What's Creative?

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Ever the Unconventional

Twenty One Pilots is an unconventional music group that has never conformed to industry standards. They never let a genre define their music. They created what exactly they wanted to put out into the world. Their music explores rap, reggae, screamo, rock, punk, electro-pop but refuses to be put into one category. Their passion and stories drive their music. Trench, their latest album, explores the character Clancy and his desperate escape from a place called Dema. They let their music be very telling and representational of their creative process and narrative they want their album to convey.

The lyrics in all their albums are filled with meaning that really connects to their audience. Car Radio, a song from their album Vessel, talks about the thought of suicide in a very honest way. “I'm forced to deal with what I feel / There is no distraction to mask what is real / I could pull the steering wheel.” They let their own honest thoughts drive their music and that’s why so many are able to connect to their music.

Joseph and Dun have talked about what drove their passion for music throughout their childhood. Joseph said he used it as an escape from his boredom and his desire to keep creating something new. Their music videos and their performances are these massive undertakings and are the physical manifestations of what the two guys want their music to say.

The band goes on long breaks after their tours. Joseph retires to his house in Columbus and Dun goes back to his home in L.A.. They do no concerts or have any communication with their hardcore fanbase. They take that time to rest and create new music. Joseph just sits in his basement where his music process is completely under his control. He just lets his moods and thoughts drive what he puts into his music.

Lou Adler and Monterey International Pop Music Festival

Lou Adler, music man and movie producer, is one of the most creative people in the rock music industry to date. His divergent thinking helped him shape the path of rock music and led him to find great success in his career and the careers of those who gained his support. Adler, a Chicago native born in 1933, is a champion of divergent thinking and pushing his domain, the music industry, to the absolute limits and beyond. This is why I consider Adler a very strong big-c creative.

Some of Adler’s most important achievements helped revolutionize his domain. Adler, first finding success through his two record labels, Dunhill and Ode, went on to help organize Monterey International Pop Music Festival which was held in Monterey, California on June 16-18 in 1967. His involvement in this festival marks a turning point for the industry.

The development of the Monterey Pop Festival validated rock music as an art form, forever revolutionizing the music industry. Adler’s involvement in organizing this festival contributed to the creation of a large scale, multi-day concert culture in rock music — a staple that may have never begun without Monterey Pop’s precedent. While Monterey Pop wasn’t the first music festival ever held — Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival was held just one week earlier — it was a landmark event for rock music festivals, as it inspired those like Woodstock which came after Monterey Pop. This festival was also the first multi-day concert with rock artists from around the world that provided the best accommodations to date and donated a majority of the earnings to charity. The festival is credited with the first United States performances from a number of iconic artists like Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and it marked the first large scale venue Janis Joplin ever played. Monterey Pop pushed rock music into the mainstream and made stars out of it’s up and coming performers. Adler’s (and his partners) festival was unlike any that had come before it, and changed the live music industry forever. As we can see today, music festivals annually attempt to recreate experiences similar to this monumental event.

The festival also made waves politically and socially, as it is credited with helping to catalyze the “Summer of Love” and strengthening the 1960s American counterculture movement.

Adler’s later music moves include signing Cheech and Chong, a comedy duo, to his label. Cheech and Chong became iconic for their comedy albums and their love of marijuana, not out of the ordinary for the ‘60s and ‘70s, but Adler’s support put them on the map. This creative also made The Rocky Horror Picture Show the classic it is known as today because of his hand in producing the American film. Adler’s intense use of divergent thinking pushed him to be an industry staple and a rule breaker, but his involvement in Monterey Pop changed the music domain forever which established him as a fully bonafide big-C creative.

To learn more about Adler and his involvement watch Monterey Pop, the documentary of the festival which was also produced by this big-C creative!

Works cited:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbVeU7OVo8U
https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/lou-adler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNrygTqx0FA
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064689/

YouTube Killed the TV Star

Growing up, Disney Channel and Nickelodeon were the entertainment hubs for kids and teens. Stars of television shows and movies were idolized and known as the A-listers. I remember wanting to have long blond hair and a wardrobe like Hannah Montana or marry Zac Efron. With the introduction of streaming services and the spike in cable prices, big changes occurred. People became less inclined to pay hundreds of dollars for cable when they could pay under ten dollars and re-watch all the shows they already loved. With the norm shifting to binge watching what had already been made, what was next for the entertainment industry?

Thanks to the combination of the smart phone and social media, a new era of entertainment has emerged. From Facebook, to Instagram, to Vine, and eventually to YouTube. This Social Media platform has flourished over the past five years and the Influencers that have grown with it have established themselves as the next wave of big-name stars.

The platform has grown to so many subgenres of channels that it is hard to pinpoint a single person as the influencer to start it all. But, because my sister is a vlogger and I know the most about them, I think David Dobrik is an incredibly influential person in building the industry into what it is today.

Starting on Vine he quickly gained a following for his funny six second videos. Once vine was taken off the App Store, he turned to vlogging to maintain followers. At the time vlogging was a new concept and YouTube itself wasn’t as widely used as it is today. As a former illegal immigrant and now DACA recipient, David did something that I don’t think Hollywood entertainment thought of: he gave a look into the lives of ordinary people. His channel started doing pranks and filming funny moments with his friends. They were simple, four minute and twenty second videos that made you laugh. Eventually he gained a new following and made other friends utilizing the new platform and ad money started pouring in.

What is so special about David is the way he made his name into a Brand. He became known for his outrageous thumbnail photos and video titles that draw in the people who follow him and new people as well. This concept is known as Clickbait. Once he had a big enough following, he created a clothing line where he simply copies the designs of other brands and puts either his name or the word clickbait on them. He makes small quantities of each item so that they have a high demand and sell out every time he releases. He also collaborates with growing companies. Seat Geek is his most popular sponsorship. They buy cars for his friends, sends him to events, and allows him to donate money to people in need. In return David makes a quick 30 second montage mentioning the app for his video. At this point, Seat Geek on David Dobrik are an association that anyone who follows the YouTube world recognizes.

Witnessing the success of people like David and other pioneer YouTubers sparked a second wave of influencers. People like my sister, Hannah Meloche, who decided to buy a camera and start filming her life and posting it on YouTube. She started when she was thirteen and came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, not LA. She is now eighteen and making a career out of it. She is surrounded by the same kinds of normal people from all over the world, all different backgrounds just filming their lives while millions of people, generally ages 10-20, watch video after video. This next generation of YouTubers also release merch and participate in brand sponsorships just as David does and make a real career out of what they do.

These YouTubers go from ordinary people creating videos of their everyday lives, to millionaires living in luxury. They are always recreating themselves. While they are no longer people just like us, they keep our interests by inviting us into the world of the one percent by vlogging their experiences. In the last year YouTubers like David Dobrik have given us a look into what goes into hosting an award show by vlogging their experiences. James Charles showed us the preparation for the MET Gala. Emma Chamberlain gave us an inside scoop on accompanying Louis Vuitton at Paris Fashion Week. While these people are no longer the ordinary people their followers started with, they keep their interests by giving them a backstage pass to all the cool places they go, something that hasn’t been done before. Especially not in such an informal way.

Just as the Buggles changed the way we appreciate music alongside MTV almost 40 years ago, YouTube is redefining mainstream entertainment by providing kids with relatable content and maybe even inspiration that the kid from “nowhere” Michigan can make it big.

https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/David_Dobrik
https://www.businessinsider.com/video-killed-the-radio-star-34th-anniversary-of-music-video-on-mtv-2015-7
https://giphy.com/search/david-dobrik

Isolation and Indie Ingenuity

Creativity is found in unlikely places by the creatives who uncover it. It can strike in a multitude of ways and settings. Sometimes its born from frustration and isolation. This is the case for Sigmund Freud, whose creative breakthroughs resulted from prolonged rumination. Other creatives also found their creative "eureka moments" through isolation, such as indie folk artist, Justin Vernon.

In winter of 2006, Justin Vernon, also known as Bon Iver, was lost and confused. In the midst of this difficult time, Vernon fled his home in North Carolina and isolated himself in his father's cabin in rural Wisconsin. The cabin was roughly 80 miles from his hometown, and even further from the societal constraints that Vernon was running from. It was in this remote cabin that Vernon hunted for food, drank beer, watched T.V. , yelled at bears, and experimented with his music. He left behind all of his previous songwriting methods. Vernon played with falsetto and layered recordings of his voice.Vernon also shifted focus toward melodies that would evoke a more subconscious response from the listener. This all culminated in a fragile, meaningful album that was unlike anything else people had heard before.

"For Emma, Forever Ago" was incredibly well received. It reached gold and platinum RIAA certifications. In addition, it sent ripples throughout the music field. Other artists began incorporating similar sounds into their music and working with Vernon. Artists from The Lumineers to Ed Sheeran to Kanye West all were inspired by Vernon's music. This clearly shows that Vernon's work moved and expanded his field in a massive way. This also supports the idea that, at the very least, Vernon is a pro-C creative as described by Kaufman and Beghetto.

As a result of 3 months of isolation, Justin Vernon had created what amounted to a field altering masterpiece that sent shock waves through the music industry. Years later, the effects of "For Emma, Forever Ago" are still recognized, and while Vernon may be pro-C for now, who knows what the future will say.

Scientific Superstar Elon Musk

Over the summer, I made it a goal of mine to try and finish one book. I hate reading, but one book I really found myself engrossed in was Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance. In 2019, one would be hard-pressed to find a person who does not know who Elon is. He is the owner of a plethora of companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, while also having created Paypal. While people know of him as a quirky genius billionaire, Ashlee’s book offers an interesting insight into the mind of Elon.

Gardner talks about Freud’s observation about the child at play when talking about the personality tradition. Elon, just as a playing child, “create[d] a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously” (Gardner, 24). For Elon, that was two main goals: to conserve what we have left on earth and to create a new future for us by looking at other planets. While the first one seems reasonable, the second one seems definitely lofty, given the current circumstances that we find ourselves in.

However, that has not stopped Elon at all. When Elon bought his position as chairman of Tesla, he made the company into what it is today through sheer determination. He has a history of treating his employees like garbage, and he is definitely not someone you would want to find yourself working for, unless you share the same interest and drive that he has. He worked beyond his pay grade in a sense, learning about engineering, finance, and entrepreneurship in his time prior to and on site of his job. He collected these experiences throughout the various ventures that he indulged in throughout his life, such as his education at UPenn, his internships, and his startups, which further cultivated his creativity and allowed for him to apply himself in his current ventures.

His diversity in experience coupled with his expectations for his employees gives us an insight as to what kind of work environment Elon runs. In the autobiography, Ashlee describes the SpaceX hangers and offices as open spaces with all kinds of workers surrounding Elon and giving him various inputs, trying to negotiate with Elon with budgeting, deadlines, and expectations. This culmination and open interaction among specialists reminded me of the Lehrer article, and the instance of having to break down an idea on a foundational level in order to identify the problem and offer the solution. Although Elon is a collector of these experiences, he does not match the level of expertise that his Ivy League subordinates have. The possible reason as to why Elon’s model works is because his workers break down the concepts in order for Elon to rationalize when making an appeal, and Elon offers his vision and criticism (often by firmly rejecting the appeal), while the workers potentially use the process of explanation in order to actualize the problem and fix it.

Although Elon exhibits a high level of energy and motivation to his work life, his personal life is another story. Freud talked about the redirection of “libidinal energy into ‘secondary’ pursuits” (Gardner, 24). Ashlee Vance highlights this in the autobiography, talking about Justine Musk’s battle with having to deal with both being with and not being with her husband. She would constantly find herself alone with her husband detached from their personal life, although Elon would remain controlling in any facet that he could. When their first child died as a stillborn, it was a major contributor to the end of the marriage due to their inability to cope, with Musk still remaining career oriented and refusing to deal with it. This leads into the idea of intrinsic motivation. Musk may have been feeling something akin to a “period of flow”, where his motivation to continue was so strong, that he was able to put aside something as heavy as the death of his child in order to continue moving forward (Gardner, 25). He was immersed in his field, living and breathing in his companies.

https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/

Elon Musk is an innovator (and probably every other word in the thesaurus that goes with innovator, creative, etc.) in every aspect of the word. He is truly inspiring, and his ability to not only create these highly imaginative visions, but to also be able to back up those visions makes him a creative, and in my opinion, a source of salvation from a potentially bleak future.

Supercharged

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 to a Serbian family of an orthodox priest and his uneducated wife in Smiljan, Croatia. From a young age he exhibited an eidetic memory, extraordinary talent in mathematics and poetry, and described very vivid mental imagery in approaching school work or his daydreams. Tesla is credited with developing the theory behind alternating current power grid that the world runs on today, and for the machinery that allowed it to be a revolution in efficiency at the time.

Tesla in his lab in Colorado, 1899

In 1876, a professor performed a demonstration of a motor/generator, which had a wire brush component on it called a commutator that would conduct charge from a moving axle, resulting in heavy sparking. Tesla argued with the professor, claiming that the inevitable sparking is terribly inefficient and that it was possible to design a motor without such sparking. The widely accepted view was that such a flaw was inherent to the machine, and his professor and classmates heavily resisted him. The professor went as far to dedicate a 1-hour lecture to discussing the failures of Tesla’s theory and how it contradicted the model accepted by the electrical engineering community.

Tesla never finished university after he developed an addiction to gambling and stopped attending lectures, but still mulled over the problem in his head. While on a walk with a friend he stopped abruptly, staring straight into the sky, and gestured at something unseen:

“See how smoothly it is running? Now I throw this switch — and I reverse it. See! It goes just as smoothly in the opposite direction. Watch! I stop it. I start it. There is no sparking. There is nothing on it to spark.”

He looked quite insane to his friend, but Tesla had conceived of an induction motor which defeated the assumption of his time and relied on a novel theory of electricity – alternating current. Instead of traveling in one direction, like direct current in a battery, alternating switched direction multiple times a second.

Tesla came to New York in 1884 and was employed by Thomas Edison and his international company, but this partnership quickly disintegrated since Edison was developing direct current machinery and power systems that Tesla believed were inferior to his own designs. The tension between Tesla and Edison rose once Tesla received funding from the Westinghouse electrical company, allowing him to develop myriad transformers, generators, lights, and appliances for alternating current. This precipitated into a massive struggle between Edison’s widely accepted direct current system and Tesla’s new alternating current system cities began to build electrical power grids. Edison, having already established a reliable electrical company, sought to smear Tesla by claiming his system was too dangerous for consumers and ineffective. On top of this, Tesla faced several instants of bankruptcy and the destruction of his laboratory, but through public demonstrations, like displaying his functioning motors and passing alternating current through his own body, he convinced the public and private enterprise to accept his vision. In the end alternating won out and Tesla’s alternating current system became the standard across the US and Europe, besting the more widely respected direct current systems.

When sitting down to draft this post I wondered how my laptop charged and, through a Wikipedia rabbit hole regarding the power grid and additional research, I found myself awestruck by Tesla and his creativity in such a rigid science as electrical engineering. He was wildly intelligent and could view in his mind’s eye every detail of an imaginary device and watch it function – disassembling and editing it without ever grabbing a pen. Beyond the unique cognitive process of Tesla was the duel intelligent and naïve personality he possessed, as discussed by Csikszentmihalyi in The Creative Personality. Tesla’s naivete manifested in his firm position against university staff that their fundamental understanding of power generation was flawed, even after he dropped out. Again, his naivete surfaced in contradicting the world’s largest electrical entrepreneur to completely revolutionize how people accessed power. Naivete isn’t stupidity; Tesla succeeded in challenging his contemporaries because he was highly gifted. Naivete is believe that you know or see something different from everyone else before you and embraces thinking that diverges from what you ought to accept. Not only did Tesla diverge from previous notions of how generator’s work and how electricity must behave, but – more importantly- his ideas then became accepted by his field and transformed the domain. He gave lectures at major universities once he succeeded over Edison, and now you can’t crack a physics text book without seeing alternating current mentioned. Such a characteristic of a creative personality, where immense cognitive ability intersect with naïve confidence, is responsible for Tesla not only challenging the facts of his time but rewriting them all together.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/patents
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/timeline/1856-birth-nikola-tesla

On a "loup"

"We have to find creative ways to make shit happen"

Tobi Lou, a talented Nigerian rapper, singer, and song innovator, was born on March 19, 1988, in Lagos, Nigeria then moved to Chicago to establish himself as the well-known artist he is today. His parents, Olaronke Champion and Yomi Adeyemi, enthusiastically encouraged his pursuance in the music industry. At the age of 31, he gets his hip-hop flair from classic artists such as Biggie, Kanye West, and Common, and combines this with some of the popular tracks showcased on MTV, Fresh Prince, and Cartoon Network. Lou's love for cartoons can be seen in his talented and dynamic music videos where his animated visions can run wild. Lou is a light-hearted and creative artist who provides music that expresses the "happy vibes" he wishes to spread to the world.

Upon arriving in Chicago, Tobi Lou initially attempted to follow his athletic dreams and pursued a career in professional baseball but an unfortunate series of injuries led him back home and eventually to Los Angeles, California.

Catching a break in the music industry was no easy feat, however. Lou describes an encounter with a producer that almost hindered him from striving to further develop his voice: “My first meeting, you know, just having this A&R tell me, ‘Okay, yeah, we like what you’re doing, we think you’re great. I think you could be huge. What we wanna do is turn you into the next Flo Rida,'” Lou states. “That’s literally the first thing that someone of any importance in the music industry told me after being ignored for so long. I took those words and I didn’t really know what to do.” He took this commentary and ran with it and just miles outside of Hollywood, the young Tobi Lou then focused on developing his signature upbeat music and visual content, striving to avoid more comparisons to contemporary artists ahead of him in the field like Chance The Rapper. According to Tobi Lou, this well-needed time away from home empowered him by providing the space to grow as an artist and begin to refine what he refers to as the “Tobi Lou feeling,” a sensation which he sets out in every recording session to impart on his audience.

Following Gardner's transformative process through which the locus of flow experiences a shift during an individual's immersion in a domain, the dream that Lou had once seen as being unattainable is now in his grasp and he continues to change up his style in order to keep himself and his listeners forever on their toes!

In Tobi Lou’s creative process, he never begins creating music with an ulterior vision in mind. He sits down with his pen and paper and “just starts” (without a plan in mind) to compose. Through this process, his lyrical creation come to life without being forced and leap off the page into animation ideas for his music videos. Discovering this method of creation done in stages has proven to be his holy grail. While exuding an aura of self-confidence and blessing the world with his impossibly infectiously upbeat tunes, Tobi Lou is far from failure.

Works Cited:

https://ans-wer.com/tobi-lou-age-wiki-height-net-worth-ethnicity-bio-real-name/
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tobi-lou-mn0003698067/biography
https://i.scdn.co/image/218968283835c688eaca8598d65b51619b992ea4
https://mixtapemonkey.com/artistpic/445.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CjM3NLjXnE