Part of being an artiste, particularly a musician, is perpetual self-engineering. Creating and changing one’s image go hand-in-hand with one’s music, how it’s marketed, what one experiences, and how he or she connects with the audience. The pandemic has pushed artistes to reinvent themselves in introspective ways from having to produce in isolation; and this has proved polarising as we get well into 2022. At a macro level, today seems like the time of maximalists, with the likes of Doja Cat, Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, and Dua Lipa topping the charts while donning the most outrageous and bombastic fashions in music videos, performances, and on the red carpet. At the micro level, though, it is the musicians doing the complete opposite who are standing out—with simplification becoming the…
