Jim Brown – HuffPost 5.28.14

Mike Ragogna: Jim, you get the traditional question. What advice do you have for new artists?

Jim Brown: Well, it’s interesting, I was a gala for my friend Peter Yarrow, from Peter, Paul & Mary for his high school, which was the school for the performing arts that was featured in Fame. He was reminding the students and very famous graduates that attended this gala that to be an artist is to move people with art. That’s the first goal. To invite them into worlds that they haven’t been into, to show them things, move them emotionally, these are really the most important things we can do as artists. The things that a lot of people become concerned about, like fame and money, are really not the job of being an artist. Being an effective artist is to make people feel things and see things and perhaps even change things in the way the world is and to be a catalyst for that. I think the best music comes from those catalytic situations. There was a lot of good music made in the sixties because it was catalytic, a lot of good music came from the Soviet Union during that time period because it was catalytic. There’s probably a lot of good music coming around all over the world today. I think sometimes we in America get over concerned about the professionalism of the music business and less concerned with the idea of what it means to be an artist. I think that would be my advice to young artists; I teach it at the film school at NYU, at Tisch, I’m constantly reminding people that the fame and the glamour that gets celebrated in American life is really secondary to our mission of informing and getting people emotional about things and trying to teach them things.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne