If
you asked someone to tell you the first few lines of “Wonderwall,” by Oasis,
they would likely tell you it’s “Today is gonna be the day/but they’ll never
throw it back to you.”
If
you asked Neil Cicerega, however, you’d get a very different answer: “Today,
daydayday day day, day day daydayday day day dayday.”
Neil
Cicerega has been around on the internet since the early 2000s, although most
know him for the series “Potter Puppet Pals,” which ran for almost a decade and
accrued millions, if not billions, of views. Yet that isn’t all he’s created.
In 2014, he released Mouth Sounds: seventeen
tracks mashing up anything from John Lennon’s “Imagine” to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures
at an Exhibition” with Smash Mouth’s “All Star”. He then followed this up with
two more surrealist albums: Mouth Silence,
released in 2015, and Mouth Moods,
released in 2016. Not all of these are “All Star” mashups, however; the
aforementioned “Wonderwall” remix transitions into the Full House theme towards the end, and “Timespin” mixes Hans Zimmer’s
“Time” with the lyrics from “Y.M.C.A.”.
Yet
Cicerega doesn’t view his album as art. “Most of the songs on Mouth
Sounds were
just things that I uploaded individually to Tumblr as a joke or an experiment […]
I don’t want to think that I’m creating art while I’m creating it,” he was
quoted as saying in an interview with Impose Magazine. He creates his music for
the joy of it and for the reaction, and by what he thinks is funny. “There’s a
lot of uncharted water with blasphemy in music […] you can either do it with
two songs that people don’t like, or songs that they’ve been annoyed with at
some point in their life, or you can mix one really goofy song with a song
that’s more respected. There’s a lot of different ways to elicit bad
reactions.” That bad reaction, for him, is the sweet spot where the humor lies.
Through his
remixes, Neil Cicerega demonstrates himself as a capable creative. He takes
completely disparate songs, and remixes them into songs that aren’t only
humorous, but that work. He aims for “YouTube joke videos,” but instead establishes
himself as a creative individual in the process.
You have to love reading through the comments on his videos and see the wide responses. The negativity is just ludicrous but he certainly does get a reaction out of everyone.
ReplyDeleteBecause Cicerega does not consider his work art, it makes you wonder if intentions play any part in what could be considered creative. This also makes me think about memes. While I wouldn't consider myself a Big C creative for creating a new trending meme, is that a form of everyday creativity? I would think so but it gives me pause to call the act of creating a meme an act of creativity.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though mashups are actually hard to create. You have to have a good sense of rhythm, you need to know what is going to fit where. The best part was that he didn't want to think that he was creating art when he did. This is maybe a part of his process; some artists do better without having a pressure of needing to create something brilliant. This creativity could possibly stem from casualness, humor and the freedom to make a piece without fear of judgement.
ReplyDeleteHis comment about "I don’t want to think that I’m creating art while I’m creating it" really jumped out at me. I think that takes the idea of intrinsic motivation to an extreme beyond most of the examples we discussed in class. It turns the question into not just "is creative art intrinsically motivated?" but "is creative art even intentional?" Is someone who's not trying to be creative generally going to be more creative than someone who is making a deliberate effort to be creative, even if neither person has an external incentive in either case? I think that's a fascinating question to consider.
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