Authenticity

Meanwhile, a fixation on honesty continues to pervade popular arts discourse, music included. Indie scenesters have historically been the ones to agitate most over authenticity, but in the golden age of confessional pop music, the aesthetic concern with honesty isn’t limited to subculture anymore. Direct access to artists’ personal lives seems more

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Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.

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“It seems to me,” the puppeteer Jim Henson (The Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, etc.) said, “that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” Don’t hide it. Embrace it. Express it. Manifest it through your discipline. Say it out loud

You never called Eight Sleep a mattress company. Instead, you pioneered a new category of ‘sleep fitness’ by positioning it as a ‘sleep fitness brand.’ Tell me about the decision-making and strategy behind this.

ZATARAIN: We were not intentional about our positioning for the first five years of the company because we didn't even know what brand... See more

That’s my big learning of the year: understanding the way someone’s interior life translates to what they make. When I first started writing this Substack, I was possessed by the sense that I had to figure out “how to do it.” Which other Substacks do I like, which other Substacks are popular, what do they write about, how do they make it work. It’s... See more