Musicians Who Are More Interesting Than Their Music

You can’t listen to just one Lil B song. That would be like trying to imagine the ocean using only a glass of water you sprinkled some salt into. To understand Lil B, it’s necessary to look at everything he does; the absurdist humor, “based” philosophy, bizarre music videos, armies of fans, his stream-of-consciousness Twitter feed, Girl Time, the rambling speech at NYU, an invented vernacular, and, yes, the sprawling catalog of music.

The music on its own, especially on a song-to-song basis, does very little to explain the living art installation that is Lil B. Evaluated purely critically, his songs are not interesting, or even passably good. There’s an unconscionable amount of them, though, and once you start thinking about Lil B and his catalog as one singular, inseparable project, things do start to get interesting. He’s the Internet, personified—a whole lot of dumb shit being created constantly that leads to a lot of fascinating, worthwhile art. Whether it was Lil B’s plan all along to deconstruct hip-hop tropes so much that they’re unrecognizable or spawn a crazy, touching worldview is up for debate, and in fact there’s an argument to be made that if you create that much of anything someone is eventually going to both pay attention and call it genius. Regardless, it’s impossible to look at what Lil B has done over the past few years and write it off as just bad music. The man is doing something we haven’t seen before, and it’s worth watching (or at least checking in on periodically).

Jason Everman got as close to stardom as humanly possible in the early '90s grunge scene as the bassist of Nirvana. He was recruited to the band early, helped pay for producer sessions for Bleach, but things fell apart on their first tour together. Everman missed his shot at superstardom when Nirvana became the band we all know today just a short time later. After leaving Nirvana, Everman joined another Seattle grunge band as the bassist, only to be fired when the lead singer made it clear he didn't enjoy the group dynamic and wanted a change. This time, the band was Soundgarden, and the cycle repeated itself. The New York Times ran a piece on Jason Everman that follows his time in the Seattle grunge scene and life after leaving Soundgarden. He's a musician you might have heard, but have never heard of. It's an unlucky story, but Everman is a compelling character that illustrates just how thin the line between success and failure in the music industry can be.

The issues that can arise when a musician is more interesting than their music are embodied perfectly by Billy Bob Thornton. In a now-infamous radio interview, Thornton got confrontational at the mere mention of his extensive, critically-acclaimed film career while on a press tour for his band, The Boxmasters. He felt that referencing his work in movies took away from the discussion he wanted to have about his music, ignoring the fact that people are always (or, more likely, only) going to be interested in listening to some revivalist classic rock if it’s helmed by an Oscar-nominated, world famous actor. It’s not unfair to say that Thornton’s work as an actor and screenwriter is far more interesting than the music of The Boxmasters, it would take some seriously amazing music to eclipse that resume. Evidently, though, it’s frustrating for some musicians when their story infringes on the music and Thornton’s interview with Jian Ghomeshi is an entertaining look at that clash.

This one is somewhat unfair, because it suggests that Willis Earl Beal’s music isn’t interesting. That’s not the case. Beal makes crushing soul music, idiosyncratic and affecting and unlike anything out there today. That said, one of the few things more interesting than that music is Willis Earl Beal himself. For starters, Beal’s path to the music industry is the stuff of legends. His music career started in Chicago, where he was a homeless Army veteran, when he started leaving homemade CDs around the city of his songs for people to find. The songs had been recorded on a karaoke machine and included his phone number which, if you called, he would sing you a song over the line. The music, as well as the story of who made it and how it was distributed, spread.

Soon enough, Beal was signed to an XL Recordings imprint to release a full-length album officially. In the years since, he’s released two albums and gained a lot of new fans, but he’s also maintained the reputation of an outsider. There have been fights, incendiary interviews, and an easily recognized unease with the spotlight. He’s mysterious and unknowable, which just makes him more interesting to listeners. Throw into the mix a magnetic live stage presence—his concerts are a fucking experience, to say the least—and you have a musician that’s going to be talked about for years.

Most famously nicknamed “The American Beatle,” Harry Nilsson had one of the great careers that never fully bloomed. A notorious partier and musician in 1970s Los Angeles, Nilsson collaborated with all the greats of the day, including The Beatles. His friendships with John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and a host of non-Beatle music greats and celebrities have all been recounted in biographies and accounts of the times, but Nilsson’s music has faded. He was a songwriter who leaned into his stranger instincts, and boasted a unique, beautiful voice. However, no matter how good the music was, Nilsson never truly lived up to his potential and will likely always be known as a name in stories about other musicians, rather than for his own music.

Carlo Gesualdo was an Italian composer and nobleman in the 16th Century who's an obscure name to anyone but classical music afficionados that know him for his work with chromatics. He's fascinating, though, not for his compositions but his reputation as a murderer. When he caught his wife (also his first cousin) having an affair with another member of the Italian nobility, he killed both of them. The details of the murder are difficult to parse, but the most common series of events has Gesualdo and several of his servants stabbing the two lovers after finding them together. Although the murders were big news at the time, Gesualdo was never arrested. He continued to write music from his castle in Naples with privately hired musicians and singers, and was said to have drawn from his feelings reflecting on the murders for some of his later pieces.

M.I.A isn’t a musician, she’s a cultural force. That’s not to say it’s not possible to be both, but in the case of Maya Arulpragasam, it’s clear where her priorities lie. She’s as interested in making statements as songs, in provoking the status quo as writing hooks. The results don’t always make for critically acclaimed albums, but they do demand your attention. Music is ostensibly her primary medium of expression, but to ignore her visual aesthetic and steadfast dedication to making her views heard would make for a watered down experience and dull the effectiveness of her presence in mainstream culture. There’s no one else like M.I.A out there; complicated to the point of contradiction, with an ability to provoke controversy matched only by the subjects she forces into the conversation. The music itself, described by critic Ayesha Sidiqqi as “nursery rhymes for post-colonial angst,” isn’t M.I.A’s message, it’s just one of her vehicles.

Jack White might be the most interesting person in music. He’s strange in a way that begets more strangeness, and it’s reached the point that now, 16 years after the formation of The White Stripes, eccentricities that would define another artist for years are just shrugged off. We’ve given up trying to understand Jack White, because he’s not like us. There’s no denying that his music is interesting, and that over the past two decades White has created undeniable classics across a huge stretch of projects, side-projects and production gigs. Looking back, the thing hanging over his entire career is the story of Jack White—one of the all-time great guitarists and arguably the last true virtuoso, dedicated to a concept of rock musicianship so specific and obtuse that he’s remained unpredictable after all these years. His life story is peppered with anecdotes that seem ripped from the autobiography of the prototypical rock star, like how he almost became a priest but decided against it because he wouldn’t be allowed an amp in his room at the seminary, or the time he was taught to weld by Bob Dylan.

Jack White's music is incredibly interesting and varied, but it is testament to the man's wildly interesting life and incredibly varied interests that his life is somehow even more fascinating.

15 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT JACK WHITE

Richard Hell was a punk before the scene had even formed. He was one of the frontrunners that shaped the culture Sid Vicious and The Sex Pistols would characterize. And although Hell was a musician in the New York punk scene, he’s more famous today for defining the fashion of the day, as he’s credited with starting the fad of safety pin piercings.

Brandon Flowers is the lead singer the Killers, who might be the biggest rock band in America, and he’s a Mormon. With the quiet marriage and abstinence from alcohol as an obvious departure from traditional frontman behavior, what’s most interesting about Flowers is how outspoken he is about his beliefs. While The Killers delve further into nostalgic anthems as their modus operandi, Flowers has been steadily more vocal about religion, and the expected contradictions and sidesteps around tropes has been interesting to watch.