Insertable bits #1: Crutches, puzzles, and originality
KeithHandy posted in So You Want... on December 8th, 2007
Originality. It comes out of nowhere. You’re happily living a normal life, and suddenly, one day, bang, you write your first song. From that day on, you’re never the same again.
You probably realized this immediately, but just to be safe, I’ll clue you in: it doesn’t work that way. The road to originality is long, incremental, and fraught with subconscious plagiarism. It’s possible that the reason some of us fear “going all the way” with our originality is not that we’re afraid we won’t be good enough in the end, but rather that we don’t want to cross all the legal land mines on the way there.
The familiar phrase, “good artists copy, great artists steal” is too cynical for my liking. I don’t buy it. But I’ll tell you what I do think: all artists use crutches. And crutches, despite having a bad name, are not a problem.
For some reason we tend to think that if we could only rid ourselves of all our needs and dependencies, then and only then we can pursue the great art, and the highest levels of consciousness, and blah blah blah. In other words, take off all your clothes, jump out of a high window, and improvise your song a capella on the way down. Anything else you do would not be “pure”.
There is no absolute definition of “pure art”. Many people think you’re selling out or crossing a line when you rely on certain technology (and this line falls in any and every place you can possibly think of along the technological spectrum, depending on who you talk to). For others the line of purity may have to do with style of performance, or choosing between improvisation and composition (which are the same thing, just spread differently over the dimension of time).
In a similar manner, people will pass moral judgement based on how “original” you are. Like any other aspect of your skill, though, you get there gradually, in small steps. Some of those steps may seem impure to armchair critics looking for a reason to stigmatize you, but remember, as with any other skill, we learn to walk before we learn to run.
Why do some of us perceive a need to “jump out the window naked”, metaphorically — the feeling that we must somehow magically conjure up pure originality right out of the gate, in a total vacuum? If you think other artists do this, then they have done a good job of tricking you, just as you will do a good job of tricking your audience. (The audience only ever hears your end result, never your path; although bootlegs, interviews, or “making of” extras can give them a peek.) Artists who develop their own voice and style have essentially accumulated a vocabulary or “tool box” of elements they’ve come to associate with themselves — and which their fans, as a result, associate with them as well. Most of this vocabulary is picked up in bits and pieces from other artists; and what little isn’t, is usually acquired by happy accident.
The idea of a crutch is that you use an existing song as a reference point for your own. It can be on any level where you’re lacking experience, apart from the lyrics and melody. You may, for example, associate a song you wrote with a popular song that’s already out there in the world, and try to “steal” the popular song’s production style — the instrumentation, how it’s mixed, and so on. In your naive attempt to copy the sound of another song, you won’t quite succeed, but be sure to keep your ears open for serendipity. It’s a pretty good accomplishment to copy a sound decently, but it’s an even better accomplishment to notice when you’ve accidentally found a piece of your own unique sonic puzzle.
I’m in danger of making overcooked metaphor soup here, but bear with me — your toolbox, or vocabulary, starts out as a fully-assembled puzzle which you “stole” or copied from someone else. As you discover new tools, you replace the other person’s puzzle pieces with your own (or at least mix in pieces from another puzzle, so that at least the combination is unique). Sometimes you will replace a puzzle piece more than once, and sometimes a fan of yours will adopt the intermediate orphaned puzzle piece and run with it in their own way. Sometimes you shake things up by going avant-garde, which means you replace as many pieces as possible, in the strangest way possible. (You can always change back the ones that don’t work.) It’s also likely there will still be some pieces that never get replaced. (You might, for example, be perfectly happy with 4/4 beats where the snare drum is always hit on beats two and four. Hey, it’s a perfectly good beat, so why mess with it?)
All the pieces that have not been replaced yet — or never will be — are your crutches. The object is to ultimately use few enough crutches that your music has its own identity. Listen to albums by your favorite artists in chronological order, and pay attention to how their puzzle evolved over time. The earliest albums are generally easy to categorize as examples of a particular style that was popular at the time, and most of the puzzle pieces are easy to cross-reference with other artists; the later albums are more identity-focused. Even an artist who has achieved some transcendent and definitive height may continue to play with new ways of reconfiguring the puzzle, hoping to achieve the same or greater height in a fresh way.
Summing this up: supreme, transcendent originality is an awesome thing to strive for; but if you demand too much of it too soon, you won’t permit yourself the necessary baby steps to actually get there. So don’t be afraid to get your feet wet by, initially, being only somewhat original.
It worked for everyone else. ;)
