Creative Influences (1?)

Weirdly I've been revisiting a lot of Dresden Dolls' music and aesthetic lately, especially their first album. I'll admit to something--when the album came out I worked at Borders shortly thereafter (people got bored with releases a lot less quickly), and a LOT of people there compared my visual aesthetic to AFP, which really kind of put me off giving anything more than a single superficial listen, though I could recognize quality in that album when I did.

AFP's Twitter shenanigans were no better and I continued to find her annoying, until around the early 2010s when I got a little more into her solo stuff and eased my opinion on her a bit. (I still do not give her problematic behaviors a pass but I finally read The Art of Asking early pandemic and it helped with some things. It's complicated and I still like Neil more but I can also see where misogyny might come into play with that.)

Looking at some other personal artistic-aesthetic influences. Bowie's early mime and Klaus Nomi's abstract influences made it into Hugh G. Bonerkiller's character somewhere, more than I realized. The emcee from Cabaret is somewhere in HR Nightmare, my emcee persona. Nothing is really new but I have the ongoing goal of trying not to overtly rip off my best instructors and inspirations. Great artists steal, but I seem to have a knack for showing up and playing something uncategorizeable.

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