Andrew Statum

Now, I’m all for experimentation. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if he and Deep Blue were performing solid, well-written, compelling songs. But these songs suck. (And they blew it. The Mets blew it. Yet again. This is why I had to stop watching the Redskins. Like watching a fish die on dry land. I was having a good night up until now. Nothing can turn a man to nihilism like baseball. Christ. I hope I don't wake up tomorrow.) Even if there weren't a drumkit, the songs still wouldn't be decent. Seriously, dude, a song featuring a meditation on Pale Male and a couple lazy duets with your hot wife? This is what happens when an artist loses his powers but just can’t find it in himself to leave well enough alone: a bunch of hokey, unimaginative love-letter-to-New-York schlock.

Of course, Earle's hardly unique. So many of these guys push on after their talents seem to have been drained. Neil Young, my first great musical love, as much as it pains me to admit this (the reason I started thinking about this in the first place was because I was listening to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere after my run), crossed the threshold into schticky ass clown-ism some time ago. It was all down hill after Silver and Gold. Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion, never wrote a good sentence once he got through All the Pretty Horses. Faulkner himself contributed a huge pile of shit to our culture after The Hamlet. Surely they know they're not the artists they used to be. So what is it? Money? Don’t they have enough?

It's like the career of a professional athlete: there's a small period of greatness, bookended by periods of mediocrity. Except so many artists (moreso than athletes, I suppose, because the fitness of the mind generally outlasts the fitness of the body ... unless you're Evander Holyfield or Julio Franco, neither of whom can call it quits) keep making mediocre art well after their creative powers have waned. The real freaks, the ones who had a lifetime of consistently great artistic output (in the Western tradition, that is), you can count on two hands: Bach, Beethoven, Wordsworth, Picasso, Stravinsky, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Philip Roth, maybe a few others but I can't think of them (granted, not everything they ever did was perfect. But for every Down in the Groove there's a Love and Theft, for every The Prague Orgy, there's a Sabbath's Theater). What is it about these few people that gives them their longevity? Where does it come from? What about their minds allows them to sustain such greatness over an entire lifetime? Why are these lucky few blessed with that too, too rare confluence of ambition, long-lasting creative ability, intellectual integrity and physical soundness while I'm stuck with just the ambition? Will my reach always exceed my grasp?

So why do good artists go flat? Of what is the decline of creative ability a function? Health? Guys like Proust and Keats wrote some of their best stuff when they were too sick to even get out of bed. Age? I want to say yes but then how do you explain J.M. Coetzee, who didn’t write a decent paragraph until he was in his forties, or Beckett, who wrote Worstward Ho when he was, what, seventy-something? Then there's the ones that were snuffed out before their artistry was close to being exhausted: Marlowe, Mozart, Jane Austen, Keats, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G. - again, the list goes on and on. If they had lived long enough, would they, too, have eventually sucked? If only Elvis had croaked the day after his '68 Comeback Special (then again, we wouldn't have Elvis impersonator conventions).

Shakespeare (if, in fact, it was one guy) had, what, ten, fifteen years of unparalleled greatness? And then we never hear from him again. He seems to just...withdraw. Now that’s real brilliance. He must have known the follow-up to The Tempest wouldn't have been that great.

Then again, any idiot can criticize other people's shortcomings, if in fact they are shortcomings. At least they're trying.