THE WRONG ITCH

THE BASICS OF CREATIVITY

This week a young guy called Ricky wrote to me.

He called himself “a music artist, a content creator and a design graduate.” He has 100,000 followers, three finished music videos and an album of “story-driven tracks ready for mastering”. He sent me two of them, plus a slickly designed PDF presentation about the “audio-visual world around his debut album.” He’s confident there’s an audience for his product.

I listened. I watched the videos. I read the PDF. And I wrote to him.

I told him the music was slick but unremarkable and his lyrics mundane and clichéd. The PDF was “well-presented consumer mush.” It could have been from any major corporation announcing any new product – a non-fat butter or an electric toothbrush – another consumer item we could all live happily without.

Cruel, perhaps. But he wanted an opinion and he got one.

Creativity begins with an itch. We’re all familiar with it. Even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as particularly creative. Something inside us wants to get out - a feeling that’s bothering us, which we need to make sense of. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called creativity “something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths.”

If that sounds like indigestion, he’s more or less right. Because the itch that forces creativity to the surface can feel surprisingly similar. What comes up is usually a bit of a mess - a mix of emotions in need of a framework, not yet tidy. And it’s when you start to shape it, ready to be looked at or listened to, that creativity turns into art.

The mistake Ricky made was not a lack of skill. It was a confusion of itches – he was scratching the wrong one. The itch he’d had was ambition: “I want to be a star.” But the itch that needed scratching was the creative one – the inability to leave emotions unexamined.

In the music industry there are three stages to creativity. The first is what psychologists call “divergent thinking” – when ideas start surfacing, emerging muddled and unfinished, but at least assuaging that annoying itch.

The second stage is called “convergent thinking” – when you sift through the ideas and decide which ones work, start shaping them, editing them into a song, something that can be called art.

The third stage is the commercial one. The art is refined for the market — given the write musical surround, shortened for attention spans, compressed for streaming, mastered for radio, edited for playlists. Here, sometimes conflict arises. Earlier, the edit was artistic: “What is this trying to express?” Now, it’s commercial: “Will it make someone listen?”

Ricky had mastered stage three of the process before he’d experienced stage one. What he sent me hadn’t come from a creative impulse but the desire to be a star. There was no unresolved emotion, no confusion searching for an answer, no inner self being revealed to the listener. So I continued my email to him.

“Think back,” I told him, “to the worst moment of your life. A time when something went supremely wrong. When you were emotionally collapsed. When you wanted to bang your head against a wall. When you felt ashamed – alone – unable to see a way out. Then write it down in simple, clear words. Not poetic. Or clever. Or songwriterly. Just truthful. Say what happened in ten words – say how you felt in ten more. Just ordinary language. And end with a line that suggests you might survive. Forty or fifty words – no more. And don’t avoid embarrassment. This is only for you.”

What I was proposing forces the artist to sit with discomfort before reaching for the polish. This first stage does the messy work. Then we reach stage two.

“Now sing it,” I told him. “Unaccompanied. No guitar. No piano. No vocal tricks. Whatever melody comes into your head. And record it. After that, build a musical framework around the vocal. Shape it. And if one line stands out, repeat it. Then you’ll have an honest song.”

We live in a culture that encourages the opposite. Young artists are taught branding before self-exploration. They’re afraid of embarrassment, dodge confession, and learn about algorithms. The result is the sort of thing Ricky sent me – an impeccable presentation wrapped around emotional vacancy.

Without the music industry, songs wouldn’t travel beyond the room they’re written in. Commerce isn’t the enemy of art. The refinement and polish that takes place in stage three is necessary. It’s a delicate process. Over-polishing might sand away the quirks that made the work worth sharing in the first place. But done right, it allows the artist’s original discomforting emotion to feel like part of everyone’s own experience.

Ricky’s music wanted to be liked without first risking being disliked. Instead of investigating his creative itch he’d moved straight to devising a career strategy. But creativity isn’t the desire to be a star – it’s the refusal to leave something uncomfortable inside yourself unexplored.

The exploration – out loud and in public – is what will find you an audience.

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