ability is the enemy of creativity?

it depends on the ability . its not the same as skill, is it?

I'm waiting for memes to die off, then get born.

No, it's not. When someone says, "Man, that band sucked," but they really loved the show, that means they lacked skill, but had the ability to do at least something right.

Ability allows someone to be derivative.

frontman qualitys >>>>> singing qualitys

I can play guitar. I certainly will not say that I am to guitar what Dan Perry is to singing, but I would go so far to say that I am a solid intermediate player. I have been working on basic jazz stuff lately, finger picking, and weird chords, fast runs... I am not awesome, but I am past the struggling with Nirvana songs stage. I am not trying to brag; I am just setting the stage for the point I am trying to make blah blah blah...

A friend of mine came over and we played some music tonight. I started out the session trying to show him a jazzy pop song I have been working on to see if he could do something with bass. It wasn't really working, he is more of a straight ahead rock guy who likes stuff like Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down, Red Hot Chili Peppers... not really anything that gets my mouth watering musically, if you know what I mean. So his bass style is pretty plodding rock, he is good, but he doesn’t swing or naturally stay in the pocket. He is a great Bass Player if you want to play in a riff rock band.

So I figure, why fight it, lets just write some riffs and see if we can make something work. We come up with a few ideas, but nothing good. The entire time I am thinking that we are just coming up with mediocre grunge twaddle. We figure out the parts, string them together, play through them... We had the bare bones of a song put together, a crappy song, but a song nonetheless. ;)

One of my housemates came home and sat down with us. It is funny how an outsider can make you realize that you are doing real crap music. So he sits down and we start talking. I play a hollow body guitar that feeds back when I play certain notes. I was just fooling around when with the note when the bass player asks me what was that, I just said it was feedback. While we were still talking I started letting the note feedback and then I slid it up and down the neck. Just a once a bar slide that provided a basic rhythm. The bass player started playing a melodic figure in a higher register. It really clicked and my housemate basically said to record that and he left the room.

An idea that showed up out of the blue in less than 30 seconds was better than what we had worked on all night. I stopped playing the guitar like a guitar and set it on my lap and started finger picking it like a drum while the bass player played complicated melodies over the top. What I was doing was far less technically complicated than my original idea, but it worked a lot better. It was a complete accident and I would not have consciously thought to do it that way.

Now the next step is to figure out what you want to do with this idea, and that is where the problem arises. If you don't have technical ability, you might have an idea that you want to communicate, but you cannot actually do it because you don't have the chops. I mean we could just scronk around and it would be fun, but it would still just be scronk. Or you can think about what you did, structure it to make it more listenable, and then go out and do it.

I think James Blount was OTM when he said stability is the enemy of creativity. I would say that Inflexibility is the enemy of creativity. Whenever you have training, you have certain subconscious rules that you follow whether you know it or not. Those rules do factor out certain musical outcomes that could be interesting.

The Catch 22 is that there are certain things that you cannot say if you don't have musical training. I think the benefits outweigh the penalties. There is something to be said for primitive technique, but if I choose to break the rules, I can still play within them if I choose. That is an option that people with technique don't have. I can say from first hand experience that my musical vocabulary is much larger than it used to be, and I am finding that the more I learn, the more I can learn. I can express bigger musical ideas, I can still sound like early Neubauten if I want, but I can also play something that my grandma will like.

Saying that people who technique aren't creative is like saying that people with Japanese cars are not good swimmers. It isn't an A or B situation. You either are creative or you are not. A lot of people use technique to cover their lack of creativity, but that doesn’t mean that someone who can play cannot be innovative. No matter what your skill level, you have to fight to keep ideas flowing. Creativity is a state of mind; it has nothing to do with what your fingers can do.

The other thing is that people assume that if you can play all you will want to do is play in a Joe Satriani tribute band. Just because you have it does not mean that you have to use it every second of your musical life. A lot of guys get tempted to use their chops 24/7, but you don't have to. You just have to look for what works and do it.

I like Einsturnzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle. I also like Hasil Adkins and Le Tigre, I dont consider any of them to be incredible technical musicians, but they all do their thing well. At the end of the day, the whole point of being a musician is being able to pick up an instrument and create a vibe with it. I don't think Chet Atkins is less of a musician than Kevin Sheilds because he can play, I also think that Kevin Sheilds is no less of a musician because he isn't as technical as Chet Atkins. If you can pull emotion out of an instrument you are in the club.

All of those bands had technique and musical members. It was not like Steve Jones got a guitar on Sunday afternoon, and by Wednesday evening he recorded Never Mind The Bollocks. There was about a three year woodshedding period from when the core of the Pistols form with Warwick Nightingale, to when they actually started to get public recognition. You had Glen Matlock who pretty much taught those guys who to play. Another thing, if you ever listen to the demos of the songs from Bollocks, you will know that the bands playing came a long way from when they first started. It wasn't like instruments just fell out of the sky and all of a sudden they were this fucking awesome band.

Same with Joy Division. Have you ever heard the LP they did for RCA that was never officially released until the boxed set. That is a fucking pile of horseshit compared to their later work. Also, have you ever heard the Live at Electric Circus record, they were bloody awful on that too. Joy Division were a crappy band for a long time before they got good. They practiced a whole lot and were lucky enough to have a good songwriter. Again, it wasn't like they got instruments on Sunday, and had Atmosphere in the can by Wednesday.

It was the same with TG. They were not really a technically proficient band, but Chris Carter was not a joker. CC was the musical brains behind that group. He did the electronics and he was the one that decided what gear they would all use. They definitely were primitive in the beginning, but they did eventually develop their own technique and style of music.

I know what kids who have had guitars for two weeks sound like, and it aint like Joy Division, TG, or The Pistols.

i like the bit where the pistols are demoing (roadrunner?) and jones starts to do some "i can play guitar me" bits and rotten goes "stop it! stop it! its fuckin awful!"

Yes, and I would add that a lot of people who really have a strong desire to be good muscians, but don't have enough creative ablity (or trust in their creative ability), instead of working on expanding themselves creatively (buy writeing, reading, watching movies, experimenting) they would instead solely work on technique, which with enough practice pretty much anyone can get. Creativity is impressive because of how much more interesting it is and how much more it can stimulate the listener to be creative themselves. That is why people who want to be skillful like to listen to skillfulness and people who want to be creative listen to creativness.

It is indirectly related but that is why skillfulness is associated with uncreativeness.

Tom

Alex, you are a great guy, but I am staggered that you said this:

Ability allows someone to be derivative.

That's such a "baa-baa-I-am-an-alternasheep" cookie-cutter thing to say, made even more painful by the fact that it's blatantly false for the reasons Mike stated!

What I was trying to say is that either position has risks. For the untrained, it is that they might not have the ability to fully articulate what they want to say. For the trained, it is resting/being trapped in the safety of sound technique.

Either way you are going to have to fight in order to find your personal voice. It just doesn't seem like a right or wrong issue to me. Perhaps that is because I have spent my musical life trapped between the two sides of it.

You cannot stay a primitive forever, eventually you will learn music whether you like it or not. I am 26 and I am just learning all the things I should have known at 16. The thing I can tell you from first hand experience is that I wish I would have learned all the things I know now a decade earlier. I still want to do intense primitive music; it is just that I finally know how to do it. I was anti-technique for many many years, and in hindsight, my music suffered a great deal from it.

Another thing, some people can understand how music works by listening, some cannot. I always had a good ear for a tune, and could pick out the hits, but I never knew why they were hits or how they worked. When I learned the back end of music I learned how it works. I had to get a hold of some of the basic building blocks before I could write songs. Some people are lucky like that, I wasn't. Now that I have some background, I am able to unlock all these ideas that I never could express before.

It is a bit like trying to think about philosophy, but only being able to think in monosyllabic words. All of a sudden I had all these new words to play with and I could think of things that I could not think of before. Every time I sit with my guitar I try and think of something different to do. I can do that now, if I am playing with someone and we need a basic idea so we can work, and I do that now as well. I could not do that when I was being a willful primitive. I think it has made me a great deal more creative, not less.

if you check out
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/group.php?type=researchGroup&id=16
there is some work done on this fine line between the strict structure of music and the inherent creative aspect. in particular the beat bugs.

Why thanks, Dan. I don't necessarily feel it's that black'n'white an issue, but I was providing an alternate perspective on the matter. I have just as much admiration and listening time for technically proficient bands like Rush as well as slovely non-musicians like the No Wave gang. For me, it's about individual style, not so much muso chops.

The thing is, creativity is not learned behaviour. You either have it or you don't. It's closer to passion then knowledge. It is perfectly possible to be technically brilliant, and have no creativity. Joe Satriani. It's also perfectly possible to have passion (which I will go ahead and directly equate with creativity) coming our your ears, and very little idea what to do with it. The Pistols.

But the original question was of ability vs. creativity. If you have creativity and passion, that's an ability. If you have knowledge as well, you're only a few good songs away from making a very listenable album.

That's kinda same point I was trying to make....although I've never really dug Steely Dan, personally.

Kenan, I completely disagree with you. I firmly believe that everyone is creative, some more than others, but we all have the ability. I think that creativity is more of a skill than anything else. It is something you have to practice and work at, but it does come, and the more effort you put into it, the more it comes. Read a few books about creativity, use the advice they give, your creativity will grow. Creativity is like bodybuilding, everybody has muscles, but you have to work them in order for them to get big.

At least personally, I find that the more I learn the more creative possibilities are available to me. I can make more combinations, I have more options, I can think in ways that I could not before. Knowing things like scales and weird chords has opened up a whole world of musical thought that wasn't available to me before.

I listen to so many different kinds of music for the same reason; I want all of these different ideas floating around in the back of my head. I read books and look at art for the same reason. That is why travel is so good for you. It keeps the mind nimble, and alert. The broader your horizons, the more you can express.

I find that the more I learn the more creative possibilities are available to me. I can make more combinations, I have more options, I can think in ways that I could not before. Knowing things like scales and weird chords has opened up a whole world of musical thought that wasn't available to me before.

I agree completely. I personally find that the more jazz I listen to, the more the rest of it makes sense. It's like working out, as you said. Or even better -- it's like learning a new language. The more you know, the more you learn.

there can be moments where having too many creative possibilities can grind the creative process to a hault and often sends the artist depending on comfortable structures and leaning on the virtuosity of their ability as an indicator that the art itself is good and effective.

often, plain and simple language allows for authenticity and can still allow for works of great creativity.

eno wrote a piece on this for wired magazine at one point. he complained that all this digital studio 10,000 button overload was hampering the creative process.

you have to pick your 10 variables... quality work is often the process of wisdom and honing. it's work after all! simplicity allows you to take the basic elements and transcend. this is why something like the beatles or devo or whatever rocks and goes farther than something like satriani to a greater number of folks.

of course, anyone can like satriani i suppose. and some would probably think me a moron.

it's great to have a big vocabulary. there's wonderful things to be learned. but contrary to what every high school english teacher told me about how i should use $.50 words instead of nickels, it's not the words at all, it's the wisdom contained that's important.

m.

eno wrote a piece on this for wired magazine at one point. he complained that all this digital studio 10,000 button overload was hampering the creative process.

Yes, true, but that's hardly the problem with Yes or Rush. The problem there is a bloated, faux-arty sense of self-importance, with a heavy dose of some inexplicable and dreadfully dull lack of understanding of the words "art" and "importance." "Look guys! I made a song out of the poetry of some long-dead Englishman! Isn't that neat?" Er...

(face turning red, teeth gritting)

FUCKING DIE!!!

NO, no , not at all. Good taste is the enemy of creativity. And innovation always comes from the outside.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing. Taste is the enemy of creativity. - Pablo Picasso [Source: Strength to Love, 1963.]

There. Somebody finally said it. :)

no, no, not so fast. I think there is a problem with this statement:

"[creativity] is something you have to practice and work at, but it does come, and the more effort you put into it, the more it comes."

Like what kenan said above a lot of creativity comes from passion, and having passion is not something that you can get from putting direct effort into getting. Mike may be saying that the effort used to get creativity is indirect, but I'm not sure. I think you have to go about it indirectly and the less you concern yourself with the "I must be creative, I must work at it" state of thought the more creative you can be. Creativity is not something that you should be able to completely control and learn. That takes away the randomness of it, and randomness is what supplies circumstances that people wouldn't think of themselves. (hense much of John Cage's work which is often considered very creative. He did this by ignoring his ability, or rather skill, and wrote by random methods.)

"Ability seems to be aimed at preventing accidents."

But in contrast to that, ways or tricks that help one to be creative can be learned. In many interviews of songwriters that all often say something like "if I sit down and say I'm going to write the best song ever, it does not work. I have to be doing something else and it will come to me out of nowhere." This is like Mike's story above. Creativity is sort of a way to harness these random moments/ thoughts.

That is completely counter to my personal experience. No matter what I'm doing, the more I do it, the more interested I become. The better I become at it, the more I want to do it. Etc etc etc.

People put "creativity" on this mythical, unattainable platform to avoid admitting that it's akin to "doggedness", IMO.

I do not do that at all. I will in fact say, counter to many popular opinions, that the more you know about anything, the more cabable you are at it, and the more appreciative you are of it. This includes the act of creation. This includes the act of just about everything. Maybe taking a shit would be exempt from the rule.

The same way that some people are tone deaf, some people are simply not capable of the kind of creativity required to make good music. It's that simple.

I thought he worked by specific methods, and those consist on using randomness. but he devised specific ways of working.