producer and entertainer, whose real name is Jason Charles Beck, dedicates the most monumental song on the album to the artistic creative process: “Neoclassical Massacre”, a rhymed tirade against the artists who make music only to adapt to the algorithmic logic of playlists and thus have the greatest possible (commercial) success.
“The role of an artist is not to let the algorithm dictate what we create – but to use the algorithm to our advantage once we have created something,” he says in an interview.
“F*ck Wagner”
Possibly the most succinct, but certainly the most provocative of the eleven songs on the new album is “F*ck Wagner”. “I’m not the first to draw attention to Wagner’s hateful rhetoric and for me it goes hand in hand with the fact that I’m a fan of his music and fascinated by how dramatically he lived his life.”
Since he was a teenager, his father had exposed him to the music of Richard Wagner, encouraged him to read and memorize the texts and their translations, and he had also attended the Bayreuth Festival very early in his life.
“When I learned more about him – including that he had written this book – I asked my father, a Jewish man: How could you constantly listen to his music and drag your children to his music temple?” says Chilly Gonzales about Wagner and his anti-Semitic writings.
“And my father said: You have to separate the artist from his art. And that has been my mantra ever since. It was through Wagner that I first encountered this question: What do we do with art that we love, but that was created by imperfect people – or by people who were imperfect to such an extent that we would call them monsters?”
His demand: Tina Turner instead of Richard Wagner
He himself has at least started the petition to rename a Richard Wagner Street in Cologne to Tina Turner Street – also to draw attention to this area of tension.
“The reason I started the campaign is not because I’m woke and think that all names of imperfect people should disappear from street signs. Then we wouldn’t have any street names at all,” he says. “I’m not a cancel culture warrior and I say quite clearly that we should keep listening to Wagner’s music. For example, I can’t stop listening to Kanye West’s music either – no matter what I think about his anti-Semitic statements.”
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