A Jack of All Trades is Cooler than a Master of One

Noah Dillon's multi-disciplinary approach to a cohesive vision and the power of personal conviction.

Welcome to Compositionally Inclined Issue 001. Huge thanks to everyone who has signed up for the newsletter before we even sent out the first issue. Each week I will be touching on a few exciting things in the current cultural zeitgeist with a particularly compelling art direction.

As I am writing this I have a video titled “Noah Dillon speaks at Yale” that just popped up on my YouTube algorithm. Noah is a fascinating artist to me because he is one of the only truly multi-disciplinary artists among my generation (Gen Z? I actually have no idea how old bro is). In this presentation he put together at Yale he talks about how he started his band, The Hellp, because he wanted to film music videos, but since he was from a small town, nobody let him. Noah taking this action and creating his own music with the intent to present it through videography is a prime example of his scrappiness and ingenuity as an artist.

Nowadays, most artists pride themselves on being a “photographer,” a “painter,” a “sculptor” and there is less of an emphasis on evolving into a multi-disciplinary artist. Yes, you will hear rappers say in interviews that they are “not rappers” but rather “artists,” and then proceed to make rap or rap-adjacent music for a full decade following that statement, but Noah embodies a display on how to successfully weave a thread of your taste and persona throughout various mediums.

Dillon’s photography work is the most exciting to me personally because of both the treatments of the images and the subjects he selects for his works. 

Noah Dillon, Three Weapons (2021)

In Three Weapons, Noah explores three very different objects and their implied meanings in the context of a self-portrait. In the series, the only compositional change is the objects he is holding. Each object carries its own weight and connotation in itself, but the title of the work is the thread that ties them together. This idea of taking three seemingly unrelated objects and creating a narrative around them makes the viewer think much more critically about what Dillon is communicating in this series.

Along with Dillon’s photography work, the videography and creative direction behind both the music and the videos from The Hellp, clearly display his own touch and vision through yet another medium.

In the video for their new single Caustic, The Hellp explores themes of nostalgia, memory, and the passage of time through the lens of their high school experience juxtaposed with their current rockstar life.

The first half of the video was filmed 5 years ago, which displays The Hellp’s ability to see the power of their vision and self-belief. The video was clearly shot to become a music video later in their career, as evidenced by the VHS camera being utilized instead of your typical DSLR or another more modern camera.

In my opinion, I think the most powerful message of this video is the value in self-belief and staying true to your path as an artist. Many artists desire to live this glamourous lifestyle using their work as the catalyst to get them there, but more often than not their dreams die when faced with reality.

5 years ago, The Hellp was a relatively unknown band. Now, with the release of their recent singles, they are beginning to exit the “underground” as artists and seeing some small mainstream success. Their ability to predict this is what is most impressive to the outside viewer. It serves as a lesson in the power of maintaining personal conviction in the early stages of an idea, a project, or even in The Hellp’s case, a career.