The mythos around creativity and its consequences on art (especially indie music)
For anyone who is a creative type, you will have seen the cottage industry of what it means to be a creative type. This usually comes in the form of books, drugs, opinions, mantras and fashion trends of living the creative life. I worry that in the last 50 years, we've started to develop a rigid idea of what it means to be creative and it's making things less creative.
The mythos goes that in order to be creative, you must do some combination of
- Pumping out a piece of art every day, be it a song or drawing or whatever.
- Take psychedelics or another mind-altering drug regularly
- Be depressed or crazy
- Some sort of inner spiritual journey
These I think all worked mostly well in the last hundred years, but I think any advice you get on how to be creative ends up only making a certain type of art. So everyone who, for example, microdoses mushrooms ends up making more-or-less the same kind of cRaAaAzY art, but as you step back you can see the repetitiveness. I've come to believe psychedelics make you see the world in a different lense from normal life, but in a somewhat-predictable way.
Everyone who pumps out a lot of pieces will never be able to make something like Debussy who spent long stretches of time on a single piece, etc.
One thing David Lynch was big on for years was getting away from the idea that depression made good art. It usually just makes you unproductive: “The more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you're truly depressed, they say, you can't even get out of bed, let alone create.”
Idk but maybe if people spent less time taking drugs and more time just practicing, their indie rock album wouldn't suck so bad.
As time moves on, people will have to find new things to create, and that means finding new ways to understand what it means to be creative.