being "creative": how to, whether to

By Robbie on May 15, 2011

Some years back in The Journal of Country Music my friend Chris Dickinson got busy taking down Gillian Welch. If I remember right, she compared Gillian unflatteringly with artists like Trisha Yearwood, pointed out the striking disconnect between the singer/composer's privileged California upbringing and her Appalachian-influenced balladry, and called the songs on the record under review "little creative writing exercises." The first thought that struck me was that the quality of Gillian's writing spoke enough for itself to neutralize any discomfort about her "authenticity." The charge of inauthenticity is too attractive in a biography like Gillian's to expect it not to arise. But I tend to overlook arguments against good-sounding or well-wrought music, even a good-sounding and well-wrought argument -- all the more if it's being made by someone who doesn't make music -- and I find that this has saved me a lot of time and worry.

As a general non-Gillian-focused complaint, though, the "creative writing" charge does have potency and sting. "Creative writing" is the last thing we want our songs to sound like. We want them to sound like they dropped from eternity using our heads as way-stations, not like we found some old records and listened to them hypnotically until we resembled them. That would be...uncreative. This hit me afresh yesterday, working on a new song. The song took place in a little mountain graveyard. Our modern world still abounds with little mountain graveyards, but there was no mistaking a certain anachronistic flavor. Well, to paraphrase Loretta Lynn, the flavor became a stench. After I had thrown in a grieving lover, a contrapuntal tenor vocal on the chorus, a reference to seasonal shift, a few hyperbatons ("but the stone tells not...as through the meadow she ran"), and a sprightly 3/4 tempo, I felt the need to step back and look skeptically at the entire enterprise. How could this be taken as anything other than a creative writing exercise? A trip through a graveyard in inverted syntax really points nowhere but to old records.

One is ill-advised to be swayed by imaginary listeners when writing songs. But more than one non-imaginary listener has noted, often with disfavor, my fondness for working in traditional forms, and I may have taken this audience sensitivity to heart. Anyway, I quit working on it, for the time being, to try for an improved perspective on the piece before diving back in. Meantime, I'll be thinking about how "original" -- good-creative, that is; non-mimetic; reducing the influence of antique vinyl psychic intermediaries in favor of fresh impressions of the world as it looks right now out my window -- I would like to be. Not very, I would think. For one thing, I don't really believe in originality -- don't think it exists in anything close to a pure form, and don't think it correlates strongly to musical value.

I guess an original singer-writer would have songs avoiding mention of love and death and technology and would play them by flailing on a homemade instrument, just for starters. This would make Jimmie Driftwood the only original artist. When I try to imagine even a strong streak of originality in a musical artist, I'm stumped for very many names. Radiohead sounds markedly unlike other rock groups. Prince made up a sound that didn't sound so old. Bill Frisell and Doc Watson sound wildly like themselves when they play the guitar. Michael Jackson and Liz Phair made an original record or two, each. There must be other examples. But to set "Exile in Guyville" or "Kid A" as the standard in originality for other musicians to follow would be to kill music altogether.

There are any number of singers and groups working the shallow end of the originality pool. I'll name just a few examples that spring to mind. Hot Club of Cowtown recreates with love and skill the small-band swing and hillbilly jazz music of the 1930s and 1940s. Dale Watson and Wayne Hancock, also from Texas, mine various postwar electrified honky-tonk veins. The Beau Hunks bring to life early orchestral broadcast music. I'd cite the group in your town that makes people happy by doing note-for-note versions of Led Zeppelin favorites, but I want to emphasize the artistry -- a value, I feel, that is not incompatible with a high degree of non-"originality." How do you get away calling people artists who play old music and write new music that sounds like old music? What makes them something other than hacks?

1.  Instrumental proficiency.

2.  Generating movement and happiness in their listeners with their music.

3.  Specialist knowledge of their field.

4.  The accurate perception that what they are presenting is the product of extraordinary love and diligence and sacrifice, beginning with the step of exiting the comfortable mainstream to seek new sounds and inspirations.

5.  Many other people who know about music, prominently musicians, say they're artists and not hacks.

When I had a radio show I interviewed a lot of the acts I just mentioned, and it interested me to learn that they loathed tags like "retro" and "revivalist," to say nothing, I'm sure, of "unoriginal." They like to think that they are doing Now music for Now people. Personally, I think this approach is ludicrous. But the fact that Wayne and Dale abjure any official association with "old school" or past times tells you how thumpingly ideas like "originality" and "progressivism" are promoted as musical goods. I liked when the brilliant guitarist Redd Volkaert was a guest on my show, and responded to my question, "Do you think that the music you play is unoriginal?" by saying: "The reason I play the music I do is that it's the music I like."

It helps to remember that past musical giants whom we revere for their awesome innovation and utter uniqueness, people such as Louis Armstrong and Bill Monroe, were highly but not completely "original." People whose mentors are lost in the mists of time nonetheless had mentors, perhaps suffered, for all we know, from influence-anxiety. Eddie Lang looked up to someone. So did Shakespeare. (Ovid, and the Bible, according to Harold Bloom.)

Another thing I like to remember is a comment made by Guy Maddin. He is the Canadian director of some of the most strange and wonderful movies of the last 25 years -- "My Winnipeg," "Brand Upon the Brain," "The Saddest Music in the World." The movies employ a host of 80-to-100-year-old technologies such as silent-film cards, live narrators for screenings, and jumpy black-and-white film. His comment was that the pace of film technology moved so fast, with innovations appearing and disappearing within the space of a few years, that no particular technology was ever maximally exploited, or squeezed dry. Younger filmmakers, any who wanted it, had a wealth of hastily discarded technologies to sift through and use as they wished. For musicians, this could be a liberating idea. It explains and defends what a lot of them already do.

I think that in talking about musicians who verge on being overtaken by their influences something gets lost, and that is that the line between music and life doesn't effectively exist for a lot of these people. If you happen to fall in love with music that's older, and you spend a lot of quality time with it, then one day you look out your window and it is what's there. People become by doing, and the guy in the zoot suit singing about jiving and jukeboxes is representing his authentic personality as much as the earnest folksinger or angry rapper. The music of the dead permeates him as the images of the dead do Mr. Guy Maddin; for him the story of an artistic object doesn't end just because someone stopped working on it and later died. If you spend a lot of your leisure time listening to records then that's your pleasure. If you spend twenty thousand hours listening to it, ride a bus for eight hours thinking of it, don a garment and stand before the curious to interpret it, and repeat for 20 years, then that's actually your life. Whether it's much of a life is another question.

Chris's "creative-writing" snipe rings a bell with me because I've often felt an instinctive contempt for costumed acts whose alleged creativity consists of a dogged and tiresome fealty to a single pop-culture period (or, often, a single singer or band from within the period). But I think the contempt sometimes needs to yield to other considerations -- those I've mentioned -- craftsmanship, listener pleasure, informed opinion, evidence of homework done. Some goy puts on a kaftan and grows sidelocks, you have to write him off as a prankster or an overzealous convert. But after he's mastered Hebrew and the Talmud, had the tip of his penis sliced off, and spent half his life in daily ritual and prayer, I would respectfully call him a Jew, no matter who his mother was. Dedication, diligence, and sacrifice matter.   

If only effort alone pulled you through. The obvious paradox of studying and emulating a William Shakespeare is that if Shakespeare himself had tried that method, there would be no Shakespeare for us to emulate and enjoy. The big guns of artistic creativity seem to possess a genius for knowing when to break away from their older mentors, as well as the audacity to do so. People like you and me are unlikely to be burdened by that kind of genius. So we copy and cannibalize more, and the wide world of art seems to have plenty of room for that, and all in all, I think I'll probably return to that graveyard song with a clear conscience, and ignore whatever fallout may come. I'm no inventor!