Rico Nasty: Staying Angry and Creative in a Gen-Z World

Maria Cecilia Simone Kelly, known more commonly as her stage name “Rico Nasty”, and her music are fundamentally a product of Missy Elliott’s break into the hip-hop and rap scene in the late 90’s. Rico, 22, is also what I see as a distinctly millennial and Gen-Z artist, that deals with the rapid pace of technological development as they grew up, which affects their seeming responsibility of constantly producing music, maintaining a strong relationship with fans, and “staying relevant”. This, however, has not lessened Rico’s creativity.

Also hailing from the DMV area, similarly to Missy, Rico received her stage name from bullying both the African-American community and the White community. As a biracial, afro-latino woman, racial discrimination was a part of her daily life going to a private boarding school at first, and then eventually being expelled and going to public school. Rico Nasty refers directly to her Puerto- Rican identity. Rico says that this comment empowered her to me more unapologetic about herself, and to bring and channel anger to all of her artistic work.

Like Missy, in middle school and high school, Rico spent time away from school to pursue her interests, namely painting and music. She was very inspired by Picasso, Missy Elliot, Beyoncé and Rihanna in this process. She sees these artists as “standing alone” in their respective domains of music and art, which inspired her to do the same. Her father, more commonly known as the rapper Beware, actually had little to no influence on her becoming a rapper herself, she remarks. She was  pushed by her former boyfriend Brandon, who passed away soon after she found out she was pregnant with his child, who saw themes in her drawings, paintings, and lyrics that were unique and novel. His passing, and eventually, the birth of her son Cameron, motivated her to make music her career. In this way, Rico is very intrinsically motivated by these relationships.

What is creative about Rico is how anger plays a role in her music. She often also refers to herself as “Trap Lavigne”, showcasing the unintentionally blending of anger and sadness of Punk music to her rap. Her most recent mixtape, Anger Management speaks to how Rico deals with the anger and sadness in her life through her music; she truly embraces these emotions. Anger Management invites her fans and audience to do the same. The beats and sounds are loud; Rico is often yelling more than she is, in the traditional sense, rapping. It is characteristic in many ways of how millennial and Gen-Z’ers are dealing with the current socioeconomic, cultural, political and environmental context impinging on their lives, with unrelenting anger.

Many have scorned Rico’s use of anger, in a very similar way to how Missy Elliott was received by the field by embracing her body and sexuality so unapologetically in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Rico responds by saying, it is a part of her, but she is always reinventing herself, whether she is Rico, Tacobella (another one of her softer, sadder aliases from another mixtape), or Trap Lavigne. Her creative process relies on this constant reinvention and immersion into her aliases. Similar to Missy, she is not attached to one representation of herself and her work, and is constantly changing up her clothes, music videos, and subjects in her music. In this way, Rico says she paradoxically consistent. Her fans can count on her for something new. Growing up in the Internet age, it is natural for her, she says, to maintain a strong relationship with her fans, who have the expectation that she will be able to keep up with pace of relevancy that comes with the Internet age. I see her becoming as timeless as Missy Elliott, even this early in her career. Additionally, like Missy Elliott, she seeks to distinguish herself as a female rapper. In her song Hatin’, very much reflects Missy Elliott’s She’s a Bitch, where they both reflect on their isolation amongst male rappers in the entire domain and field, but even amongst female rappers themselves. Isolation is a major part of both their creative processes.

Rico Nasty’s music can help us reflect on how we evaluate creativity as a generation. With constant change, how do you be unique in a way that can impact others? In reinvention always necessary? How do we stay true to ourselves in a constant upheaval? Rico’s answer?: Do what you love and don’t give a f**k.


-Lauren 

Resources:

https://www.thefader.com/2018/06/07/rico-nasty-cover-story-interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dub55zK-FcA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMh3Q0nR8mo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47CLW-C-hqI

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/rico-nastys-thrilling-anger-management-review/587995/

Tim Burton: The Man Who Molds Halloween

Tim Burton, born on August 25, 1958, has always had a love for horror movies while growing up and began drawing at a young age-- but he never knew how much he would shape the genre he loved.

Inspired by fairy tales, pop culture, and gothic traditions, Burton started to make stop-motion movies early in his career, as he felt it was the best way to express himself. He never saw himself as a good artist, but once he told himself that did not matter, his career began to soar. 

We all know the fall and Halloween season would not be the same without Burton's works: Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and Edward Scissorhands are all movies that are loved during all parts of the year, but especially Halloween. Arguably, the season would not be the same without them.

Tim Burton's creative process is not as complex as one might think: he collects things all around him that inspires him, including people he sees, individual objects he likes, or whatever inspires him. He begins work with simple sketching, which is the best way for him to "see" his creations. Burton is often quoted saying that he "doesn't really care if it looks bad, as long as it makes sense" to him. Collaboration is also a large part of his creative process and loves to get other creators' insights on what should be fixed, improved, or changed. Burton always gets feedback on his works, which is a significant part of his creative process. Similar to the research Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro conducted in their study Collaboration and Creativity: The Small
World Problem, Burton has a clear small world network of creatives who he considers similar to himself and who "see" art the same way he does, and by working with them, Burton is perpetually able to make amazing art through cinema. The art, in fact, comes before the story in most cases, with the characters often making their own story as Burton works on them.

Sketching and drawing have always been an immense part of Burton's life: he draws everywhere, at all times, on anything he can. He draws on sometimes more than ten notebooks at the same time and if he doesn’t have paper, he uses napkins, tissues, tables or even walls. Burton describes his constant need to draw as a way to focus and put out anything that might be stuck in his imagination.

Burton, as of right now, still seems to be a 'little c' creative, but I feel he has the potential to become a 'big C' as his career develops. Burton refuses to categorize his own work, but that does not mean others haven't. You always know Tim Burton when you see it, and that alone is a characteristic of all great creatives. Similarly, Burton uses his art to express himself, and the way he feels regarding just about anything. His work transcends the boundaries of movies created just for 'kids' or 'adults'; people of all ages enjoy his work time and time again. Burton's work with stop-motion and claymation is unprecedented within his field, with his work has inspiring countless others and touching the hearts of so many people, even children, all around the globe.

Spooky Sources:
https://the-artifice.com/art-tim-burton/
https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/TBEssay.pdf 
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/tim-burton-boyhood-traumas-of-a-director-1910871.html

BTS Paved the Way

International superstars.  The world's biggest boy band. The Second Beatles. Billion-dollar boy band. All used as headlines to describe the K-pop band BTS, sensationalized in American media since 2017. But to me, these seven men are more than a cliche boy band; they are BTS.




BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan) is a seven member boy group from South Korea and emerged on the Korean pop scene in 2013. At the time, the members ranged from 15-20 years of age, presenting the image of hip hop teenagers complaining about school and the pressure placed upon them by parents and the older generation. Even in the beginning, they wanted to fight against the stereotypes in their generation in a predominantly conservative society, aiming to protect the youth by telling them to be themselves and follow their passions. As they grew older, they moved away from school-based hip hop music and began to develop a different sound that included more pop and R&B, as well as a very intricate story line that details the ups and downs of youth and friendship. This era, beginning around 2015, is known as The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Trilogy. In their music videos, as well as additional short films, each member of BTS has their own story centered around their struggles to truly find themselves in the world. One member is theorized to die by suicide due to being in an abusive household, two are theorized to portray an LGBTQ relationship, and another is theorized to be placed in a mental hospital. For a musical act, BTS began to define themselves for the deep meaning behind their songs as well as their music videos, providing the basis for their growing popularity in 2017.


During this time, two of the members who frequently produce songs for the band, RM and Suga, revealed the band went through an extremely difficult period dealing with claims of "plagiarism," ridicule on the internet, and constant doubt among themselves. They released their own solo songs and in the song "The Last" by Suga, he is openly candid about his struggles with OCD and depression, as well as social anxiety, while RM discussed the weight on his shoulders of being the leader as well as loneliness and the depression that followed. However, these struggles were what defined the recent Love Yourself era, expanding on what they had felt to their fans, many of whom were going through similar situations. In 2017, the Love Yourself era was born, ushering in new levels of popularity and self-realization.

Covers of the Love Yourself albums.

In this new era, BTS base their stories around love, which they explain is a rather abstract concept that to them means more than loving someone else. Love Yourself: Her, Love Yourself: Tear, and Love Yourself:Answer center around love, loss, and acceptance respectively. BTS used insight from themselves to create these three albums and the extended version of all three, Map of the Soul: Persona. They utilized their personal experiences to create three albums about love and the different kinds of love. Her is a more playful type of love, which can be associated with their beginnings of being in love in school, while Tear is about the hardships of love and how an untrue love can tear you apart. The second album can relate to the struggles felt by the band before they created the Love Yourself era. Finally, Answer returns to the focal point of love: self-love. BTS spent a long time looking within themselves and within society, listening to their fans and finding ways to relate to their struggles and give them a beacon of hope. In this way, BTS was intrinsically motivated, opting to tirelessly write songs because they wanted to learn to love themselves; more importantly, they saw the challenge in figuring out how to better their lives while simultaneously bettering the lives of anyone who listens to their music.

BTS is greatly involved in the creative process of music, with most of their songs from the Love Yourself era featuring lyrics or being partly self produced from any of the seven members. Besides inward reflection, they have also included literary works in their creative process, most recently with psychologist Carl Jung's "Map of the Soul," which shares the same name as BTS' extended album. The title track Persona deals with the components of the psyche  and the true realization that loving yourself takes courage and forgiveness towards past mistakes and flaws. Everyone has shadows within them and BTS, with a message that is rather radical for Korea (where seeking mental health resources is still quite stigmatized,) stress the importance of embracing your darkness to realize your true self. If you seek help you should never be ashamed; that is only a step towards self-love. Towards the end of this era, which ended today on October 29th with the finale of their Love Yourself: Speak Yourself tour, BTS express their thanks to their fans for helping them to learn how to love themselves. The original intention was to teach their fans self-love, but as a result, BTS resonated strongly with their own message. During the US leg of their tours, the leader RM closed out by saying, "Please use me, please use BTS to love yourself. Because you guys helped me learn to love myself, every day."



Through personal experience, interactions with society, and the use of psychological texts on self-reflection and how to make fundamental changes in life,  BTS crafted their message about self-love at a deeply personal level and resonated with those who were struggling. They have indeed saved lives through their music, inspiring people to continue living and loving themselves, which is why I believe BTS are creative. They are unlike any other artist out there by building their music and entire character around self-love and defying social norms.

I think this phrase sums up BTS perfectly: BTS paved the way. 

http://www.mtv.com/news/3099373/bts-grammy-museum-conversation-recap-quotes/

https://medium.com/bangtan-journal/love-yourself-the-message-behind-btss-record-breaking-album-series-229119e81902

Michael Schur: King of (Situational) Comedy

If you’ve ever binged one of several popular television comedies of the last 15 or so years, you’ve likely come across Michael Schur’s name -- even if you may not have noticed it, hidden in the credits. He has nonetheless been integral in the development and creation of some of the most iconic sitcoms of our era, and has used his creative talents to become a hugely successful producer of televised content.

Michael Schur got his start, like many in the television industry, on Saturday Night Live as a writer, and he eventually took over running the news show-esque segment Weekend Update, then hosted by Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. From there he moved to LA (to be with his then girlfriend, now wife) and joined the writing team of the U.S. version of The Office. In addition to his behind-the-scenes roles on this show as a writer and producer, he also stepped in front of the camera on

occasion to play Dwight Schrute’s -- shall we say eccentric? -- cousin, Mose. After the success of The Office, one of the other writer/producers Greg Daniels partnered with Schur to create the next NBC workplace mockumentary, Parks and Recreation, for which he served as executive producer and writer. Post-Parks, Schur partnered with Dan Goor to create and executive produce the police comedy Brooklyn 99, soon to begin its seventh season. While Goor serves as showrunner for Brooklyn, Schur has additionally created and executive produced NBC’s hit comedy The Good Place, entering its final season. As if all this wasn’t enough, Schur additionally served as executive producer for both Abby’s, the first outdoor multi-camera sitcom (with a live outdoor audience) which released its first ten episodes this past spring and was created by Josh Malmuth, and Sunnyside, which recently premiered on NBC.

So clearly with this much success in an entertainment industry with ever-increasing competition among different platforms and services, Michael Schur clearly has mastered a method to conquer the madness. One of the aspects of his creative process that has allowed him to be so successful is collaboration. This practice has been essential to Schur’s process essentially as long as he’s been writing professionally for television -- as an SNL writer, his best-known sketches were all co-written, according to an interview on the podcast, I Think You’re Interesting. In that same interview, Schur also credits co-writer and co-producer of The Office and Parks and Rec Greg Daniels for the fact that he “skipped all of the hard parts [in the television industry]...Greg held [his] hand and skipped them for [him]”. More recently, Schur partnered with Dan Goor to create Brooklyn 99 and worked with New Girl’s Josh Malmuth to produce Abby’s. Schur has also lauded the casting team helmed by Allison Jones responsible for finding suitable actors for these various collaborative endeavors, and talked about how much of a flexible team effort the conversation between himself as a creator and the team as casting directors always is.

Another strategy Schur employs in much of his creative processing is collecting. He is heavily influenced in his writing and producing by comedies from previous generations; this is evident in his references in interviews to significant sitcoms like Frasier, Friends, and especially Cheers, which undoubtedly guided his comedic development. He also talks in an interview with The Believer magazine about the personal importance of the writings of David Foster Wallace, in particular the book Infinite Jest. He goes so far as to say that “it’s influenced everything I’ve ever written”, and discusses how it made him realize the importance of embracing sincerity in his writing. This literary work and the lessons it imparts especially influenced the show Parks and Recreation, which celebrates the triumph of optimism over pessimism (a theme found in Wallace’s work), especially in the cynical world of politics.

Schur has definitely had to embrace divergent thinking in order to create content that remains unique, relevant, and relatable among today’s oversaturation of TV content options. He appeals to the general populace (and has gained much acclaim for this) by prioritizing characters over premise in his programs. In his words in the aforementioned podcast interview, “premises burn off,” but audiences invest their time and attention on relationships between realistic, engaging characters, which should always be the first priority. Schur has emphasized how he never begins developing ideas for a show with a grand premise in mind, but begins by thinking about a person or group of people, how they interact or how they address a challenge, and it grows and adapts from there. He talks in the podcast about that pattern of thinking when developing the concept for The Good Place: he began by thinking of the nature of being a good person, and how a person could be struggling to achieve this sort of goal, and he cycled through a number of possible premises that could suit this sort of personal obstacle before settling on the afterlife. Another way of appealing to the general public (aka, his audience) that Schur excels at is embracing diversity and inclusion in his casts and characters -- done through color-blind casting and the inclusion of multiple queer characters in his shows -- and addressing relevant and difficult themes while still being comedic. For example, Brooklyn 99 has had episodes discussing racial profiling among police officers, the processing of coming out and being accepted (or not accepted) by family and friends, and sexual assault and harassment (that episode was aptly titled, “He Said, She Said”). By confronting important current events and topics that matter to his audiences, Schur is earning greater attention and acclaim from his audiences and his field in general.

Schur also exhibits a great amount of creative problem solving through his tweaking of characters and plots of shows to make them more appealing to those audiences. This is especially prevalent in The Office, when the writing team made significant changes to the character of Michael Scott after the first season to make him slightly more likeable and relatable to viewers -- an alteration Schur acknowledges as the reason the sitcom was so successful and wasn’t cancelled after twelve episodes. Parks and Recreation underwent similar modifications after its first six episodes received a negative response. In a stroke of creative genius, Schur and his team did not entirely alter the character of Leslie Knope in the same way they had Michael Scott, but rather changed her fellow characters’ responses to her enthusiasm and dedication to her work. Instead of rolling their eyes at her plans, they would acknowledge that she had better ideas and strategies than anyone else in the office and go along with her thoughts, thus creating more of an “us versus the world” mentality, according to Schur’s interview. These sorts of subtle improvements to positively influence audience responses to protagonists demonstrate Schur’s skill at creatively solving these problems in entertainment, preventing his shows from early cancellations and instead allowing them to flourish into some of the most popular sitcoms in recent televised history. Or, to use Lehrer’s language, Schur learned from his failures and allowed those initial negative responses to drive his creative modifications to his characters and shows as a whole.

Through his extensive collaboration with other members of his domain, collecting of comedy and literature as creative influences, thinking in unique and divergent manners to find ways of connecting his audience to his characters, and learning from failures and creative problem solving, Schur has claimed a spot as king of comedy hill, and with this many great successes under his belt and his strategies to creatively process ideas and solve problems, I believe he has earned his crown.

References:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321658/?ref_=nmawd_awd_nm

https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-michael-schur/

https://bgr.com/2019/03/24/mike-schur-new-show-nbc-interview/

https://www.vox.com/i-think-youre-interesting/2018/12/15/18141338/the-office-michael-schur-beginning-season-1

GARDNER: Gardner, H. (1993). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York:Basic Books.

Lehrer, J. (2009). Accept defeat: The neuroscience of screwing up. Wired Magazine, 21.