The most recent edition of NME (12 January) recommends eleven bands in its New Noise 2008 feature: Foals, The Rascals, The Ting Tings, Black Kids, Glasvegas, Friendly Fires, Yo Majesty, The Courteeners, MGMT, Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong and Lightspeed Champion. Foals are on the cover of the magazine and also get the largest feature, in which vocalist Yannis Philippakis expounds his uncompromising view of the price and value of creativity:
“There wasn’t that much to give up,” shrugs the singer. “I was at college and I didn’t make many friends because I was always in the practice room, writing Foals loops, trying to satisfy myself. Perhaps I have lost something that can never be regained. You know when you do mushrooms and you lose a bit of your soul forever? It’s like that with art. It’s sad in a way, but that burn, that corrosive hunger inside you, is good. It feels good. It feels like grabbing a spleen and setting it on fire. To me, all the people I admire lost something. They lost their soul, or their lives, or their marriage or destroyed something through their obsession and their passion for creating something. The more you create, the more you give away of yourself and all you are left with is a husk, with a carapace that will set itself on fire in 10 years’ time. There’s a real power in that. There are times that I’ll sit on a bed and think ‘Oh, I wish I still had my job, my friends, a girlfriend and time for myself.’ But, once you’re on this road, it takes you to one place, a place that cleanses you, but kills you. People die working in factories, I’d rather set my shell on fire.”
I love the image of the “corrosive hunger” and I can agree to a certain extent that a passionate creativity might involve compromises or sacrifices (insofar as any choice to do/be one thing implies a rejection of potential choices to do/be others). However, is creativity really a finite resource whose exhaustion only ever leads to a combustible conclusion? There might indeed be a “real power” in that romantic notion, but it sounds just a little too fatalistic to me.
Imperfection gives rise to anything I can think of, from the universe as we know it (broken symmetries allowed for nonuniform distributions of energy and, eventually, mass, thus dust clouds, comets, stars, galaxies, etc.), to, yes, people (artists and others alike). We learn by testing hypotheses and fixing mistakes in their formation, so it goes that the people who’ve learned the most are those willing to make the greatest mistakes. That’s precisely the person you’d want at the pen of any songwriting that’s to have more than ephemeral, poppy appeal. I think.
The imagery’s nice, yes; but it seems a severe recasting of truisms for self-aggrandizement. But, hey, man, it’s all about the music.
the quote strikes home for a different reason to me.
the idea of losing something in the world’s eyes (girlfriend, job, ‘a life’) in order to gain what you intuitive KNOW is important.
it’s a perennial struggle for me, if i’m honest, to stay put in the creative centre and not constantly dash out to please people, to entertain, to find ways to be liked.
i was just listening to the buddhist teacher, ajahn amaro talking about what the Buddha calls the 8 worldly winds – praise/blame, fame/disrepute, loss/gain, happiness/unhappiness – and how important it is to detach from these as they blow hot and cold around us.
the musician in his studio, the artist at his book, the monk in his robe can be exemplars of the people who ‘don’t care’ – because ultimately, ‘caring’ is a waste of time. someone’s ALWAYS going to like your stuff, someone’s ALWAYS going to hate it. it really has nothing to do with the stuff.
yet we believe the positive dyad completely – if we get praised then ‘what a wise, perceptive critic’… but we never believe the negative – if we get criticized, then: ‘what an arsehole he is’.
the way to be truely creative (not just in art but in life) is to not care but just to do.
within that set-up, creativity is probably inexhaustible.
dylan said it: as long as you’re on the way to becoming something, you’re probably going to be ok. stay in that phase. as soon as you get there, as soon as you’ve become it, then you’re dead.
Yeah, I see where you’re both coming from. I guess maybe I was being a bit narrow in my thinking and assuming that he was emphasising the mythology of those whose creativity caused them to lose everything – Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, etc. – at the expense of the considerably greater weight of numbers of those whose creativity did not.
I can accept that creativity has its price. When I look at the contrary, non-conformist characters whose music (or art in general) gets my juices flowing, there’s usually some form of loss lurking in the background, whether trivial (e.g. caring what others think) or more significant. Creative burnout to the extent described above, however, seems thankfully rare.
I’m still trying to work out why this quote struck such a chord, even as I profess to disagree with it. The “corrosive hunger” image… I suppose it’s a neat allusion both to the stomach acid problems that bug me when life gets out of balance & my positive energies become manic and also to Blake’s “infernal method” by which the truth is revealed.
Good post, Hg. corrosive hunger is a compelling and romantic notion (perhaps a little on the perpetually-adolescent side?) but I just don’t think it’s true that all the people who have chosen passionate creativity have “lost” something else that they wanted more. I’ve known plenty of artists who have lost their marriages, lost their health, whatever…but they chose to do the art to the exclusion of other things, other responsibilities, other loves. Their families often suffered. But I don’t think the art was coming out of that pain, necessarily. In fact many of these artists seemed pretty oblivious to the pain of others, and if they were suffering themselves, it was often for other reasons. Or they learn to “wear” the suffering because it makes them feel special, and the whole dynamic becomes a vicious circle they feed off.
I think we all want to feel passion, and creative passion is a wonderful thing that I certainly go for in my own life, and that I hope will help fuel me well into my old age. It took me quite a long time to separate out the path of *doing* from the goals (the *arrival*) I had been attached to, though, nearly all of which had to do with other people’s reactions. I agree with Alistair’s conclusions.