In an ordinary small loft apartment, the wiry guy with the bong is expending some effort to convince me that the band Living Color “stole” his song idea with their hit song “Cult of Personality.” I’d been around musicians long enough that this was a well-worn cliche to me, and I probably rolled my eyes as he drummed out the lines and played the chord structure that he says he composed. To be fair, what he played sounded very similar, but not exactly the same. He sang a melody that was also strikingly similar with some pretty unmemorable lyrics. If he reached a point where he came to realize that he has a fine party trick, and not some injustice, then it could be palatable, and maybe even fun. But for now, he was forcing this performance of his into a place where it neither fit nor belonged. You have to evaluate everything according to its context. This might have been the moment when I decided I was done with musicians.
His claim that he wrote something very similar to a song that became a hit a few years later might have some merit. To be clear, he wasn’t accusing anyone of plagiarism; he was lamenting the missed opportunity. If he had been positioned differently, he could have gotten his song out there first. It could’ve been his song on the radio, and not theirs, because his was just as good.
It’s such a common story: someone tells you “I had that idea first,” or “I started working on an idea, and after some research, found that someone else was already getting ready to bring a similar product or service to market.” I’ve had several moments like this. I first started thinking about this during the “Cult of Personality” episode, and over the years, I’ve filled sketchbooks with ideas and plans for things that already existed, or were very close to being brought to life by someone else. So I’ve given some thought to what constitutes creativity, invention, and what is genuinely valuable in that kind of venture. It seemed pretty clear to me even as he was drumming out the beats, that his idea, while basically fine, was miles from anything that could be brought to a recording studio, not to mention the work that goes into recording, collaborating with other musicians, writing lyrics, creating textural and harmonic composition between the various voices before you even get into to finding an audience, promoting, getting distribution (back in the days before SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and iTunes), having artwork done, and the inevitable touring and pressing of the flesh.
It seems that my acquaintance was at step 3 of a process that might take hundreds of steps and years of work. Anyone can put together a beat, and I’ll wager that neither he nor Living Color were the first ones to create that beat. But Living Color did the work for that particular song. That work is what really produced the value of a song that was both novel and that people wanted to hear.
But just as his problem was the lack of a process, just applying a process isn’t everything that it takes to correct the problem.
Artists are known for talking about their process, changing their process, involving other people in their process, and what an exciting process it was to make this song, or this movie, or that photo shoot. It’s hard to know what they’re talking about, because in some ways, a process can be very personal, very fluid, and very situational. It’s a big tent, but I think we can identify some tent poles:
Details
Unfortunately, I think the expression “detail-oriented” has become a bit of a cliché, separated from any concrete meaning, but also separated from the broad missions, goals, and targets that those details are meant to serve. I’m not aware of a good term to describe the skill of being able to recognize how the details serve the big picture. Some digging on the internet may show you Systems Thinking (thwink.org) and systems thinking (wikipedia) as a contrast with with Event Oriented Thinking. It’s not the details; it’s which details that need and deserve your attention, and that’s just as much a creative judgement call as anything.
Experimentation
If my acquaintance had taken those beats and chords and explored some variations, he might have found something compelling. In a worst case scenario, he might find that all of the variations have been played out, but having explored all of that territory, comes away with a better grasp of the landscape. If you think about it though, it seems hard to believe he wouldn’t find something in some extended trial and error.
Associations
Artists that endure tend to listen to lots of other music, or look at lots of other art, or read other books, and make those fresh associations between things that hadn’t been made before, or maybe hadn’t been made by a person in a position to do something about it. This is why creatives often favor more metropolitan areas: there are more opportunities for serendipitous discovery. Art shows, musical performances, coffee shop conversations, random invitations are all opportunities for associations and inspiration that you might never have found on your own.
Position
It’s hard to ignore that position matters. A lot. How much of that process could he realistically pursue living in rural Pennsylvania, without a support system of other musicians, studio equipment, a network of people connected to the music industry, and so on. Access to the tools and networks that make projects possible is a big reason why some artists make it, and others don’t.
Take the musician Prince as an example. There’s no denying that he’s a talented person, but growing up in a household with two musician parents who could teach him multiple instruments, songwriting, introduce him to various kinds of music, make those associations, and as he got older, guide him to recording facilities, and make network connections. His natural talent was just a starting point, and being positioned to engage in the process at all of those stages along the way kept him developing and growing as an artist until he was ready to emerge onto the scene, seemingly fully formed in the eyes of those who didn’t see him when he was still forming his chrysalis.
While we might not all have the structural advantages that Prince had, we can still have some influence over our positioning. Positioning seems to have two major components: preparation and network. You can make the argument that network is more important, because we can all find examples of people who succeeded because of their connections, and in spite of a poor level of preparation. I’m not sure how easily you can find examples of well-prepared people who succeeded despite a lack of a network. Ideally, these two components complement each other hand-in-hand. The well-prepared gains network because they’ve done the homework, which enables them to take their preparation to a higher level.
Since then, I’ve seen the same story play out again and again, not just the frustrated person that got beaten to the punch, but the opposite story, too: the woman with an idea who went through the process, who did the work, and at the end of it, had something that was valuable because of that process. It’s important to note that because she went through the development process, the final product looked noticeably different from the original idea. That’s the power of the process.