What NOT to do with creativity
Charli XCX was right.
This issue of People Who Like Things was planned for next week … but then a little announcement came across my timeline this morning:
It’s 2020, so why not? Here’s next week’s newsletter, today.
I’ve been thinking a lot about art in the time of COVID-19 and how living in a world that can change so quickly in a day, in an hour, is doing unprecedented things not only to our attention span but also to the context surrounding art. People will keep fighting to create under all circumstances, but when things move this quickly, I wonder if some art almost won’t make sense if it’s not immediately released and viewed in the exact context in which it was made.
To get specific, let’s talk for just a minute about Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now album, which was written and recorded during the singer’s first six weeks of self-isolation and then immediately released for fans via Spotify. (I recommended it in a newsletter from May, which now feels like a hundred years ago.) If you’ll remember with me, her album was released on May 15, about two weeks before Black Lives Matter protests rocked the country and drew our attention to some vital, consuming issues that felt more important than our fears and worries while being inside to stop a virus from spreading.
It’s an album aptly titled how i’m feeling now, and while the songs taken on their own are delicious ear candy, it’s ultimately a record that needed to be heard and enjoyed in that exact “now” to make sense. If Charli XCX had waited the normal life cycle of an album to promote and release it, “detonate” and “anthems,” for instance, wouldn’t have packed the same punch as they did when you’ve been inside and away from the world for weeks.
I would theorize that Charli XCX’s 6-week creative cycle for this record is the latest step in technology and art intersecting to give us new music faster and faster. Beyonce famously released a hit surprise album that fans could download immediately on iTunes back in 2013. For her 2018 album Sweetener, Ariana Grande wrote “No Tears Left to Cry” as a hopeful way to process the horror of the bombing at one of her concert stops and followed up just six months later with a whole new album, thank u next, which was written and recorded while Grande was going through some very personal struggles and losses in the public eye.
Perhaps “kill your darlings” now means "release your darlings to digital streaming immediately and then get back to creating something new." When the news cycle dominates our lives and changes so quickly, you have to jump on available time and space when it's there.
For my own creative work, I’m definitely not planning to put everything I’m feeling out into the world as soon as I feel it, but I do think the evolution of the music industry is a reminder for all of us that we don’t need to sit on ideas forever. There’s always a reason to say you aren’t ready to do something and you need more time to prepare. There’s always the fear that maybe this is the one good idea you will have, and you might mess up your shot at it, so you need to be painfully careful.
I think the opposite is true. I think clutching so tightly to our creativity is strangling. I think the faster you give ideas life in some way (even if it’s just scribbling them down in a notebook), the more your creative brain will reward you with new ideas. It’s one of the paradoxes of creativity: Take each idea seriously, but also don’t take it seriously at all because you know more will come.
For people who have kids to read to and/or just appreciate the very specific art of a beautifully written middle-grade novel:
Abby McCourt loves looking at stars, memorizing facts about Star Wars movies, and dreaming up stories with Blair, her beloved older sister. But with Blair away for the summer getting treatment for an eating disorder, Abby needs a distraction and starts working to solve a local mystery with a visiting astronomer. What Happens Next by Claire Swinarski is a rich, beautifully structured book that would have enchanted me at age 12 and still holds plenty of childhood magic for adults. There’s an organic, literary quality to the writing, with characters that breathe on the page, but What Happens Next also never forgets that it’s first and foremost a summer adventure.
For anyone else always on the lookout for a witty, satisfying, unique romantic comedy:
It’s hard to believe that Palm Springs (streaming on Hulu) was made before anyone knew how perfectly it would fit life in 2020. A funny, dark, sweet, existential fairytale, Palm Springs is a Groundhog Day movie that comes in right at the moment when the guy stuck in the time loop resigns himself to this new life. I’m not sure how it manages to be both an escape from 2020 and a timely catharsis for everything we’re dealing with. Does anything really matter in our own lives when, for instance, Twitter seems to reset itself at the end of every day and nobody remembers what they said before? As Nyles (Andy Samberg) explains to Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the choices you make and the ways you hurt people do matter because you have to live with those decisions forever, even in a world where everything resets once you close your eyes. “We have to deal with the things that we do,” he says. How much better would our world be if we all took that to heart?
Love, LOVE Taylor!