Dave Clark wrote: > > And why is it that hardly any of the artists arouse the same > amount of passion (both positive and negative) as jeff mills?
A couple of reasons: For one, we have a saying in Dutch that roughly translates as "high trees catch a lot of wind" (I'm sure there's an English equivalent, but you get the idea). Mills is high profile for a techno artist, although not because of the publicity he himself generates, but the publicity his releases and DJ sets generate. Anyway, a lot of people will have heard (of) him and hence have an opinion about him. Which leads to a lot of talk about Mills, which gets on the nerves of people who want to talk about other things besides Mills, hence the negative reactions. Second, musical history has conditioned us into thinking that in order for something to be a commercial success, its musical aesthetic values have to be compromised and diluted to make it accessible to the masses. While there are numerous examples that validate this line of thinking, there *are* counterexamples. IMO Mills is a prime one, he hasn't compromised his music or his DJ sets one bit, his commercial success is solely due to his artistic qualities. Also, as other have pointed out as well, commercial success in the techno scene is nothing compared to commercial success in the pop scene. Related to that, there's the romantic image of the starving artist, struggling to get his groundbreaking art out there and preferably dying the day before an exhibition of his work generates huge rounds of applause. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but it's an archetype that is somehow got (partially) embedded into human thinking. And if an artist doesn't conform to that image, well, then it can't be art, right? :) My 2 zlotys, Otto
