Elliot Aronow on tension, texture, and making things that outlast the algorithm

A lot of you have been telling me you're stuck on the artist development side. You've got the workbook, you're working through it, but you need somebody who can push back on the creative side. I'm a marketer. I can tell you how to roll something out. I can't tell you whether the thing itself is interesting enough to roll out in the first place.

So I brought in someone who can. My friend Elliot Aronow runs minor genius. We've known each other since the late '90s, when we met as hardcore kids on St. Mark's Place. In the years since, Elliot worked early days with The Strokes, ran the indie-sleaze-era blog RCRD LBL, hosted a TV show called Our Show with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem, and Chromeo, and wrote for The Fader, GQ, and Playboy. He has consistently had the kind of taste most people try to fake. He advises public-facing artists, founders, and brands on how to make their projects more distinctive, memorable, and alive. 

Here's what we got into…

Make things that outlast the algorithm

Elliot's frame for the dominant playbook of the last fifteen years most strategists and creatice directors use: “make it repetitive, make it simple, flatten it, keep paying the parking meter, keep giving more and more of yourself to your audience, and maybe if you're extra lucky you'll get chosen from the ten million other try-hards.”

He's found the exact opposite to be true. People with real careers and durable arcs make real shit as an event, then recede into a quiet period, then come up with the next thing. You don't win by being louder, more naked, more muscular, or having crazier clothes. That stuff doesn't get traction anymore. You have to make the thing people actually want to pay attention to, which is hard.

What I'd add is that people don't spend enough time on incubation. They stay on the rat wheel doing the daily thing because the algorithm will punish them if they don't. That part's real. But indexing a little bit every day so you can free up time to make something genuinely special is where the payoff lives.

Loosies vs. tentpoles

Elliot's framework: you might do certain things daily to feed the parking meter, but the goal is not to be tethered to the meter. As an artist you want a collection of loosies (small posts, ephemera, daily promo) that you can circulate to keep the algorithm happy. Then your real focus goes onto tentpole moments and recurring strong formats.

minor genius events are an example. They do one every two to three months. First few weeks spent curating who's going to be there. Next few weeks, pure promo.

Then they do the event, document it, post it to Substack and Instagram, and over time that body of work compounds. When he wants to invite the next round of writers in, he just sends them the Instagram links from the first three readings.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Same logic for the quarterly video magazine. Not a weekly podcast (that feels uneventful now). Quarterly big aura deep dives, made into an event, with real resources behind it. Lots of little things to throw out there, but the main effort goes on the flagship stuff.

Don't let your work age poorly

One of the things Elliot is really good at is making things that don't feel of-this-week. They could've come out twenty years ago or twenty years from now.

I asked him how. His answer: be a student of great shit. And looking at the last year of music, or honestly, the last four years, is not going to set you up for running with the greats.

This shows up in fashion, too. Elliot and I have lived through enough different pant fits at this point. My wife will sometimes ask why I don't wear the baggier ones like my buddy Chris. I don't want to look at a picture in five years and think "I looked like that person." Iterating on one thing across decades beats trying to be relevant this specific week.

Beastie Boys are the all-time example. Look at their fashion choices. They weren't wearing Ralph Lauren Polo in 1995 like Wu-Tang or Nas. They were in ringer tees, Plan B jeans, Simple sneakers, and weird goggle-looking glasses with a visor. Very specific look. What they had was a great way of deciding "this is part of our visual and sonic vocabulary, this isn't." If there's one thing for any artist to develop, it's that filter.

You can't fake the inputs

If you're in this to be in this, you have to expand your mind, find the fringier stuff and the obvious-but-overlooked stuff, and figure out how to incorporate it into your world.

A lot of our biggest musical experiences as kids didn't come from digging deeper into hardcore. They came from getting the Dr. Octagon CD, or Air's Moon Safari, or Atari Teenage Riot albums.

Elliot's bigger point: be a believer in scenes, not just audiences. When you're part of a little scene, an enormous amount of information gets exchanged. You go to a cool person's house in college, look at their records, and you're like, "What's Don Caballero?" Or, "wait, The Byrds are cool? I thought my parents liked them because they were lame." Forming little taste buckets with friends, being open to shit you haven't heard of, and allowing yourself to be a little humbled by that.

This is what A&R figured out at the end of the 2010s. One old dude in an office can't outwork being around creative people all the time. People who are good at creativity, talking, observing, and learning. Looking at what's on their bookshelves. Finding out the Jai Paul record is fucking sick, and nobody knows about it because it's on Bandcamp and the leaks.

The creator economy has pushed people into solitude. One-person everything-machines. Make the music, market the music, look cute in the videos, tell everyone what you ate for lunch to feed the algorithm today. All that stuff makes your life shitty, and your art suffers. The fix is mostly very obvious. Go to the record store. Ask the opinionated nerd what weird shit people are sleeping on. They will be so excited that anybody asks them an actual opinion instead of "Do you have, like, Life of a Showgirl? For my niece."

Don't make yourself smaller

I asked Elliot what he tells an artist when the pressure kicks in to be more palatable, to shrink. His first answer: "Listen to Death Grips."

If you're trying to play the conventional pop game, understand there's massive machinery behind that. Those artists are often groomed from childhood to be there. If you're not playing that game, the stuff that gets in people's bones always has texture and irritation and pathos inside of it.

Think early Sleigh Bells. Everything in the red, fried, abrasive-sounding, and inside that, this awesome '80s Cyndi Lauper energy. People loved the tension. If Sleigh Bells were just Alexis Krauss singing nicely over okay music, it wouldn't have worked. The fact that it was disturbing and melodic made people lean in.

That same Sleigh Bells lineage is, per my For You page, what makes Tekashi 6ix9ine and now all this Nettspend, Osamason, fakemink stuff possible. Take a really hooky song and distort it past the point of decency. "Crown on the Ground" was cheesy Casio horns blown out into something that isn't cheesy at all; it's sick as fuck. Same thing with distorted sub bass. Five years before that record, you'd get thrown out of a session for distorting bass like that. Now it's the playbook.

Elliot called it: stuff that's intentionally wrong lands as confidence.

The Charli XCX record is the cleanest current test of this. The new single is the ultimate litmus test; you either get it or you don't. Someone I really respect tweeted at me that the production was so stupid an AI could make it. Buddy, you're telling on yourself. She made the big statement she had to make. Kamala didn't come through, so back to the well. And the cultural saturation is real.

PETA had a robot calf out at a fashion event this week, demonstrating against leather, wearing the Brat-coded gear two hours after the fact. That is where we're at. That's why you have to make a statement that big.

Elliot writes about this in his zines. The market and the industry will always try to flatten you. All the context, all the nuance, all the weird ridged-brain part of what you do, the industry needs to smooth that out to turn it into a product. So there needs to be an abundance of texture and weirdness and off-ness from the jump, because by the time it goes through three levels of people writing about it and the label trying to market it, the voltage is already getting reduced.

Same logic for being an artist in the first place. You have to come at it from an overabundance of wanting to make this shit happen, because there's so much friction in the way. I heard someone say recently that we can't even use the word friction anymore; the right term is adversity. Friction means slow down a little. Adversity means getting mentally beaten every day by people making up lies and misinterpreting your art on purpose, which you're then expected to defend.

Make the thing as specific and pointed and uncompromised as possible. By the time it goes through the reductions, the public will get a watered-down version anyway.

The outré is hard to dunk on

Elliot uses the word outré to mean vulgar or outside good taste. The example he reached for was Death Grips. Nobody in the comment section is going to dunk on a band that puts a cock on the album cover. You can't really dunk on something that so clearly does not give a fuck.

This is not an instruction to be the most outrageous fuck-you-society artist you can be. The point is that inside all of us there's a little Death Grips, and maybe for some of you right now, 20% more of that could be the difference between competent pick-me music and something that actually gets in people's bones.

Texture is the word I keep coming back to. Somebody does a flat, clean design, then drops a Ray Gun-style xerox treatment on top, and now the thing actually feels like something. People talk about how Charli XCX went through 70 versions of the Brat cover. The people who don't get it say "70 versions, really?" Yeah. Really. The right amount of fucking up the font gave it character.

Confrontation is part of the bones

The bands Elliot and I loved growing up were divisive on purpose. Ink & Dagger. The Locust. The Make-Up. All of them got accused of being pretentious, art jerks, bad people, ruining hardcore, ruining underground music. Elliot loved them because so much hardcore really asked very little of him as a young person. "This is fast, they talk about politics, you should like it." That wasn't enough.

The bands that get inside people have that confrontational quality. They are not soothing. They are not "these guys could be your friend" relatable. They open you up to a different world.

Look at the through line. The Make-Up were bringing back '50s Nuggets-era garage sounds into the punk and hardcore world. Ink & Dagger were doing weird vampire shtick over experimental electronic music in that same space. Push enough buttons in that direction, and a couple of decades later, that's how Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey work. The contradictions are what create the conversations.

Elliot's line on this: thumb-stopping does not necessarily mean louder or crazier. It means a really distinctive point of view. Saying something nobody else is saying, not the thousandth diluted version of what Taylor Swift is saying. And it looks like it came from one person, or a couple of people who know exactly how the other person smells.

Establishing creative vision vs. hiring vendors

The last thing Elliot wanted to get to is the one I see artists confuse all the time: the difference between having someone amplify your vision and having a vendor.

Artists confuse hiring a publicist or a label or a marketing team or a manager or an A&R person with having someone who can actually take their vision and make it bigger. There is a really big difference between paying someone to "blow this up" versus working with someone in the studio on the ground who can say: "This is part of the world, this is not part of the world, the thing you think is the bad part of the song is actually the awesome part, the way you're framing this single is going to flatten it.

As an artist, you want to be looking for people who can challenge you, sharpen you, make you more dangerous, less palatable, more exciting in the marketplace. Not "we can help you make this bigger." Because if you bring a small or flat thing into the playbook, you are doomed from the start.

Putting a finer point on this from my side. I get artists telling me they need a publicist to shape their vision. Buddy. At best, the publicist is going to do a decent job checking the grammar on the thing you hand them. A publicist is somebody with a Rolodex of friends they've made online, email addresses, and DMs they can send, with leverage from the other artists on their roster. They are not your creative director. They are not the person shaping a publicity strategy.

I do the strategy of how to push something as far as it can go. A recent meeting (NDA'd, so the band stays anonymous) is a good example. They're a hardcore band doing really well right now, making a music video. I see the treatment and I tell them this can't be one video. The narrative will suck if it has to land in two and a half minutes. The songs are this long, the narrative needs to be ten minutes. So we go part one, watch part two in two weeks, part three in three weeks, part four in four weeks. That's the kind of strategy I run. I am not the person who came up with the idea to base the video on some obscure '80s movie. That's the director and the creative director. That is the Elliot Aronow role.

People spend a ridiculous amount of money in this business trying to authenticate bullshit. Before any marketing question, ask whether the thing is real. Whether it has a spine. Whether there's tension in it, texture in it, or an actual point of view. If it passes snuff on those fronts, then the shoot-it-out-of-a-cannon people can get you some juice. Most folks miss out on that critical reflection of whether the thing actually slaps.

All great art has tension

I asked Elliot what tension actually looks like in practice. He pulled LCD Soundsystem first. The tension between a bitter middle-aged hipster guy and a person who can capture longing and missing your friends better than anyone else on planet Earth.

What's funny about LCD is that what made them special is choosing not to do the obvious New York layup of writing an "I like the girls who do drugs"-style song. Then, when The Dare actually writes that song ("Girls"), it's not a slam dunk. It's a twenty-times slam dunk, one of the songs that performs best on Spotify and gets the most repeat plays of any song in recent years, because it was a smart thing to do.

Elliot brought up his own tension example from the punk scene. He used to dress nice. People got pissed off because it went against the rule of looking bad and wearing a garbage bag with safety pins as a mini-skirt. The tension was: I'm punk, I like punk things, I don't appreciate authority, I don't want to do what my parents told me to do, and I also like wearing a nice Ralph Lauren sweater. Beastie Boys had the same kind of thing. We're joking around and fucking with you, AND we're dead serious about the shit we're serious about. Those tensions drive the project much more.

I asked Elliot if he'd looked at what Joey Valence & Brae are doing. He hadn't. Zoomers doing what the Beastie Boys did, but today. I've made the argument that they're the smartest band in music promotion. Every time I watch what they do I think these kids are better at creativity than almost every group out right now. Can't say I vibe with the music. The creative is undeniable. Elliot's take: you either got it or you don't, and if you do, the best thing you can do is keep harnessing it. The best artists keep getting better at knowing who they are.

Go deeper with Elliot

If you're sick of publicists and marketing gurus trying to be something they're not, studio.minorgenius.xyz is the link.  He works with artists before production, roll out, or pr to find the voltage underneath the work, and make it more interesting, weird, undeniable, and durable. Once the right frame is in place, it gets unleashed to the public.  Culture > Content.