Non-Random Thoughts On Creativity And Untapped Success

 

Most of the greatest artistic achievements in life - songwriting, non-fiction prose, poetry, painting, design - succeed not by producing grandiose, complex outputs (although there are many exceptions, which are obviously impressive), but by capturing simplicities that have previously remained untapped.

You can see this wide across the artistic landscape - from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which consists of clear, direct writing that changed how people think about clarity itself, to C.S. Lewis’s brilliant Christian writings, to classic songs like Let It Be and Hallelujah, which are musically simple, lyrically straightforward, yet profoundly moving.

Brilliant but simple creativity is there awaiting discovery, and when it is produced in writing, music or other art forms, it resonates because it expresses something we all recognise but didn’t personally articulate, as we were waiting for someone else to notice it. Creativity at its finest often lies in noticing and expressing what’s already there but unseen - in distilling something vast into something simple, essential, and resonant.

And it also reminds me of the wisdom about good listening and paying attention, hearing not just what is said, but unsaid, because what is unsaid is often equally important.

20 Albums That Influenced Me

 

About 5 years ago, I partook in the fun social media post-a-thon “20 albums over 20 days that have influenced me in some way”. One popped up on my memories the other day, so I thought I’d compile them into one list for a blog post. These were submitted in no particular critical order.

Day 1 - Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
One of the finest journeys in musical album history – a gorgeous, mystical blend of folk, jazz, and soul, with poetic and introspective lyrics, all projected by Van Morrison’s stunning voice.

Day 2 - The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths
A marvellous exploration of British melancholy, wit, and post-punk energy, all in one. Morrissey’s sardonic lyrics and jangly guitars from Johnny Marr make this an album that’s both intelligent and emotionally raw. The album is a masterclass in creating beautifully tragic songs that still feel empowering. ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ is pure sonic brilliance, and in ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ we have one of the best anthems of the 1980s.

Day 3 - Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd
A masterpiece that redefined the concept of the album as an immersive experience. And the 12 minutes of ‘Time’ segueing into ‘Great Gig In The Sky’ is probably my favourite 12 minutes on any album ever. Their follow up album Wish You Were Here is equally as good, as is ‘Echoes’ from the previous album Meddle. Some of the best rock music ever written.

 Day 4 - Freak Out by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention
This is a brilliant, raw, acerbic antidote to the soppy, superficial   flower-power bubblegum love songs being churned out around that time! In 1966 nobody was prepared for an album like this - not even the The Beatles or Bob Dylan ventured that far into this kind of courageous, counter-cultural sonic expressionism and intelligent parody of the musical establishment.

Day 5 - Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan
This isn't just the album that got me into great music, I think it got me into music full stop - it made me appreciate the album as a work of art, not just as a set of songs with a few singles and the rest as filler. Amazing that this was released in 1965, before any of the other truly great albums - it is the first album in rock history that creates its own little sub-universe and draws the listener into it. Without it, there'd be no Revolver or Sgt. Pepper, no Electric Ladyland, no Ziggy Stardust and no Dark Side of the Moon.

Day 6 - Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
The eighties killed off many great seventies artists, but thankfully Kate Bush wasn’t one of them. Side one is the most familiar, with the terrific hit singles ‘Running Up That Hill’, ‘Big Sky’, the title track and ‘Cloudbusting’. But it’s the conceptual innovation on side two that’s probably the strongest, with a terrific series of songs about a woman going mad in her own seclusion. And yet the astounding 'Hello Earth' near the end is probably Kate's equivalent of Hamlet being "bounded in a nutshell and counting himself a king of infinite space" - knowing there is always hope when we have thoughts and dreams. Very apt for a time like this!

Day 7 - OK Computer by Radiohead
More than any other, this album taught me about music as a 'grower'. When I first heard OK Computer, it came across as a difficult listen. It was a sonic trip that sounded like it was made in outer space, but I admired it more than I liked it. But after about 15 or 20 listens, it began to grow on me, and it started to sound more and more like a friend than an acquaintance. That, I realised, is the multi-layered brilliance of the songs - they have depth; they grow into the listener's cognisance like acorns grow into trees; and they sound fresher with every listen. A remarkable achievement!

Day 8 - Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys
There are days when I think this is the best album ever made (although I think those days would be more numerous if Brian Wilson hadn't made the big mistake of leaving Good Vibrations off the album). This album, like all great pop albums, sounds amazing when you first hear it, but it never stops sounding amazing with repeated listens! An album that exhilarates you the first time you hear it, but still seems to grow with every listen is a truly rare and wonderful thing - and Pet Sounds encapsulates that sentiment more than just about any album. 

Day 9 - Can't Buy A Thrill by Steely Dan
Possibly the most underrated band in the world. With Steely Dan you get an agglomeration of most of the other greats rolled into one; The incisiveness of Dylan; the wit of Lennon; the slick polish of Pink Floyd; the melodiousness of Genesis; and the sumptuousness of Frank Zappa. They get everything right on this album, and on their follow up Countdown To Ecstasy, which is nearly as good, but not quite.

Day 10 - Hunky Dory by David Bowie
In truth, apart from Lodger, I could have picked any of Bowie's greats as my choice - from Hunky Dory through to Scary Monsters - depending on my mood and what I'm looking for.  I think that's probably what makes that Bowie period so special - so many great albums that are so good for so many diverse reasons.  

Day 11 - Blue by Joni Mitchell
Amazing! One of the most beautifully honest and emotionally deep albums I've ever heard. And there is an ineffable quality to Joni Mitchell that's not immediately obvious to fathom, in that she doesn't have a classically great voice, but when you combine that voice with those profound lyrics and the exquisite music, it has a combined quality that's hard to beat. I think it's because she uses her voice so magnificently in making it sound like a musical instrument.

Day 12 - Forever Changes by Love
Almost nobody has even heard of this band, yet in 1967 they made one of the best albums in the history of popular music. I saw them live when they came to Norwich, and it was the best gig I've ever experienced.

Day 13 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers by The Byrds
I almost can't choose between The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Younger Than Yesterday the year before, but the former just grabs it on account that it doesn't have the dreadful Mind Gardens on it. Other than that aberration, this is almost perfect pop music! But it's so much more than that - because when you think of the connective chain, six degrees of separation-style, that began with The Byrds, it's incredible what a panoply of great music emerged. I mean, you have all those terrific Byrds albums, at least one really good solo album each from Gene Clark, Gram Parsons and David Crosby; then there is The Flying Burrito Brothers created by two former Byrds; and of course we have Crosby, Stills and Nash (and later Neil Young), from which we get the link to Buffalo Springfield (Stills), The Hollies (Nash) and later Manassas (Stills), and a whole catalogue of brilliant Neil Young solo albums, and several decent solos from Steven Stills too.

That is a *lot* of good music!

Day 14 - Automatic For The People by R.E.M
More than any other music, R.E.M's albums in the nineties remind me of my important friendships - the created experiences of what we used to call 'making future memories now'. Smell is the sense most closely linked with memory, but sound can elicit nostalgia in a way that even the olfactory senses are too low-resolution to touch - and this album is so very precious to me. I think this beautiful album is R.E.M's high point on what has been a fabulous career. Here they substitute the trademark guitar sounds of their eighties material for the lush string arrangements and a greater acoustic feel, and they've never been more profound, sincere and evocative than right here.

Day 15 - Let It Come Down by Spiritualized
There's a mystery attached to Spiritualized: how can a band this good be so under-appreciated by the masses? Sure, without Phil Spector, Brian Wilson and The Velvet Underground there wouldn't be a Spiritualized of this calibre, but even so, few bands in the history of rock music have been able to create the combination of melodic electricity and profound delicate beauty as Spiritualized. Their lack of adulation is one of the cosmic musical solecisms that needs redressing. But in addition, there's a further mystery within the mystery, because even those who do give Spiritualized their worthy regard always seem to vaunt their inferior (but still excellent) preceding albums Lazer Guided Melodies and Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space over this one. The reality is, Let It Come Down, with its 110 piece choir/orchestra and the sonic depth of its guitars, brass and piano is one of the most gorgeous, soulful, deeply meaningful works in rock history.

Day 16 - After The Gold Rush by Neil Young 
Can't not have a Neil Young album in this list - he's terrific. Short and sweet.

Day 17 - In The Court Of The Crimson King by King Crimson
If Tony Iommi sired a love child with Sandy Denny, and that child grew up to read Coleridge and learned to play the flute and mellotron, and they all formed a band, this is what they’d produce. This album is like the musical equivalent of a brain probe that traverses the rich gamut of order and disorder deep in the sub-ducts of personality, where we humans are so much better and so much worse than we can imagine. The contrast from track 1 to track 2 is like going from Charles Manson to Paul McCartney – you almost can’t believe it’s the same album. It’s Iago and Desdemona inside the same cranium. And if you have the software, trim down Moonchild to just the first 4 and a half minutes, and you'll have chopped off the only boring bit, leaving yourself a near-flawless prog rock masterpiece

Day 18 - Transformer by Lou Reed
Not as seminal as The Velvet Underground & Nico, but everyone needs a lost weekend-kind of an album, where we have nostalgia for the old days of Jack Daniel’s, cigarettes, wimmin and the nightlife - and this album is mine. Equally I’m so glad those days have passed – but I’ll always have the enchantment of memory, and this music best encapsulates that reminiscence. This isn’t glam rock, but it’s certainly decadent rock-cabaret. Yet despite the hedonism, there are few moments in music that are more beautiful than the last 45 seconds of Perfect Day, with Mick Ronson’s glorious string arrangements and piano. 

Day 19 - The Beatles
It's impossible for me to single out one Beatles album, as they all mean so much to me. I know you understand, because, let's be honest, what these guys did was quite remarkable: it takes some special ability and creativity to make a series of albums like these that pushed the boundaries of musical innovation further and further away from the competition, yet still remained wholly commercially appealing to every kind of demographic. Dylan, Hendrix, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin - they all enchanted subsections of their potential target listeners at the expense of others - whereas The Beatles charmed everyone in a feat of intelligent populism that seems highly unlikely to be emulated ever again. There are no other albums in the world quite of this magnitude, whereby the music satisfies an almost impossible triumvirate: 

1) Of being able to be carefully absorbed on the stereo, with the listener concentrating on every note as they become immersed in the album as a work of art operating from within its own little sub-universe. 

2) As background music while they do other things like work or entertain guests. 

3) Or as a hit factory, where most of the songs on every album are indelibly stamped in the public psyche as singalongs in the car, in pubs, at parties, etc.

 It takes some kind of brilliance to achieve all three of those qualities on one album – but the Beatles managed it at least five times in one decade, so I'm picking them all!

Day 20 - Tigerlily by Natalie Merchant
One positive thing about relationships from yesteryear is that the good music survives long after the romantic residue has gone back to the dust. A past girlfriend of nearly 20 years ago had this terrific album by Natalie Merchant, and I thought it so good that I immediately went on to play.com (remember that website?) and bought her entire back catalogue, and ditto the 10,000 Maniacs (her antecedent band). It’s one of the most impressive back catalogues, yet so rarely appreciated as much as it deserves. Just listen to a song like The Letter – at just 2 minutes 12 it perfectly captures sentiments we’ve all felt, with the most beautiful simplicity, you wonder why no one has ever written it before.

The Slow Burn of Success: Finding Joy In The Journey

The things we pursue that are of most value to us are going to be hard and take time. Very few things that are worth having come easy, and most of the best things worth attaining require hard graft - either physical, mental, or both.

With some of those things we’ll get more of the gains in the early periods, where gains then diminish over time (like weight training, fitness, DIY). But many, if not the majority, of our valuable pursuits work the other way; the initial gains start off small, only to grow and accumulate over time, where the initial investment yields the largest rewards after the groundwork has been put in (friendships, networking, acquiring knowledge, playing a musical instrument).

I mention this in the hope of encouraging those of us who are trying to become an established name in our field or passion, or who are hungry to gain more momentum to break into the mainstream  – whether that’s in writing, music, art, starting a small business, building a successful blog, podcast or video channel. There are many pursuits that could reap greater rewards for our efforts and abilities, and I think that the reality of compounding progress – from baby steps to bigger strides - is something we can expect to experience on our journey. I've read of many cases where a blog or podcast reaches a key point of critical mass and experiences more growth in one month (and beyond) than in the previous two or three years. Perseverance can lay the groundwork for transformative breakthroughs. 

And remember too, for further encouragement - material published now that is only making a small impression and getting relatively few hits will still be there for people to see and revisit if you do make it big - so nothing will go to waste, and every effort can contribute to your future success, and make an impact henceforward. 

For those blessed enough to eventually make a significant impact in their craft, the early wins may feel slow and gradual. But we can be buoyed by the fact that most success stories begin that way, where the greater the gains, the more they can become even greater. And while the explosive results may come later, I think it’s vital to enjoy and value those incremental advances along the way – they are a rewarding and necessary part of the adventure. 

 

On The Philosophy Of Art & Morality

In this paper, I will consider supposedly subjective things like taste and opinion and look to challenge long-standing views about their subjectivity - instead attempting to show why they can be thought of as being inextricably related to objectivity.

 

To read the full paper, click on this link.

 

Hope it's informative and in some way enjoyable too!

We Really Need To Talk About ABBA & The Peculiar Nature Of Genius

We really need to talk about ABBA; I just need to get it off my chest. ABBA are, to me, the music equivalent of science's string theory (super trouper string theory, perhaps) - and what I haven't resolved since childhood is quite where ABBA belong in popular music's pantheon. The thing about ABBA is that they have this rather arcane qualitative thing going on whereby they are superior to the level they are required to be to produce the thing they are producing.

What I mean is, to make good pop you only have to be at the kind of ABC, Supertramp, 10cc, the Bangles or Ace of Base level - a kind of n where ABBA are n+1, and where 1 = some obscure quality that outputs material that's superior to what it needs to be.

The sixties pop equivalent would be The Beatles n+1 where n is bands like The Animals, The Small Faces, The Hollies, The Monkees and the Spencer Davis Group. And the same with prog rock and Pink Floyd too. To be a decent prog rock band you only need to be Yes, Jethro Tull or Rush. Pink Floyd were far better than they needed to be - the n+1 to the others' n.

And for me what adds to the mystery of ABBA's high quality singles is that generally their album tracks are little more than mediocre filler. When other great bands make great songs you usually get a sense of their qualities from the other songs on the album too. Not so with ABBA - the brilliance of songs like Dancing Queen, Take A Chance On Me, S.O.S and Mamma Mia are not hinted at anywhere on their non-single tracks.

It's almost as if ABBA were a band with flashes of absolute brilliance trapped inside the body of a mediocre band, bursting out every now and then with enough inspiration to wow us with enough brilliantly arranged and executed pop singles to secure them a place in music's pantheon. They had bursts of genius without being anything close to geniuses.

On the subject of genius, I recall in his considerations of tonal and nagual art, William Burroughs saw the nagual as much more unmanageable in the sense that it was unpredictable and harder to creatively construct than the more predictable patterns of the tonal. The tonal universe is the more empirically predictable cause-and-effect universe, whereas the nagual is the less foreseeable, intractable elements of reality that burst through unannounced and linger beyond the radar of prediction. As Burroughs put it, "For the nagual to gain access, the door of chance must be open"

Whether it be the painter with his formulae of form and colour applied to a canvas, or the writer with the formulae of words to paper, the true ‘genius’ of creativity was not thought to be in the person being creative, it was instead being continually re-crafted by tapping into something transcendent of the individual self - even if that transcendent thing could still be classified as human creation.

It ought to be noted that this wasn’t a scientific viewpoint, but an artistic feeling. Norman Mailer has suggested that William Burroughs was "possessed by genius" as opposed to ‘being’ a genius or even ‘possessing’ genius.  The dynamic spontaneity of ‘genius’ is nagual according to Mailer and Burroughs, and to be possessed ‘by’ genius is to tap into something altogether special – something that seems to find itself located in the collective nature of human minds, in that we share it and all in our own way seek to take possession of it, yet so often find it elusive. 

If this is the case about genius then the old maxim that genius is more about perspiration than inspiration probably has some mileage, particularly bearing in mind that the greater the output in terms of quantity, the more opportunities for the door of chance to be opened to let the nagual genius creep in.

Then again, if one looks at some very ungenius-like highly prolific artists in output - such as Paul Weller, The Fall, Tangerine Dream, The Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen - one gets the impression that however long they keep trying they will never produce something of genius that's on a par with the really great artists.

One final point about greatness is that it so often requires the lens of retrospection to reveal its quintessence. For example, if you asked 1000 keen music fans at random in the UK which 3 albums from the 14 years of 1966 to 1979 they considered to be the best and most innovative, I think the range of different albums chosen would be narrower than if you asked 1000 keen music fans at random in the UK which 3 albums from the past 14 years (the noughties - the years 2003 to 2016) they considered to be the best and most innovative.

However, I suspect that if you asked 1000 keen music fans at random in the year 2050 which 3 albums from the years 2000 to 2013 they considered to be the best and most innovative you'd find the range of albums chosen probably would be as narrow as the current 1000 keen music fans choosing from the 14 years of 1966 to 1979.

I think that's probably because while there are more albums being produced in the modern era, there are fewer great ones - but also because people need a considerable passage of time to assess what makes an album really great, and today probably is too soon to assess the past 14 years with a proper consideration.