A while back, I wrote about « surprise » in music. How most people prefer their music to be nice and predictable rather than nice and unpredictable. I was discussing this with my significant other who is an artist, and her question wasn’t if this was the case, but why? Her take on why surprised me. She said it maybe boiled down to narcissism. That when confronted with strange and different art, on some subconscious level, people feel ordinary and dull, whereas ordinary and dull music and art makes people feel special and celebrated, or at the very least adequate, because their unsurprising ordinariness is squarely in tune with what glamorous « artists » are producing. Of course, one could then argue that the few who enjoy original and surprising art revel in the narcissistic pleasure of belonging to a special sophisticated elite.
In the end, and as I said in the previous post, as far as I’m concerned, it is a moot point, because I can’t help liking what I like and composing the way I do. Whether because of subconscious super-narcissism or lack of musical technique, I can never quite manage to create a « typical something », no matter how hard I sometimes try.
It does comfort me in the feeling I’ve had all my life that what I compose can/will never be popular.