You Are Not Alone
Much of building your own creative identity is understanding yourself as part of a collaborative environment. You need counselors, foils, and competitors. You need high-level models for inspiration and flatfoots to tell you the truth. You breathe in all kinds of air so you’re never in a vacuum. Prince gets credit as a singular genius, and he obviously was, but if you study him with any level of specificity you see how important all of his creative partnerships have been. Just because he’s the one who put them into place, the one with the will to make calls and keep people practicing for endless hours, doesn’t mean that his creative relationships weren’t a vital part of who he became as an artist. Other people are answers to questions, and the biggest challenge is thinking of what question they’re answering. It’s like Johnny Carson’s old Carnac routine, where he would read the answer and then supply the question. Maybe the singer you know is useful for teaching you about harmonies, but maybe she’s actually better for teaching you about how to bounce back from disappointment. Maybe the comedian you know is most useful for talking about geometry. Each creative person has already been through the process of curation. They have already sorted their ideas and selected which ones they’re going to show you. Dig for the ones that are underneath the surface, because they may be of great service to you. The majority of my creative life has been spent working with others—in my band, on TV shows, scoring movies.
As I mentioned in previous chapters, when I first met Tariq Trotter, my partner in the Roots, we were high school students together. I knew Tariq a little bit, because on one of my first days, I was down in the office taking care of some paperwork and he was called in to answer charges regarding some funny business with a girl in the bathroom. You didn’t do that unless you were the man. He was also a gifted artist and, as it turned out, a fantastic MC. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In those days, hip-hop was in its infancy, and it was about to be kicked into adolescence by a blind man. This brings us to what I have called “the single most influential moment in the history of hip-hop.” Guess what it is for a little bit. No. No. No. Wrong, but close. It’s The Cosby Show, and specifically that famous episode where Theo and Denise are out driving and they get sideswiped by Stevie Wonder’s driver. That kind of thing mostly only happens in sitcoms. Another thing that only happens in sitcoms is that when the driver of a world-famous musical genius sideswipes you, that driver invites you and your entire family down to the studio to see his recording session. The Huxtables don’t decline the invitation. Who would? So there they were, on the other side of the glass, watching Stevie sing. Cliff pretended not to be impressed, but he was impressed. Claire swooned. The kids were beside themselves. And then Stevie showed them a new toy. At one point, Theo had said, “jammin’ on the one”—I don’t even remember now why he said it—and a few minutes later Stevie picked up that sample and inserted it into a song.
When Stevie put Theo’s voice down into the sample bed, hip-hop changed forever. There were so many of us out there, so many fledgling rappers and producers who saw that episode and had the tops of their heads lifted. I had known about DJs and turntables for years. But I had never seen anything like what Stevie was doing with Theo’s voice. It remade hip-hop production right there, on the spot. And I’m not the only one. J Dilla had the same experience, when he was still the young James Dewitt Yancey in Detroit. Just Blaze had the same experience when he was still Justin Smith in Paterson, New Jersey. Whatever wheels were in our heads started turning.
Santa was also onto it. Right around that time, Casio put that technology in homes with its first sampling keyboard, the SK-1. Do you remember the commercial? It had a white kid noodling on his keyboard and then putting his dog, Rufus, into the song. Rufus barks. The keyboard barks. I don’t know if that commercial was some coded reference to Rufus Thomas (the music the kid plays sounds sort of Memphis–inflected, and Thomas’s big hit was “Walkin’ the Dog”), but I wasn’t doing a deep read of the commercial. I was doing a deep desire of the keyboard. And it came true. I got that thing for Christmas. I used it to take samples of voices, but pretty soon I was also sampling drumbeats. That was the beginning of a new beginning, and a quantum leap forward for my understanding of hip-hop production, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known the phrase “quantum leap” yet, since that show was still a few years away.
That’s one model of collaboration; put everyone in one place and see what happens.
Tariq, by this point, was a talented visual artist. He mainly made molds of African medallions. But his creativity had morphed into something verbal as well. He wasn’t writing rhymes yet, but he was sitting at one central table in the cafeteria and showing off his skills. By “skills,” I mean mostly that he was playing the dozens. Kids would come by and say something to him, causal-like, but with a little edge. You know: the way kids hang out. Maybe they’d take a casual shot at his shoes or his hair. Tariq would look at them, laser-eyed, and then fire back a devastating joke or comment. If a kid was growing too fast and his pants were moving up on his ankles, Tariq would make a comment about a levee, because when levees broke there were floods. If a kid had thick glasses, he would ask them about a nebula, because they were far away, and you needed powerful lenses to see them. These thoughts grew into rhymes. I remember one kid whose sneaker sole flapped around loosely. Tariq told the kid that his shoes were talking, and then, before you knew it, the talking-shoes insult became an image—tongue and all—that he built into a couplet. I don’t remember it exactly. His insults were always two steps down the line, which is to say that they were themselves a great example of creativity.
Before I mastered the SK-1, I was just one of the kids in the circle around Tariq, marveling at his abilities. There’s a clip online where the whole early Roots group is in an alley, and we’re lobbing topics at ’Riq, and he’s firing them right back at us with the most brilliant lyrics. He could handle any suggestion, and did. (He could rap about a table or a haircut or aeronautics. What mattered most wasn’t the topic, but the fact that he could take any topic. This is his version of improv comedy’s yes-and imperative, and it’s nearly perfect proof of his creativity.) Once I had my instrument, though, I was more than an onlooker. I was the other half of something. As amazed as I was by his verbal athletics, he was equally amazed by what I could do with that little keyboard. Kids were already putting some kind of musical backing to Tariq’s performances. He would chant his insults, and kids would tap out a James Brown beat on the table. But once I figured that out, I could just put that beat into the SK-1 and program it to back him. He noticed, and I noticed that he noticed, and a bond began to form. It was a bond of mutual respect but also mutual need. He saw that his performances were greatly improved by backing percussion, and I saw how my growing sampler skills could turn into something that had real social and cultural power.
We worked out a routine for our collaboration. He would come to lunch and start razzing kids, and at some point he’d get into a rhythm. That rhythm would suggest, either to him or to me, a sample. I remember one week near the beginning of senior year, Tariq was building an insult that was drawing on everything in the news: maybe Baby Jessica, who had fallen down a well in Texas; maybe Robert Bork; maybe Iran-Contra. His dexterity was a rarity, as they say. At some point, one of us started beatboxing Audio Two’s “Top Billin’,” which was a song on everyone’s mind back then. I suddenly had a purpose. I left the cafeteria, which was on the eighth floor, and ran all the way to the basement, to the recording studio, to drum the beat of “Top Billin’” into the SK-1. Then I hustled back up to the cafeteria so that Tariq could perform over it. That day, the collaboration didn’t work. He hadn’t been able to fit his rhymes around “Top Billin’.” He had something else in mind, Busy Bee’s “Suicide,” but we were out of time. The next day, though, he tipped me off earlier, to Big Daddy Kane’s “Wrath of Kane,” and I went down to the studio and brought it back.
This was a collaboration, a partnership in the truest sense. We each had our roles. We negotiated briefly, but most of the energy in the process was spent participating. He waited eagerly for my beat so that he could get going with his lyrics. I excitedly assembled my beat because I couldn’t wait to hear it with his lyrics. Collaborations work best this way, when there’s a mutual desire to see what the other side adds. You know that what you’re making on your own has value, but the sum is more than the parts, and every part knows it.
Community Activism
That’s the traditional definition of collaboration, right? Two creative forces coming to a summit meeting where each benefits the other. And that’s how Tariq and I worked for those first years. We added in musicians. They contributed, of course. We added in mentors like Richard Nichols. But the core remained that formative one: his words, my beats. Each creative endeavor develops its own unique DNA, and this was ours.
As we embarked on our career as a hip-hop band, the idea of collaboration broadened. Our second album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, was mostly an internal affair: we brought in people like Dice Raw and Ursula Rucker along with M-Base artists Cassandra Wilson, Steve Coleman, and Greg Osby, but we operated within the confines of the group. For Illadelph Halflife, though, our scope broadened. From the beginning, we had modeled ourselves on the Native Tongues collective, the corner of the hip-hop world that included A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Jungle Brothers. We imagined that we were at the center of a similar world, one called Foreign Objects. Very early on, we tried to set up touring packages that included a number of different groups underneath the Foreign Objects umbrella. But as it turned out, the Roots were the only group in that set that lasted. Still, as we came through Illadelph Halflife, we were aware that we all had connections to different parts of the music world, and we tried to unite them all under the banner of the record. That album includes contributions from Bahamadia, from Raphael Saadiq, from D’Angelo, from Q-Tip, from Common, from Steve Coleman, from Joshua Redman, from Cassandra Wilson. People took verses or sang hooks or performed featured solos. But collaboration wasn’t a plan that we drew up and executed. It was just an organic fact, if not exactly an Organix one. We knew musicians. They knew us. We made records. They did, too.
For the album after that, though, the idea of collaboration shifted into overdrive. Illadelph Halflife sold decently well, around three hundred thousand copies (eventually it went gold.) In today’s numbers, that’s like a billion. But to a record company at the time, it was a holding-pattern number. You might not kick a group to the curb for selling three hundred thousand, but you wouldn’t buy them a mansion and a fleet of luxury automobiles, either. It was just big enough to let the label know that they were on to something. Also, we had been moved within the Geffen family to the MCA label, part of an endless series of label shenanigans. At that time, Rich, our manager, decided that we needed to go to the record company and make some demands about our future. They were modest demands, but they were unconventional. I had moved to a house on St. Albans in South Philadelphia. Rich told the label that they had to start paying for jam sessions at that house, and that the music created there would form the basis for the new album. Paying for jam sessions meant more than just running equipment: they sprang for transportation in the form of two vans and also for a chef to cook for whoever dropped by. All the factors lined up like a powerful electromagnet, and soon enough we were attracting all the local talent. The Roots were there, of course, but also a bunch of other people at the start of their careers. There was Jill Scott, who was working at a clothing store but knew that she wanted to devote more attention to singing. There was Jamal, who was working as a pizza-delivery guy but was writing and playing songs; he turned out to be Musiq Soulchild. Bilal was there, and India.Arie, and Eve, and Common. It was like a salon. I remember more than once coming home to find a huge jam session already in progress. And not just in progress—getting out of control, with too many people and too much noise. I was the buzzkill. I would run to my bedroom, grab the telephone (it was one with a cord—this was back in the twentieth century), and call the police to report a disturbance. I narced out the noisemakers in my own house. But I saw how amazingly it created a space where people could work together, where ideas took hold, where they bounced off one brain and into another brain. Early on in the book I talked about cognitive disinhibition, and how a Harvard psychologist developed a theory that creative people filter the world around them differently, or rather less. They see too much. It gets in their head. They then have no choice but to make things. That’s what St. Albans was like all the time back then. That pebble went into the pond and rippled. What was happening at St. Albans expanded into two nightclubs: the Five Spot in Philly and the Wetlands in New York. That part of the scene focused largely on the Roots and hip-hop, and not only launched all those careers, but brought us back into contact with Scott Storch. And when that version of the movement went from cocoon to butterfly around 1999—the Roots released Things Fall Apart, went platinum, and hit the road, and other artists in that circle emerged—the collective morphed into the Black Lily movement, which kept things going when we were touring. Black Lily focused primarily on female or female-centric artists like Jazzyfatnastees, Jaguar Wright, and Jill Scott. Floetry arrived stateside from London to become part of the collective. Les Nubians came from Paris. Kindred the Family Soul led the crest of the second wave of acts. The eight-year-old Jazmine Sullivan slept backstage for most of the evening and then came onto the stage to perform. At the same time James Poyser and I, working mainly with Erykah Badu (and then later with D’Angelo and Common) at Electric Lady studios in New York rather than in the nightclubs, evolved yet another version of this musical collective, which we called the Soulquarians. People like Bilal and Nikka Costa came around. Others came back around. There was an aftereffect that has resounded in the music world in the years since, as well: the musicians who worked steadily through that period as teens—Adam Blackstone, Omar Edwards, and others—have become the backbone for major stars like Rihanna, Jay-Z, Adele, and The Weeknd. And then there are the technical support personnel, the lighting directors and the soundmen and the tour managers—all in all, there are probably a hundred careers that grew out of that fertile soil.
That’s one model of collaboration: put everyone in one place and see what happens. There are obviously tons of examples throughout history that have worked this way. But there are other models, too, that have to do with learning how to reach out, how to stretch your arms, how to close your hands around what you find when they’re outstretched, and how to bring it back into your world. In the spring of 2017, I conducted a series of conversations at Pratt Institute with other creative artists, and for one of those I spoke to the film director Ava DuVernay. She spoke about the importance of using her films to communicate a personal message, but she also spoke about the strategy of creating a distribution collective to ensure that work made by filmmakers of color reaches its audience. Her organization, ARRAY (it used to be called AFFRM), puts movies in theaters, and also on Netflix. ARRAY has a collective goal, and it recognizes that there is strength in numbers.
Import Importance
The album we put out right around the time of Voodoo, Things Fall Apart, was our most acclaimed album and our bestselling one, too. It was a watershed moment for the group. When it came time to record a follow-up, I wanted to be aggressive about pushing the envelope artistically. Because of Things Fall Apart, most people saw us within the context of neo-soul. I didn’t want to repeat that. I wanted to show that we were much more than that, that we could pick up the threads of our past releases (we had flirted with acid jazz on Do You Want More?!!!??! in 1994 and Wu-Tang-ish dense hip-hop on Illadelph Halflife in 1996) but also weave a new tapestry. There is also a psychological dimension to the departure, a fear of following up or a desire to step away from the work you’ve already made before the audience makes that choice for you. That’s what motivated albums like Sgt. Pepper’s or Paul’s Boutique. And that’s what was motivating us.
While we were on the road, dream hampton, a poet and friend of the band, gave me a CD to listen to by a new artist. It was a demo, kind of rough and blunt, but I liked it, especially two songs called “Bitch I’m Broke” and “Boy Life in America,” which were kind of punk soul, with very blunt lyrics. When dream went into the gas station, I snuck a look at the CD case and saw it was a guy named Cody ChesnuTT, styled that way, with the two capital T’s at the end. That was all. Just a name. At that time, there was no social media yet, not really, so the whole idea of expanding your network, or using your network to teach you about how it might expand itself, was foreign. I had started an online community called Okayplayer, a mix between a message board and a chat room, and I went on and asked if anyone knew about this Cody ChesnuTT. Most people didn’t.
A few days later, I went to MCA, our label, and one of the guys working there mentioned my Okayplayer post to me. He hadn’t seen it, but one of his interns had. (That’s another thing about networks—they have to work across levels. If I had been networking only with artists my age, with similar experience and similar tastes, I would never have learned anything.) The guy told me that he wasn’t a huge fan of the record, but that he could find me a disc if I wanted. He went into a big bin that was like a CD graveyard and came up with a few copies of the CD. At that point, I was still in the frame of mind of seeing other people as a collaborative resource. The first thing I thought of when I encountered a new talent wasn’t what they reminded me of, or how far they might go, but whether or not the Roots could work with them in a way that made sense. I listened to the Cody ChesnuTT album with that in my head, and the song that jumped out at me was “The Seed.” It wasn’t the most fully realized song, but it was sticky, like grip tape, with a good groove and plenty of room to grow into a hip-hop version. Collaboration isn’t about what’s there so much as what’s not there. It’s the jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing and a pile of bright pieces nearby. Tariq agreed, and after a few tries he had new lyrics for it. We set up a session with Cody. The recording session was both a perfect example of the promise of collaboration and a perfect example of the problems of collaboration. In those days, even more than now, I liked to record at night. Cody was supposed to land from California in the early evening and come right over. But someone (maybe it was Rich) wanted us to work earlier in the night rather than subject a new collaborator to my crazy schedule. That would have been fine, except that it conflicted with another kind of collaboration—I had a date to go see a movie. I complained, and Rich said it was fine, that they would just record without me, which he knew I wouldn’t accept. I pushed my date a little later, told her that I’d meet her at 8:15, and got ready for an efficient recording session. It wasn’t always the way, but this time it had to be the way. Cody got to the studio about 7:30, said hello, hung out, and we didn’t get down to real recording until 7:55 or so. I was drumming with my coat already on. We got through the song once and had to go back for a second try, at which point the air conditioner blew my song map to the floor. “Don’t stop the tape,” I said. You can still hear that on the tape. That’s still on there. Now it was almost eight. We went through the song again, and I went out the door. Those last three beats were done one-handed, with my other hand resting on my bag.
It wasn’t an ideal collaboration, like you see sometimes in movies, where two like-minded artists spend the summer creating a series of paintings or figuring out a movie. But as quick as it was, it had a certain feel; it was the product of his energy and our energy in a way that I knew it would be the second I heard his album. Collaborations can be chemical like that, and it doesn’t matter if they happen in a mansion over the course of a week or in a recording studio on one hectic night. Sometimes, it’s as simple as adding sodium to water and standing back. (Don’t do this at home! Don’t even really do it in a nearby lake. Just watch the videos on YouTube instead.)
The magic was audible, and not just to us. The producer Don Was said that it was his favorite record of that year, and he played it for the Rolling Stones when he was producing them. “That’s the kind of sound we want,” he told them. That’s the best-case scenario for a collaboration, and it’s most likely something that will never happen to me again: hear a song in the car, get the CD dug out of the bottom of the reject bin, call the guy, meet the guy, record with the guy, get a hit, get put in front of the Rolling Stones.
An Elastic Band
At the time we were working with Cody, collaboration happened mostly along those two tracks: first, putting people in the same room for a long time and seeing what happened (often, it’s magic; sometimes, it’s just time passing); second, hearing something that I knew would make a great combination and making it happen (usually that works out on the plus side of the equation). But as the Roots got older, we started to have a better—or at least more complicated—understanding of how to collaborate on music. A big factor in this was our day job as the band for Late Night and then, later, The Tonight Show, where we collaborated with people all the time. Here’s how that job works: We come to the office and see a schedule of musical groups that have been booked as guests. Every once in a while, they will bring their own band. But often, the artist’s name on the booking sheet means that we are, for that moment, that artist’s band.
For me, when I started, that meant that I had to suddenly learn a ton of new things. Not just new material, but a whole world of music. I was always pretty open to new things. As I have said, my dad had THE record collection, and it wasn’t a narrow one, either. I heard all the music of the seventies in the seventies. And even my dad’s influence was only part of a whole. My sister, who is a few years older than me, went to school and came back with exactly what you would expect: Steely Dan or Boston or Fleetwood Mac. My mom loved digging in the crates for cool albums with cool album covers, which meant that she ended up with records that featured Mati Klarwein’s paintings, such as Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. From an early age, I was all prepared to be diverse.
And yet, Late Night was still a little bit of a culture shock. At that time, in New York, there was a blossoming Brooklyn music scene, and I developed kind of stereotypical ideas about those Brooklyn bands early on. They were hipsters. They played rock and roll but played it ironically, whether that meant touching on seventies styles that they didn’t completely embrace or forging into a kind of math rock where the whole idea of traditional verse-chorus-verse songs was challenged.
About six months after we started, Late Night booked Dirty Projectors. I assumed just more of the same: Brooklyn band, attitude. They came in and we went into the studio for afternoon rehearsal. The second they started playing, I was internally apologizing for assuming that they would be one way when they were, in fact, so many other ways. They had these three female singers doing complex syncopated vocals and then they would just burst into choir harmonies. I looked around, trying to catch the eye of someone else in the Roots. It ended up being Kirk, and the two of us just stared at each other. We were so shocked and impressed that when we got backstage we were still humming. Kirk insisted it was ProTools. No one could have done live harmonies the way those women did it. While we were talking, Amber Coffman, one of the singers, walked by us in the hallway. Kirk called her in and asked her if she could do the harmonies live.
“Sure,” she said. She went and got the rest of Dirty Projectors and they re-created them. When I posted the video, it went viral.
When it came time for the Roots to make our album How I Got Over in 2010, we put them on the record. Other people we met through Fallon were on there, too. We had the Monsters of Folk—Jim James and Conor Oberst and M. Ward. We had the harpist and vocalist Joanna Newsom. These were different kinds of collaborations from Cody ChesnuTT, which happened because I heard a certain similarity. These collaborations happened because I heard certain differences. It wasn’t only that we were going for a new sound as a band. We were going for a sound that itself contained multiple sounds, for ideas that were collisions. Those kinds of combinations—unexpected ones, but ones where both parties are determined to produce an outcome that lives up to their respective creative reputations—are absolutely necessary. They may not always make for the best music, but they always make for the best creativity. They force you to define yourself again, which is vital for a midcareer creative. In 2013, the Roots did a record with Elvis Costello called Wise Up Ghost. It grew out of his appearance on the show, where he loved playing with us, and we put together a set of songs, some new, some remakes of older material. Over the course of that record, we needed to understand what made us Roots in comparison to his Costello, and he had to understand the same project in the other direction. For bits of both artists to survive into the final product, they need to make themselves visible to one another, and to themselves. Every successful collaboration is also a fight for your own creative life.
It Takes Two
Some ideas are one-person ideas. Once they leave that one person, they go through many other stages—they get produced, or published, or filmed—but they start inside one head. Other ideas are two-people ideas, truly collaborative efforts. Those ideas happen as a result of partnership, and creative partnerships are like other kinds of partnerships: lifelong friendships, business relationships. They have push and pull. They have ups and downs. They have times to speak and times to be silent. I have been in a band for more than two decades that has depended on collaboration, and I have watched other kinds of partnership—songwriting teams, comedy teams, writing teams. Being a collaborator is a constant learning experience. You quickly learn your strengths and your weaknesses. Admittedly, I’m not always a good communicator. I am not always straightforward about asking what I want out of a creative partnership. I am not always clear with myself on the difference between doing the work and running the operation. It can be difficult to deep-dive inside yourself and figure out all the things about you that work and don’t work, let alone the things that work and don’t work in collaboration with someone else. But here are some general tips for making creative collaborations work.
—Set aside a time and place. This is a fundamental principle, and one that is too easily overlooked. Maybe your creative partner works better in the morning, but you prefer evenings. Some people will recommend compromising and meeting in the afternoon. That seems like a weak solution to me. I’d recommend a different kind of compromise. Go morning one day, evening the next. Same with place. You don’t always want to be the host. Sometimes make the trip to where your partner lives or works. This may seem obvious, but it’s not just about accommodating the feelings of your partner. It’s about making sure that the greatest number (and widest variety) of ideas make it out of the brainstorming process.
—Be open and curious, and expect the same in return. We have talked about creative disinhibition, and how creativity depends on not filtering your ideas so much that strange or unexpected ideas disappear. The same is true for a partnership. Be receptive to ideas that sound strange. Maybe be receptive to those ideas especially, because the tendency is to be dismissive. When you give a fair hearing to a strange idea, you might loosen up your own idea to the point where it’s significantly improved. Say you’re collaborating on a song about returning veterans, and your songwriting partner suggests including a kind of calliope sound that gives the whole thing a carnival feel. Don’t reject it out of hand. Maybe there’s something to that. Maybe it’s gallows humor, or it shows the way the government doesn’t take its responsibility to vets seriously. And if that doesn’t work, maybe the general idea of sound effects or a kind of novelty is a good one. Military drumbeats? Too obvious? Maybe you’re right, songwriting partner. But let’s keep exploring.
—Analyze. They say that creativity is a mysterious process, and that’s of course true to some degree. But one of the things I’m trying to do in this book (and, for that matter, in my life) is to demystify it, or at least show certain ways in which the mystery is a myth that people keep alive to avoid dealing with the nuts and the bolts of the process. This goes for creative partnerships, especially. You might think that working with a creative partner is about finding a groove, or jamming, or everyone nodding their heads when they reach that magic plateau where things are sounding just right, but it has to be more than that. Learning to be analytical about your collaboration is an important part of the collaboration. You may illuminate some of the uncomfortable dynamics or solve problems that you didn’t even know were interfering with your progress. This is the second layer, the “meta” of Mo’ Meta Blues. It’s also the same principle as meditation. You’re always in the booth and always outside the booth watching. Be clear with yourself (and others) about what’s working and what’s not working.
Every successful collaboration is also a fight for your own creative life.
—Positive reinforcement works. One special form of communication is praise. You don’t have to be insincere about it. No one likes to have smoke blown at them. But you can be honest about what is working in the creative process. If you are collaborating on a song and you’re impressed by the idiosyncratic meter of the lyrics, say so. Your creative partner is taking risks, the same way you are (hopefully), and you don’t want to leave him or her hanging. Over the past year, I’ve tried to train myself to get better at administering praise, to control my trigger finger for criticism and be better at dispensing praise. Because of my dad, I came from the Whiplash school of motivation, where saying that someone else did a good job was seen as a weakness. I definitely did not come from the world of participation trophies. I have a tendency to turn up my nose at people who aren’t willing to use elbow grease and bloody knuckles to get further in the process. I don’t believe in perfection, but I do believe in satisfaction. Still, now that I’m a little older and a little more mellow, I recognize that other people need praise.
Working It All Out
Even when you follow these helpful rules, collaboration is never going to be easy all the time. The most common problems in collaboration, in my experience, revolve around resentment. One person feels that his or her ideas aren’t getting enough of a hearing, or that they’re being twisted to suit the other person’s ideas. The most common form of resentment, of course, comes at the end of the process, especially at the end of a successful process.
I’ll call your attention to a very odd thing that happened to the Beatles. Everyone knows a number of Beatles songs, assuming that they are human beings. And most everyone knows that when they credited their work, most of the songs were credited as collaborations between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, even when that wasn’t entirely the case. Early on, the two men wrote together, but even as they started to develop their own styles within the group, that label stayed. Showbiz. Well, at some point in Paul McCartney’s life, that arrangement started to rankle him. I’ll let Paul take over here. This particular version comes from an article in New Musical Express, but it’s a story that McCartney has told dozens of times.
We had a meeting with Brian Epstein, John and me. I arrived late. John and Brian had been talking. “We were thinking we ought to call the songs, Lennon and McCartney.” I said, “That’s OK, but what about McCartney and Lennon? If I write it, what about that? It sounds good, too.” They said, “OK, what we’ll do is we’ll alternate it: Lennon and McCartney, McCartney and Lennon.” Well, that didn’t happen. But what happened was the Anthology came out and I said, “OK, what they’re now saying is, ‘Song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.’” I said, if you’re doing that, it’s not Lennon and McCartney, it’s not the logo any more. So, in particular cases like “Yesterday,” which John actually had nothing to do with, none of the other Beatles had anything to do with, I said, “Could we have ‘By Paul McCartney and John Lennon,’ wouldn’t that be a good idea? And then on ‘Strawberry Fields’ we’ll have, ‘By John Lennon and Paul McCartney.’ ‘Penny Lane,’ ‘Paul McCartney and John Lennon.’ Seeing as we’re breaking it up, can we do that?” And at first Yoko said yeah. And then she rang back a few days later and she’d decided it wasn’t a good idea. And it became a bit of an issue for me. Particularly on “Yesterday,” because the original artwork had “Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and a photo of John above it. And I went, “Argh! Come on, lads!”
Yes, lads. Argh! This is an incredible passage about an incredible chapter in pop music history. Collaborations, even those that are pleasant in the process, can be unpleasant in the product. Maybe you care if your name is first. Maybe you don’t give a damn if they alternate. Maybe you are more satisfied by playing the title character than by getting highest billing. Just make sure that everyone’s clear. Oh, and get to meetings on time.
When I was writing this chapter, a friend had an interesting suggestion. He said that collaborators should be as creative with issues of credit as they are with the original ideas. “Start from a 50/50 split and then play some games to push it a few points one way or the other,” he said. “Or be listed alphabetically, but not by your name—by the word that represents the number of letters in your name.” It’s worth thinking about, if only because it keeps the collaboration in its comfort zone, focused on making things rather than on the things that have been made.
We’ve looked at how the process of locating yourself inside of a collaboration can function as a sort of redefinition, how you can come to see yourself anew when you see yourself next to different people. As I mentioned in connection with the Roots–Elvis Costello collaboration, this makes you reassert your identity. But it can also make you revalue it. If you felt tall your whole life and started hanging out with the Knicks, you’d have to adjust accordingly. Collaboration can be like hanging out with the Knicks. You’re not as tall as you thought you were. But you have other qualities that you didn’t notice until you stopped being preoccupied with your height. This is a thornier issue, and potentially a more profound one: collaboration can not only allow you to place yourself in close proximity with other creatives and watch what happens, but it can fundamentally change you. I mentioned before that some collaborations are like throwing sodium into water. What I didn’t mention, because my grasp of chemical metaphors is limited, is that the sodium burns up. It’s changed forever.
There are examples of this in my own creative life, and one of them began on one of the most momentous days of our nation’s history. On the morning of 9/11, I was in New York. The night before, the Roots had played a big Michael Jackson tribute show at Madison Square Garden, and our hotel rooms downtown didn’t pan out for some reason. Our reservation had been dropped, or a credit card number had been transmitted incorrectly. Whatever the case, there were no rooms for me. It was one of the only times in my career that I threw a full diva fit, a four-to-the-floor “Do you know who I am?” And it didn’t even work. I was sent uptown to a different hotel in the Bryant Park area, where I went to bed, exhausted and frustrated.
The next morning, I woke to the news. A plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later a second plane had flown into the South Tower. My first impulse was to run to the front desk to make sure I could extend my stay. My second was to run outside and get a cab. New York was as silent as Vanilla Sky’s first ten minutes, but I managed to find a cabbie. I gave him a hundred bucks and told him that I only needed to make a short drive over to the Virgin Megastore, and that I’d pay him to wait and drive me back. I loaded up on music. I can’t remember all the records I got, but one of them was Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, which was released that day. It became my post–9/11 soundtrack. I had mixed feelings about Jay-Z at that point. He had immense commercial success, and he didn’t seem to have the necessary self-reflection or self-doubt. The gangster face put me off. But when I listened to The Blueprint in the wake of 9/11, I started to feel such a deep connection to it. I realized that Jay and I had plenty in common, including East Coast roots and a love for the music. We also had people in common, including the writer dream hampton. I told her that I had come around to Jay and to The Blueprint, and she passed the news along to him. He was thrilled, she said. That mattered, too: I didn’t know that he cared what I thought. That process was the beginning of a kind of collaboration, though it was mediated and abstract.
It also helped me to develop another one of my important theories about creative work. I had always believed that there were two types of artists—Type A, achievers; and Type B, creatives. If I had written this book back in 1998, I would have depended upon that distinction. They were two different tribes, two different kinds of artists. The Type A artists are very directed toward product. They produce a tremendous amount of work. Often they are looked down upon by the Type B artists, who think of themselves as something more pure. Jay-Z, of course, was the classic Type A. That was part of the reason I was suspicious of him. But about a month later, he sent out word that he wanted the Roots to back him on his Unplugged album. When we got the offer, I panicked. I had listened to The Blueprint solidly for a month. I had immense respect for him, a million times more than I had before. But I still wasn’t sure about collaborating with him. We had our fans, and they saw us as a certain kind of thing—in the shorthand I’m using, hardcore Type B. For a little while, I avoided Jay’s calls. Then I gave in, still a tiny bit against my better judgment. It ended up being one of the best decisions of my creative life. As I have said, I have worked with hundreds of artists in my three decades in the business, and each and every one of the collaborations has had its own strange mix of ego jousting and creative strategy. Sometimes you have to rep for the idea you don’t want, because you know in advance that the creative process will reverse your suggestion. Sometimes you have to agree with everything you’re presented while you’re putting a third party up as a kind of agitator. Collaborating with Jay was the easiest thing in the world. He listened to everyone, asked questions, and then gave his opinion. The first few times we came to decision points, I couldn’t believe how simple it was to work with him.
In fact, that collaboration made me rethink my entire theory up until that point. During the year before the Jay-Z collaboration, as I have said, I spent most of my time and most of my energy with a group of like-minded artists who convened at my Philly house. Spending time with those artists was wonderful in nearly every respect, communal and miraculous, but it could also be backbreaking. Everyone was the same type of creative person, inspired and driven but not conventionally self-confident, passionate about the ideas they wanted but not straightforward and lucid in communicating those ideas. There were constant battles about listening and credit and all kinds of things that were central to the creative process—or so I thought until I worked with Jay. I had, in my mind, put him on the other side of the line, stereotyped him as an achiever rather than a creative, but we got so much creative work done with him, with a minimum of friction, that it changed my way of thinking. It taught me that different styles, not just different ideas, can be complementary rather than contradictory, and that creativity is a larger idea than I might have thought when I was a young art punk.
Later on, I ran across an interview with Björk from the German show Why Are You Creative? Björk is talking with the host, Hermann Vaske, and he mentions the British artist Damien Hirst, specifically an interview in which a reporter said something to Hirst about a piece of his, that he could have done it. “Yes,” Hirst said, “but you didn’t.” Hirst’s quote seemed defensive; I was more interested in where Björk took it.
I think everybody could do it and for me maybe I’m not so concerned if it’s creative or not. Maybe because I’m brought up in such a working-class situation and the people I admire most, like my grandmother or my family, if you would look at their passport no one of them says artist. But for me all of them have been very brave and completely stood by what they have made. To take care of a lamp shop is a very creative thing, or to feed eight children can be a very prolife statement with all the hindrances and everybody wanting to stop you. My grandfather, he would show me a fireplace he has just made and he is as proud of it, just as proud as if I was playing a song.
Achievers and Creatives can stand in the same place and erase the idea that there is any real distinction between the two.
For me, that crystallized some of the things I had been thinking since the Jay-Z experience. Maybe he wasn’t as hung up on whether what he was doing was creative. I mean, it was, and he knew it was, but there’s also that other personality—the hustler, the CEO as top-dog hustler, the get-things-done guy, the person who instinctively recognized that people who weren’t Artists in the capital-A sense were also doing things that they could be proud of and should have been proud of. It was more inclusive and maybe a little kinder in some ways. Artists who kept their capital A also kept a sense that they were somehow different from everyone else. That could be valuable. I knew that more than anyone. But maybe it could be a drawback.
I know that this returns to something I said early on, which is that everyone is creative in some ways. If you think you’re creative, you are. And maybe the more arty you are, the more you need to yin-yang it with an achiever: it produces results and reduces anxiety. I have seen versions of this principle many times over the years, but I didn’t feel the full force of my Jay-Z revelation again until the 2016 Roots Picnic, when the band backed Usher on a full set of his hits. Going into it, I had some concerns. Would it be a good match? Would we fit together? Usher had a reputation as a guy who was more like Jay: a hitmaker, a chart dominator, a commercial presence who wasn’t necessarily connected to the art on a deep level like, say, the Soulquarians. (Again, I’m not saying this in a judgmental or mocking way in either direction. I’m just differentiating between two approaches to creativity.)
As it turned out, it was a dream.
Usher was completely out of his comfort zone. He had been a solo act in the classic sense, whereas the Roots consistently work with different artists. But Usher had no fear. He gave us carte blanche to take his music to new places. In other collaborative environments, I was accustomed to seeing people say “NO” to me, brazenly, Electric Company–style. I saw the word coming out of their mouths. I didn’t see the word “NO” coming out of Usher’s mouth once. From the second I knew we’d be working with him, I started to have ideas about what needed to be done to his music. I was pursuing an idea, which was to return soul music to its spiritual basis. It used to be a music with uplift, a music that instilled survival strategies in African Americans. I wanted to work Usher’s catalog with those goals in mind. And when you talk about his catalog, you have to start with Confessions, which sold more than ten million records. It’s a textbook example of how to make pop that works. I wanted to muddy it a bit. I wanted to take the flash away and put him in an environment that was more of a legitimate seventies concert, to trade some of the things in the songs that were synthetic for things that were emotional. I had peanut butter intended for the chocolate of Confessions. We played him our idea. We explained it. We worked through it. And then, because this is how collaborations work—and how the best ones work best—he started to contribute in ways that I couldn’t have expected. He started to have ideas about arrangements, about performance, about pauses. We discovered to our surprise that he had a baritone. He was doing some Barry White–type ad libs. It occurred to me that with more time, we could really do something with that. But there was a schedule. We had to keep it. The show itself was about 70 percent of the way to being the perfect rethink of Usher, but it was an amazing illustration of how Achievers and Creatives can stand in the same place and erase the idea that there is any real distinction between the two. Later on, I had Usher on my Pandora show, Questlove Supreme, and he was just as sharp there, just as willing to talk about creative limits and rethink his earlier work. My creative relationship with Usher, and my respect for him, has gone a long way toward changing my understanding of the difference between Achievers and Creatives.
Social Networks
These days, collaboration has a second meaning. There’s a shadow collaboration that takes place online. When I discussed Cody ChesnuTT—how he came to our attention as an artist, how we reached out to him—I mentioned that I went on Okayplayer to ask fans if they knew anything about him. That was in the early days of the medium. We had the Web, but we didn’t have anything close to the social-network environment of today, which is rich with (or rotten with, depending on your perspective) Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and more.
I use technology as much as anyone. It starts in the morning, when I wake up and check my phone. It ends at night, when I check my phone and go to sleep. In between, I’m online like most people, which is to say I’m online all the time. When I’m on there, I’m interacting and interfacing with people in a variety of ways. I’m reading other people’s posts, noting who is reading and responding to mine, piecing together a tissue of sources and authorities. The Internet has indisputably changed the way we read and think and converse, so why wouldn’t it change the way we create? It has, of course. And it’s natural to worry that it’s changing it for the worse.
One of the things I read recently online was a spirited defense of the Internet as a creative environment. It was written by a marketing professional, so I approached it with more than a little skepticism, but it also made good sense, so I felt my skepticism draining as I went through it.
I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he made an argument that most real creativity comes from the combination of unexpected things. It’s the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups theory of how things get made, and it has some validity. He talked about Picasso and African art as one prominent example. If I’m going to quote the guy, I should go find the piece. Hold on. Okay: got it. It’s from Forbes online, from 2014, and the writer is named Greg Satell. He used Picasso as one example, and also mentioned how Darwin “[combined] insights from economics, geology and biology to come up with his theory of natural selection.” He went on to say that the very notion of combination comes up in most theories of creativity, including Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of strange loops. I didn’t know much about strange loops, so I took a little time to read about them. Hofstadter wrote about these loops in the context of M. C. Escher, whose drawings seem to take you all the way around a certain mental or physical journey only to return you to the same place where you started. Hofstadter talks about how this takes you through several levels, where you think you’re moving down or up but are in fact not moving; it’s your perception that is moving. He takes it into complicated ideas of mathematics, but also into simpler ideas of psychology. The self, he says, is one of these loops: we pass through a bunch of layers on the way to coming back and being the same self, and we only make symbols about our existence, and stories about ourselves, because of these loops. The Internet, Satell argues, is a great and efficient vehicle for creating these kinds of loops and for connecting us to other loops. Maybe in passing someone would mention something to me, a strange reference like Hofstadter’s loops, or the way a certain Roots record reminds them of Roland Barthes or Ishmael Reed. It used to take a significant amount of time and effort to get me to track down those references and then to figure out how they fit into what I was working on. Now, it all happens in a few mouse clicks. Networks can (and do) form more quickly than they once did, and people can (and do) see connections more easily than before. In that sense, all the benefits of networks that I sketched out above are right there in front of us.
One good example of this is coming up with song titles. I have a friend who is a songwriter. He doesn’t like to name his songs after words in the lyrics. I don’t know why he doesn’t just take the easy way out. It worked for Al Green and James Brown and the Beatles. But he wants to name his songs weird things. He used to have a complicated way of finding words. He would drive around town, noticing words on signs, and when he saw a word twice, he would use it. It was a variation of that game kids play on long road trips, where they have to find a word that starts with A, a word that starts with B, and so on. Maybe people don’t think of that game as creative, but it is—it’s giving shape to a set of words that are otherwise randomly scattered on signs. And his driving around was also creative, because it attached titles to songs. In the last few years, he’s started adapting the title-finding strategy for the Internet. Now, he’ll type the chorus into a search engine and pay attention to the kind of sites that come up in return. I don’t want to step on his work, so I’ll illustrate using a Roots song: say “The Seed 2.0.” If I search on “seed” and “push” and “life,” what do I get. Hmm: most of the results I get are links to lyrics for the song. Let me do it again and subtract “Roots” from the search. Now I get results for skateboarding sites, for something called PUSH (“Persevere Until Success Happens Through Prayer”—really, isn’t that PUSHTP?), for Five Tips to Help with Tomato and Pepper Seed Germination. If I were titling songs the way my friend does, I might call it “Tomato and Pepper Germination,” a perfectly good, strange name for a song. And because the Internet works by odd association, it also sparks odd association. The fan who sees that a song is called “Tomato and Pepper Germination” goes backward through the same loop, thinks that it’s strange or gets used to it, but does his or her own version of hitting all these different levels and combining them into something new. This is just a new form of free play that became possible because of the capabilities of search engines, but remember: free play is one of the most important forms of creativity.
That’s the good news about the Internet. Well, it’s not all the good news. We didn’t get to economics or distribution technologies or the way in which it has pulled in the distant corners of the world. But for each of these pieces of good news, there’s a piece of bad news. What’s the bad news with creativity and the Internet? As luck would have it, the bad news is also on the Internet. As long as I have been going online, I have had the suspicion that it was doing something to my brain: not necessarily making it weaker, but transforming it into a different kind of instrument. Rather than stay inside itself and cultivate ideas, it knows that it has to go out into the world and find ideas that match some impulses and instincts that are beginning to stir. With the help of the online world, the brain is more a hunter-gatherer and less a farmer. At some fundamental level, that seemed less creative—or, at the very least, less of the process of creation was taking place inside my own head.
The most complete version of this theory came from a guy named Nicholas Carr, who argued that the Internet actually changes the shape of our brain and how it works. Or at least that’s what I think it says. Carr wrote a book called The Shallows. I didn’t read the entire book, though I read the article in The Atlantic that became the basis for it. (Is that shallow?) It was called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” and it came out all the way back in 2008, when the Internet’s hold on us was weaker than it is today. In the piece, Carr says that he noticed that his experiences with the Internet were changing the way his brain felt to him:
I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Luckily, that was at the beginning of the article. There seemed to be thousands more words, but I didn’t read it. I’m kidding. I did. An article, I can still handle. But I know what he means. We’ve all felt it. Reading is a different experience than when we were young—each word offers the possibility for linking out to something else, and the main text just doesn’t have the same gravity it once did. But is this larger network actually providing us with a larger understanding? Toward the end of the piece, there’s a consideration by the playwright Richard Foreman of the new way of processing information. Foreman noted that while our minds hold more information than before, they are more than ever a series of connections to information outside of our minds. And too much is about information: locating it, retrieving it. This, said Carr, quoting Foreman, is alarming: “As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Everyone agrees that creativity is a privileged form of thinking. But is it immune to this effect, or is it even more vulnerable to it? I have said before that creativity can be defined in many ways, and that one of the ways is that it’s the attempt to answer a question that is itself in question. If a question comes into perfect focus, answering it isn’t a creative act anymore. It’s more a matter of information retrieval. The Internet, if you believe Foreman, if you believe Carr, is a menace to creative questioning. The second a question comes into view, the research process starts. We begin our research, our search for facts to satisfy questions, almost immediately. And just as Carr noticed his reading changing, I have personally noticed the way that research sprints ahead of idea formation. When a certain soundscape appears in my mind, I match it immediately to a song on Spotify. When a certain faint picture of an old TV show appears, I find the original show on YouTube. When a lyrical phrase pops up, I google it and find that it’s from a Schoolly D song, or an Ice Cube song, or an SZA song.
The best illustration, maybe, is the exception instead of the rule. Recently, I was thinking of a song from the eighties. I didn’t know exactly which song I was thinking of: it was one of those nostalgic twinges. I thought at first that it was Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy,” but then a split second later I realized it wasn’t that at all. The song I had in mind was something slower, more mysterious. But I didn’t have any way to find it. Beyond that, I was at a loss. I didn’t remember what month I had heard the song, or else I could have gone and looked up the Billboard charts from that month. I didn’t remember even a few words of lyrics, or else I could have searched for that phrase. Maybe in the future, there will be a way to mine your mind for a snatch of melody and reverse-Shazam it, but I couldn’t retrieve the song. Because of that, I just sat there and thought about it. I got further and further away from the reference job at hand, and closer and closer to an idea of my own. Denied the ability to complete the research task, I instead pursued a creative goal. I started to invent a new song that matched the characteristics in my head. I put down a little drumbeat and added a little melodic figure. I started to sing nonsense lyrics. They were about a new chair in my apartment, and they went something like “New chair / there you are, there / I don’t mean to stare / But I’m aware / You’re a new chair.” I’m not claiming that it was a Johnny Mercer special. But I heard an entire new song coming to life in my mind, and I knew that wouldn’t have happened if I had been able to quickly locate the song in question.
Now, it’s true that my brain, in making this pre-song, was drawing on a network of its own. It was doing something similar to what a person does during the surfing process. But it was drawing on a deep well of various kinds of things. William Klemm, a professor at Texas A&M University, wrote an article where he looked at the creative process from a neurological point of view. Much of the stuff he said is above my pay grade. As I have said, if you want me to be a neurologist, send me to the neurology academy, or whatever it’s called. But one part I understand. He defines creativity as the process of drawing water from a deep well. I’m paraphrasing. He said that “creativity comes from a mind that knows, and remembers, a lot.” We don’t have those brains anymore. Instead, we offload our knowledge to our phones and computers, to Wikipedia, to Shazam. It’s a great convenience, but what’s lost in the process?
If a question comes into perfect focus, answering it isn’t a creative act anymore.
And I think that Klemm’s answer is only partial. Creative minds know and remember a lot, but that also means that they have to know, and remember, selectively. One of the things that’s being lost, along with the ability to really focus and concentrate on the bottom of that well, is the ability to establish hierarchy, a confident sense of knowing which events (or ideas) are the big planets and which ones are the small moons orbiting around them. I probably just mixed a metaphor: consider it a mashup. Dave Chappelle, in one of his two comeback specials on Netflix in the spring of 2017, talked about when he was young, and one of his middle school teachers wheeled a television into class so that the students could watch the launch of the Challenger space shuttle. I’m a little older than Dave, and I remember it, too. It was 1986, and it was a big deal. There was a teacher on board, and every other teacher wanted to share in the glory. Of course, it all went horribly wrong. The launch went fine, but a few minutes later, the shuttle exploded. All the astronauts were killed. Students and teachers across the country watched, stunned. The punch line to Dave’s bit about it is subtle: the teacher, staring at the screen, dismisses the class for the day: “You all can go home.” But after that, Dave makes a point that’s deeper than a punch line. He starts to needle the younger people in his audience. These days, he says, you guys get so much more news, so much more data, that everything is the space shuttle, so nothing is the space shuttle. Just when you’ve filled your mind and your heart with the horror (or, in other cases, the joy, or the significance) of an event, another one comes along to wipe it away. How do you grow up in an environment like that? For creativity, things need to settle in. Take root, flower, bloom, grow, tangle. The skim, the superficial, the way things get replaced so quickly, is the enemy not only of deep thoughts, but of creative thoughts.
I guess I want to leave all Internet users—in other words, everyone—with words of caution. Of course, use technology. No one is suggesting that you unplug, or that you wander the earth only as far as your landline cord will let you go. But don’t think that the giant hive mind out there is a replacement for your own mind, and don’t forget to have the courage to set aside most of what you’re being delivered (and deliveries, as Chappelle says, come in constantly). When we network with other people, we learn to use them as trusted resources. When we network with technology, we learn that the resources are countless, but not all trustworthy. It’s a balancing act. Stay upright.
The Connect Effect
Think of two artists you know, who you consider to be very different, and imagine what project they would make if they collaborated.