As I get ready for my trip to Los Angeles, I have a ton of thoughts to sort out. I’m a little stressed about ironing out the details, but ultimately I think everything’s going to work out pretty good. Now that the quarter is over, and I’m going to be deciding which direction I want to take my learning this spring, I’m having to really define what I want to get out of this experience. I know that getting into the specifics of how I think this trip will end up is a mistake, there’s no way I can predict right now how this experience is going to influence me once it’s all said and done. The only thing I can really do to effect what I get out of this experience is make sure I plan well and be as present as possible during it. When I think about where I’m at right now and what I want to learn, I know that I want to get better at making music. Ultimately that’s always been my goal and I think it will stay that way.

This quarter I feel like I’ve learned about an aspect of the creative process that I’d been unintentionally ignoring up until now, which is learning the history surrounding my craft. It seems like an intuitive thing, of course you should know the history behind whatever you’re passionate about. But it’s easy to underestimate the importance of it, and I want to use this experience as an opportunity to focus more on what I’m learning and less on what I’m actually producing creatively. This doesn’t mean I won’t come back to producing afterwards, but I think that taking a break from that and allowing my perspective to readjust will do much more for my creative process than trying to make stuff without paying attention to my raw appreciation for music—that appreciation and understanding is what I want to focus on developing during this trip. I guess it’s important to ask myself about how the geography of this situation will be significant…

For one, I think Los Angeles is a fascinating town in terms of how many people are there for the same thing. It’s a transient town, comprised of people from all over the world. While I’m down there, I will be reading a lot and listening to a bunch of records because I want to be building my knowledge of old music before I start sampling it. But how can I take advantage of being in L.A. during that time? Interviews are one way I know I can learn more about what the city is like. It’s such a spread out city, I don’t feel like there’s one area I can hang out at and get all of what I’m looking for. I think the people are what make the city unique, so what I need to focus on is talking to as many people as I can when I’m not reading or listening to music. Los Angeles is a town synonymous with glitz, glamor, fame, movies etc. This is probably what attracts so many people there. But to get something unique out of this experience I don’t think I should go down to L.A. seeking what everybody else is seeking. I read an article talking about fashion that brought up the question of whether or not L.A. is on it’s way to becoming a fashion capital. The article brought up a number of new brands to sprout from L.A., and went over many of the advantages to having a company in a spread out town like L.A., vs. New York or Paris, which are more cramped. It also talked about the eclectic influences one can have creatively from living in a place so disconnected from the fashion world compared to N.Y. or Paris; not everyone is embracing the same trends at once. Something else it brought up was that Los Angeles has star power, and that this has the potential to effect the world of fashion just as much as if not more than what is happening on the runways. Considering the fairly recent merging of high fashion with the world of hip-hop, I think studying the fashion of people down there can tell me a lot about how influential the music is on their lifestyles.

One of the most basic things I learned in this class is that the music of any time is indicative of how some of the people felt about life at that time. Just as music of the past has been influenced by the world around the creator, I think there are other things going on culturally that can speak to the state of music right now. The relationship between hip-hop and high fashion is continuing to grow closer and I think by conducting research about street style, I can learn about the type of influence music may be having on people.

I think that L.A. is a city obsessed with image. For one, it has successfully branded itself, as something, which I can almost certainly say, is much different from an experiential perspective than it is in terms of the mental associations we make with it and fame, fortune, and dreams coming true. In other words, the only thing I can really expect from L.A. is to have my expectations challenged. In reality it’s kind of a dirty unpleasant place (from the few times of been through), but in that place are people who are really good at selling certain images to the rest of the world. I’m very interested in fashion, and more specifically its relationship to music. Over the past decade there’s been somewhat of a revolution in the world of menswear, and it’s relationship to hip-hop. As someone who at some point might be interested in working in the fashion industry, I think the link between the music and this new emergence of style and demographic is something I could really gain from studying. In addition to my studies, while down there I’ll be taking pictures of a lot of people on the streets and trying to interview them about their inspiration for their clothing choices; what music they listen to, and how long they’ve been into fashion, etc. I also want to practice doing fashion sketches of the people I see when down there. I’ll be simultaneously educating myself both on the history of the music I’m interested in (hip-hop), and the history and ideas of high fashion, while interviewing everyone I can about their experiences in Los Angeles, specifically on the business end of their pursuits, and how the idea of image has effected that. I have a potential interview set up with an associate at Siegal & Gale (marketing firm), who I think I will get some insightful wisdom from on his philosophy of image and branding; wisdom that I hope will be able to carry over to different creative fields. Other than that, I also need to talk to the Alumni office to see if they can hook me up with some interviews with Evergreen graduates down in L.A.