Ghost and Metal Elitists: Transcending Genres

Being a Ghost fan means getting to hear the most creative and out-there ways to describe a metal band, and I've definitely got favorites. "Putting the ABBA in Black Sabbath." "Ghost is like Scooby Doo chase music but metal." So on and so forth. Considering the variety of the band's sound over the years, I don't blame people for thinking Ghost doesn't fit the mold of "satanic metal."

 

Truthfully, that's the greatest thing about them. With Ghost songs, the average listener can easily tell that metal is the foundation of their songs, but beyond that? Anything goes.

Tobias Forge, the band's frontman, has never backed down from musical diversity. In an article by The Rolling Stone, Forge described "Stand by Him," from Ghost's first album Opus Eponymous, as "a song that combined old new wave with adult-orientated rock and occultism and a little bit of West End." In general, Forge's songwriting process tends to start with anything that appeals to him. In an interview with The Lounge, he said his writing "can start with basically anything, from a drumbeat or a rhythm to a vocal line to just a melody to a riff." One of my favorite examples of this sort of spontaneity and musical diversity comes from their IMPERA album, a song called "Twenties." This song describes the aggressiveness of empires, how they disguise destructive greed and hatred through promises of prosperity. Of course, a song with such an aggressive theme needs the perfect aggressive instrumental behind it. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Forge described how he happened to stumble upon a Swedish music program with a Brazilian rapper performing in a favela:

 

It was like one of the most musically aggressive things I've ever seen, and I mean, I come from death metal, black metal…which is obviously sort of thriving on the idea of being violent and dangerous and all that…Immediately when I heard that it was like - of course I had heard the [reggaeton] rhythm before - but it was like, 'that sounds like a fun way to write an aggressive song that I have never really heard.'

In The Creative Act, A Way of Being, Rick Rubin notes that these sorts of creative experiences can only happen when The Source (of creativity) is tuned into through a kind of detached awareness. When we impose a lifetime's worth of societally crafted expectations on the world around us, we end up filtering out so much that we are left with very little with which to be creatively inspired. When we practice widening our awareness and letting more filter through, we open ourselves up to the creative energy that flows through everything. As Rick Rubin puts it, "Most of what we see in the world holds the potential to inspire astonishment if looked at from a less jaded perspective."

In Ghost's most recent album, Skeletá, the music continues to flourish beyond the boundaries of traditional metal, and it's probably their most significant departure from that framework yet. Every Ghost album has a sort of theme that can be attributed to it: IMPERA is about the rise and fall of empires, Prequelle deals with death and survival, and so on. Overall, pretty dark themes. With the hostility of IMPERA in particular, I, along with other Ghost fans, was expecting a turn towards a traditional, heavy sound. Skeletá is absolutely not that. Forge did not want to write an "Impera Two," as he puts it in The Rolling Stone article. He wanted "more of an introspective, healing record, a new record that shone a light on the innards of my mind."

Skeletá has a much brighter, optimistic sound because it is about humanity. Accordingly, Forge widened his awareness to the possibility of blending other genres, specifically pop, into Ghost's more rock-focused sound. As he told The Rolling Stone, "In the pop world, it’s different because there are no hard rules. The ensemble in pop doesn’t have to be drums, bass and two guitars." As surprising as this sound was to me when Skeletá was released, I grew to love the unpredictability from track to track. Furthermore, it made me appreciate the heavier songs that were on this album, such as "Lachryma," because each song was a new experience rather than the album as a whole.

As Rick Rubin puts it, "Art is confrontation." With Ghost, there is plenty of confrontation and disagreements to be found. One day, they'll have stadiums screaming about the rise of Satan with "Year Zero," and the next they'll perform "Mary on a Cross" (a TikTok favorite) under dazzling, colorful lights. Ghost's identity, in my opinion, is based on their shifting identity, from Papa to Papa, album to album, and genre to genre. At its core, though, Ghost is a satanic metal band, and that label can be more of a blessing than a curse. With genres, Rick Rubin notes that "as soon as you use a label to describe what you're working one, there's a temptation to conform to its rules." Forge, as well as any Ghost fan with eyes or ears, is well aware of the metal elitists who rave about Ghost's nonconformity. In one particularly funny moment with Metal Hammer, Forge talked about how the song "De Profundis Borealis" was intended to sound like a black metal song, before he quickly cuts himself off and says, "I know it’s not a black metal song, so you don’t have to fucking get going" (emphasis added).

At the end of the day, I'm still going to tell people that Ghost is a satanic metal band if they ask what genre they fall under. Even when they stray from that label, I don't care, because as Rick Rubin put it, "the most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them."

Tobias Forge's Interview with The Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.co.uk/music/news/ghost-interview-tobias-forge-skeleta-48893/

Tobias Forge's Interview with The Lounge: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/tobias_forge_details_ghost_songwriting_process_explains_how_early_pink_floyd_really_fucked_up_his_music_writing.html

Tobias Forge for Metal Hammer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIXHSDrrEBU

Tobias Forge for Apple Music (with Zane Lowe): https://youtu.be/pkaovFj710o?si=837vhPU_wsHplpL9

Jane Goodall: The Amazing Discovery

 

    Dr. Jane Goodall, also known as Dr. Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, is a world-renowned primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist who was born in Bournemouth, England, on April 3, 1934. As a child, she loved the outdoors and animals. Jane was unable to afford college, so she attended secretarial school in South Kensington. Though Jane had no college degree or scientific training, she still managed to travel to Africa. In March 1957, Jane boarded the Kenya Castle ship to visit friends and family. While visiting, Jane met famous paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, who offered Jane a job at the local natural history museum. Jane worked at the museum for some time before Leakey sent her to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees on July 14, 1960. While studying at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, now known as the Gombe Stream National Park, Jane made a discovery that challenged the normal scientific ideas. She witnessed a chimpanzee, whom she named David Greybeard, using tools. She observed the chimpanzee sticking blades of stiff grass into termite holes to fish out termites. Excited about her groundbreaking observation, Jane told Dr. Leakey, to which he responded, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans”. Jane stayed in Gombe until 1975, where her research changed the view that humans were the only species capable of tool use, emotions, and complex social structures. Jane’s creative product is not only the groundbreaking research of chimpanzees, but also reshaping primatology and introducing a new way of seeing primates.

    

    We can see the creative process in Jane Goodall’s discovery through the Geneplore Model. In the generative phase, we see Jane spending months observing chimpanzee behavior, naming individuals, and noting differences. She allowed herself to consider the possibility that chimpanzees might be more creative and inventive than initially expected. In the exploratory phase, Jane repeatedly made observations by documenting repeated instances of termite fishing and behaviors among chimpanzees, refining her observations, and eventually publishing her research, which challenged the normality in the scientific community. Jane’s methodology reflects the creative process as she generated striking new ideas from observation, exploration, refinement, and then communicated them. 

    Jane’s findings relate to my focus book, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, by Agustín Fuentes. As Agustín argues, humans’ creativity emerged from earlier primate behaviors, such as tool use, social interaction, and environmental adaptation. Specifically, Agustín said, “The primate spark of creativity emerges from the way that primates have made social lives and social innovation central in how they deal with the pressures of the environment…in the use of objects as tools and, more important, in the creation of novel social behaviors.” (Fuentes 22). Agustín points out that primates exhibit sparks of creativity through tool use, problem-solving, and social learning. Jane’s findings reflect Agustín’s ideas through her observations of chimpanzees in Gombe using twigs to “fish” for termites. She viewed that primates could solve problems and even pass techniques to others.  Her work connects modern primate creativity to the emergence of human creativity. 

    

    Jane Goodall became increasingly active in conservation and activism after witnessing widespread deforestation in Africa and worldwide. She continues to advocate for the protection of chimpanzees and habitats through the Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977.

Appleton, Sarah. “Jane Goodall.” National Geographic | Education, education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/jane-goodall/. Accessed 28 Sept. 2025. 

Pruitt, Sarah. “How Jane Goodall Changed How WE Study Animals.” History.Com, A&E Television Networks, 30 July 2025, https://www.history.com/articles/jane-goodall-research. 

Fakemink & Islam: music as an expresser of religious tension & internal conflict

 

The city of London needs saving, and rapper, Fakemink (aka "London's Savior"), stands at the forefront of the UK underground rap and hip-hop scene. He aims to innovate, deepen, and revive traditional UK rap/hip-hop with his mellowed down version of jerk rap and spiritual lyricism. His song titled ‘Music and Me’ exemplifies this by exploring his struggle with Islam and his career. This song shows the tension and disagreements between his Muslim faith and artistic expression. Over ambient beats, the lyrics are about guilt of crossing moral lines for his earthly desire to create music.

In Islam, there is a common saying, “deen over duyna”, which translates to “faith over the temporal world”. A fundamental aspect of Islam is to prioritize and choose devotion to God over worldly distractions and desires such as fame and money. The inherent nature of Fakemink’s career and passion for spreading music goes against these Islamic values. The internal battle of choosing between his love for god and passion for rapping fuels his creativity. 

Fakemink's music is a battleground for belief, loss, and identity.

Nick Cave’s book, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, focuses on how Cave’s loss of his son influenced his turning toward Christian imagery in his music. Cave uses faith not as certainty, but as a language to wrangle with grief and spark creation. He states, “that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity”. His outlook on his creativity suggests that when detrimental things happen in life, the need for spiritual consolation can be immense. "I had a major taste for havoc… I might wake up in my hotel room surrounded by the remnants of a heavy night on the road, empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, maybe a stranger in my bed, but also an open copy of Gideon's Bible with passages underlined”. Despite his sins, struggles, and dark state of mind, Cave still reached for god, even if it was just through the presence of the Bible besides his bed. This reach was more for survival rather than about piety.

 For Cave, god was a way to put together puzzle pieces of meaning in the midst of chaos. Spirituality is like a flicker of grace in self-destruction. His belief in religion did not erase the havoc, but coexisted with it, giving inspiration to the contradictions that fueled his art.

Both Fakemink and Nick Cave use music as a way of negotiating with something greater than themselves like pain, belief, and God. The use of music as the intersection between difficult topics can be seen not just as self-expression, but also as a coping mechanism. They demonstrate that even in moments of despair, the impulse toward god persists. Not always as moral clarity but as a desperate, creative grasp at hope, freedom, and forgiveness.

Yoko Ono: Pursuing Peace Through Hardship

 

    Yoko Ono is a Japanese artist and musician who rose to fame for her craft in the 1960s, particularly in the realms of conceptual and performance art. Ono is most famous today for marrying and being a musical partner with John Lennon from The Beatles, but she was a trailblazer in the avant-garde scene before they ever met. 

    Ono was one of the first women to be admitted into the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. After she moved to New York with her family in 1956, she turned her Manhattan loft into a series of performance events where she presented conceptual art that often required interactive participation from the viewers. Her piece Painting to be Stepped On (1960) was a canvas on which the audience was allowed to walk on. Her other well-known performance piece is Cut Piece (1964), where she sat passively while the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her dress. This work was attributed to feminist art with its themes of sexual violence. 

    She continued to make art and films before she met John Lennon in 1966 at an exhibit showing her work in London. By 1968, the two began collaborating on experimental films and recordings, thus resulting in their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. In 1969, Ono and Lennon married. During their honeymoon, they had a week-long "bed-in" in which they made their hotel room open to the press in an effort to promote world peace, especially the war in Vietnam. Once The Beatles disbanded (1970), Ono was vilified and blamed as the reason for their split. Ono didn't let this kill her creative thunder; she continued to create and made the Plastic Ono Band and many popular songs. 

    On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was killed in front of his and Yoko Ono's apartment building. Ono was devastated and feared for her and her son's safety, but she refused to let this violence stop her voice. She released "Walking on Thin Ice" and the album Season of Glass, whose artwork is a pair of Lennon's glasses splattered with blood and a half-full glass. She has also worked on different memorials for John Lennon and oversaw the release of some of his unpublished works.

     Ono used art as a way for not just her but for the world to process the death of her husband. She took her grief and made it communal to help peace prevail. This is a common experience for many artists who grieve. Musician Nick Cave lost his son, but he created an album called Skeleton Tree after the event. Cave used his album as a place for his son's spirit to live, which he describes in his book with Sean O'Hagan. Both artist refuse to sentimentalize loss; they show how hard the grieving process is through their art. Ono turned her mourning into action by participating in peace activism, public installations, and art.

The Imagine Peace Tower is a memorial to John Lennon from Yoko Ono

Bobby McFerrin, Musical Scientist

Perhaps best known for his happy-go-lucky anthem Don't Worry, Be Happy, Bobby McFerrin is a world renowned vocalist and creative whose novel musical inventions branch beyond the confines of genre. McFerrin has collaborated with artists from all corners of the musical world, from the classical great Yo-Yo Ma to jazz aficionados such as Chick Corea. I personally find his solo compositions to be his most engaging, with many of them being completely acapella, McFerrin filling in as the roles of bass, percussion and melody all on top of one another.

The "product" from him that I find to be his most creative is this clip from the World Science Festival, in which McFerrin uses his vocal skills and musical intuition to lead the (assumedly un-musical) audience in a piece based on the pentatonic scale. McFerrin uses intentional movements and an in-depth knowledge of pentatonic chord progressions to demonstrate the universal nature of music. His performance is playful and upbeat, and contains bits of humor, virtuostic improvisation from the maestro himself, as well as an insightful note that "regardless of where I am, anywhere, every audience gets that". McFerrin has a knowledge of the way music is engrained within us, and he uses his skills to display that in a playfully creative way.

One of the aspects of Bobby McFerrin's life that seems to mirror The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is the trajectory of his career in similarity to that of a scientist. Before McFerrin made waves across the country, he honed his craft for many years, not releasing his debut album until he was 31. This reminded me, humorously, of the way a scientist like Jennifer Doudna spends years working in a lab until she and her team are fully ready to publish the results. 

Bobby McFerrin's music and creations in general are always filled with humor and energy, and I'd highly encourage anyone reading to give a listen to his compositions and arrangements.

Lindsey Stirling and Combining forms of Art

    In the book The Creative Act, it demonstrates how there is exploration within oneself, and art shows it. That can be shown by the artist Lindsey Stirling. She is a musician, dancer and songwriter. Within that she started the art of playing the violin first when she was five years old. Then later in her life she became very famous for playing the violin while dancing to the songs that she plays. A quote in the book states, “Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us” (Rubin, 12). With Lindsey Stirling, she took the art of dance and playing an instrument to a new level. Doing that can show other artists that you can combine different parts of art that you like and create a new thing. The way that her creative processing is through arranging the music and choreographing the dances, creating the costumes and then telling other people her vision to get the end product that she gets in music videos or on stage. Everything is really thought out for her and taken into consideration.

     Another quote from the book is about awareness stating, “In most of our daily activities we choose the agenda and develop a strategy to achieve the goal at hand. We create the program” (Rubin, 21). This elaborates more on what Lindsey Stirling is doing within her work. She is building strategies to put herself out there and be as creative as she can be. That is how she creates what is being filmed and what is being presented at concerts. With that, she uses ways of getting others to be creative with the way that she performs and executes her vision. She tells a story with emotions and images and creates a space where you can see and feel the art that she is presenting. From the book, the author Rubin writes, “Even if the world outside were to remain static, the information we took in would be ever-changing. And so too would the work we bring forth” (Rubin, 56). This shows that Linsdey Stirling is allowing herself to move freely through the way that she demonstrates her creativeness. It also contributes to Linsdey Stirling adding different things to her music and dances to make them go together. Through all this, Linsdey Stirling has been a really creative person in the different pieces of art that she does.

Here is a link to a piece of her art:
Lindsey Stirling - Carol of the Bells (Official Music Video)

Grant Achatz and Delicious Chemistry

Grant Achatz has made headlines for his outstanding culinary skill, three Michelin stars, heartbreaking diagnosis with tongue cancer, and unlikely recovery of his sense of taste. He has famously taken an inventive and avante guarde approach to flavor and menu design, which he learned during his time at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and training with Ferran Adrià’s at El Bulli in Spain. Achatz, a Chicago local, opened the restaurant Alinea with co-founder Nick Kokonas in 2005, where he offers guests a range of multi-sensory and experimental dishes. Alinea is not just food, it is an experiment, which Aschatz constantly reinvents and incorporates elements of art, theater, and psychology for an unforgettable dining experience. Aschatz's other two restaurants and cocktail bar have found similar commercial success for taking this approach and all four venues are well known for playful and surprising serving techniques. 

To make this innovation and constant reinvention possible, Aschatz became a chemist. After all, there are only so many ways one can plate and decorate their food. The chef has made a career beyond aesthetics and instead applies transformative science-driven methods through the art of molecular gastronomy. He investigates ingredients' physical and chemical properties. Similar to a traditionally trained chemist, his research utilizes methodological experimentation. 

Some standout creations include a helium filled edible balloon, which Achatz produced by cooking an isomalt mixture, a natural sugar substitute made from pure beet sugar, in stages to achieve an elastic and edible skin, which he fills with helium. 

Achatz' experimentation with unconventional textures has also yielded a plethora of unique menu items including liquid olives and parmesan air. The first comes from the process of spherification, in which olive juice is combined with sodium alginate and put into a calcium chloride bath to create a gel skin around the liquid olive flavoring. Foodies can experience a similar and far less expensive textural sensation at perhaps any boba tea shop, thought Achatz' has a more unique flavor profile. 

Parmesan air provides Alinea' customers with flavor but no texture. Achatz this created with a specialized foaming canister (iSi siphon) charged with nitrous oxide, which traps the flavored liquid base in air and creates a disappearing foam leaving an invisible flavored residue. 

Aschatz's scientific technique parallels Jennifer Doudna's approach to understanding the shape of RNA. Similar to Aschatz breaking down ingredients to understand their individual parts, Doudna focused on understanding each component of RNA and the function of its building blocks. She aimed to "fully discern [RNA's] structure, atom by atom" (Isaacson, p. 48). 

Both Aschatz and Doudna embrace the tedious complexity of their fields that others find intimidating. Doudna's motto, "never do something a thousand other people are doing" (p. 46) brought her to RNA research because it was, according to Doudna's graduate mentor at Harvard Jack Szostak, "'viewed as so difficult it was maybe impossible to figure out'" (p. 48). Achatz welcomes difficulty at Alinea, his renowned three Michelin star restaurant, by reinventing the menu every four months. The restaurants namesake, the ¶ symbol, is defined as "the beginning of a new train of thought." Like Doudna, Achatz considers his "creativity [to be] primarily the result of hard work and study" (Achatz) and less some abstract, divine gift. Both creatives consider their processes to be mentally stimulating and enjoy finding ways to push themselves.