In the music industry, rawness is a commodity. Struggle and hardship alone are not enough. They have to be tapped into. They have to be shaped. This process of shaping is sometimes called art, but it also results in a product fit to be sold and consumed, however ragged, however scratchy it may seem. Some artists understand that they are trapped in this paradoxical bind, but they don’t necessarily know how to escape from it. Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain fall into this group. Others have successfully learned to laugh at it from the outside, using surreal humour as a distancing technique even as their music leans into the lo-fi. Think early Stephen Malkmus.
Sometimes a new artist emerges, a fresh voice with a fresh take on confession and…

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