Unblock Party
Getting started on an average day can be a pain, but it’s a pain that most people can deal with, like a slight headache or a sore heel. For some creative people, though, the pain of not being able to be efficiently creative doesn’t go away. It just stays and stays, getting worse—or worse, not getting worse at all, just staying and staying, until you’re numb from it. When that happens, when you can’t feel your extremities (creatively speaking), you might be in the clutches of writer’s block—or whatever the equivalent is in your creative field. Songwriter’s block? Painter’s block? Chef’s block? Filmmaker’s block? They all sound bad, except maybe sculptor’s block, which sounds like it could be the start of something promising.
For years, I would hear people talk about writers’ block. I didn’t encounter it firsthand or even secondhand that often, so I had a kind of superstitious feeling about it: I didn’t want to know. But the more I went on in the music world, the more I saw it, and sometimes I saw it close up. When D’Angelo was young, he was in a group called Precise: they came up from Richmond, Virginia, to play at the Apollo Theatre in 1991, and that led to a publishing contract, and that led to work for Black Men United, which was a vocal choir that had almost everyone in it—Gerald Levert, Raphael Saadiq, Boyz II Men, R. Kelly, Usher. D’Angelo got launched. He recorded Brown Sugar, his debut, and when it came out in 1995 everyone knew that he was one of the most creative forces around. You could feel it in the way he arranged vocals, in the way he let songs drift but never became aimless. He had a great voice, but lots of people could sing. He had a perspective. He had force. He had ideas.
But in the wake of that album, he had something else, too, which was trouble writing new material. There was pressure on him for a follow-up, because Brown Sugar had been such a big hit, but a follow-up didn’t happen easily. It wasn’t that he couldn’t go back to the well. He went back there. But when he went back, it was dry. I’m not telling tales out of school or anything. He’s talked plenty about that period. His first album had summed up everything that he thought and felt. He had found a way to express his entire soul. That’s why they call it soul music. So how are you going to bounce right back up with a new record? There’s a phrase that people like to use to describe these situations. They say “sophomore slump.” But that’s a little bit of a misnomer. No one’s in school anymore. It’s just a slump, period. D’Angelo really suffered while he struggled to get more material together in the wake of Brown Sugar. He was completely blocked, locked up tight. For a guy who had woken up day after day for years with new songs blooming in his mind, to suddenly be looking at an empty flowerpot was a terrible feeling.
He kept on, though. What he did mostly was release cover versions of other people’s songs for soundtracks. He and Erykah Badu did a Marvin Gaye–Tammi Terrell duet, “Your Precious Love,” for High School High. He did “Heaven Must Be Like This,” the Ohio Players ballad, for Down in the Delta. He had done covers before, of course. One of the big hits from his debut was a version of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” But these were one-offs. They weren’t destined for the follow-up record, though people may have thought so at the time. They were just hanging there in the space between records. Some people will say that it was a business move or a branding move, a way of keeping a new star visible for a little while he got his act together, creatively. Some people did say it. But to me that’s too cynical. Or rather, it’s irrelevant.
Those covers were fully creative works, ways of making things without recording his own songs. He weaponized another aspect of his creativity and temporarily vaporized the issue of writer’s block. I think there was a kind of psychological freedom in them, too, at least a little bit. Creativity is a privilege and a blessing, but it’s also at times a burden. The pressure of coming up with your own ideas—or rather, Your Own Ideas, with all the capital-letter significance that implies—can be a problem. It’s not that the pressure crushes you. I don’t think that’s what happened to D’Angelo. It wasn’t like he read an early draft of a press release that talked about the follow-up to Brown Sugar and suddenly felt paralyzed. I think that his block was more about having emptied out the tank in a very comprehensive and exhausting way, then promoting that album around the clock for two years. It was difficult to get other things to float to the surface. So he did the next best thing, or rather another best thing, which is to make something that is already made. I recommend this to any creative person in any discipline. If you’re a painter and you can’t think of anything to paint, copy a landscape or a portrait by a painter you like. If you’re a writer and you feel like you’re not capable of writing something new, find a poem you like and type it out again. If you’re a chef and you’re drawing a blank in the kitchen, try to make a classic dish of your mentor’s. People with limited ideas of things call this cheating. It’s not. It’s inspired imitation. Making your own version of existing works keeps you on your toes. It keeps your machinery humming along.
Creativity is a privilege and a blessing, but it’s also at times a burden.
Take another one of the covers from that period: D’Angelo’s version of the Prince song “She’s Always in My Hair,” which he contributed to the Scream 2 soundtrack. I know it well. I played on it. To make his version of “She’s Always in My Hair,” D’Angelo had to find within himself a reason to make a version of “She’s Always in My Hair.” The songs he picked weren’t arbitrary. He wasn’t turning in D’Angelo-style covers of Johnny Cash songs or the Banana Splits theme (though now that I say that, I want to hear them both immediately). The songs he selected were songs that mattered to him and to the people around him (present company included). They were songs that were in him in some form already. If you x-rayed his creativity, you would see those songs in there, glowing in his bones. And by the time he was done with his versions, he had repossessed them to some degree.
And even then, it wasn’t straightforward. Even then, it wasn’t simple. Even then, all the creative choices had to be identified, addressed, wrestled with, resolved. “She’s Always in My Hair” is a perfect example. From the start, there was a question of how faithful to the original it should be. If I were making it on my own, I might have leaned in that direction. But when I’m working with D’Angelo, I’ll filter some of my own ideas and default to his creativity. I wasn’t about to drag D’Angelo to hell with me and put him in a position where he was putting out a version that competed directly with the original. We ended up taking another approach, going away from the chilliness of the original toward something super funky. That decision had its own set of problems. What if we made it so funky that it was perceived as a way of showing up the original version? (This may not have been a realistic fear, but it was an anxiety in my mind, a point of pressure.)
I have thought often about that period of D’Angelo’s career, what it meant to him, how easily it was misunderstood as merely transitional, as the dead spot between Point A (Brown Sugar) and Point B (Voodoo). So here’s my advice to anyone, in any field: when you feel you can’t make work, make work from work that is already made. Don’t duck and cover. Cover without ducking. Do it proudly. It keeps you active. A little bit after that, D’Angelo started working more diligently on the material that would become Voodoo. Those songs were a huge leap forward. They reminded people that he was a visionary, and then some. What accounts for the empty well suddenly being full again? In interviews, D’Angelo credited the birth of his son Michael, and that may have been a big factor. But he also kept himself in shape, creatively speaking, even when he wasn’t creating. Voodoo wouldn’t have happened without the period after Brown Sugar. Maybe that’s self-evident. But it wouldn’t have happened the way it did if he hadn’t used the period after Brown Sugar the way he did.
Thinking about “She’s Always in My Hair,” returning to the choices we made during that period, also gets me thinking. Deep down, I think that there are pure creatives and then there are privileged observers. In some way, I still think of myself as that the lucky observer who gets to spend time near pure creatives to see them in action. When I hang with someone at that level I’m amazed at their inability to act like a sponge or observe their surroundings. When I remember D’Angelo, that’s what I think of. Or take Prince. I think of a typical late-nineties night at Prince’s house, where there was always a jam session with a bunch of younger musicians (again, present company included). He might start with a riff to a cover song and all of a sudden we were launched into it. It happened one night with the Ohio Players’ “I Want to Be Free.” The funny part was that Prince didn’t even know the lyrics. That blew my mind. It kicked over my Jenga. How could that be? Why would he introduce such an iconic song if he didn’t know it inside and out? It occurred to me that with Prince, maybe he feared being too derivative. As I discussed earlier, I don’t really have that fear. I think that my creative identity is unquestionably made up of parts of other people’s creativity. I have lived my life being referential and reverential. But I have also seen cases where artists at an elevated altitude don’t want to work that way. They hold the idea of covers at arm’s length. I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m not saying they’re right. I’m saying that making things is about making choices.
I, Me, Mimic
Copying, or covering, is always a valuable creative exercise. It gets you going. It restarts your brain and encourages you to look for the way things are built. Go and retype those last three sentences. The first two have lots of alliteration: copying and covering, gets and going. The third one doesn’t have any at all. That’s one thing to think about.
But how does it work as an exercise? Not everyone is satisfied by replicating someone else’s work. There’s a related option, which is parody. In this day and age, parody is tricky. There are times when it seems like all of social media is just one giant parody factory. It’s like that gum that Violet Beauregarde demands in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Willy Wonka tells her that the lab is still working on it, but that the point of the gum is to taste like an entire three-course dinner. She starts chewing it against everyone’s advice, and at first it seems like it’s working. “It’s amazing,” she says. “It’s made of tomato soup, roast beef and baked potato, and blueberry pie.” It’s that last part that doesn’t work out so well. The blueberry taste is connected to some kind of blueberry deformation. She starts to swell and turn blue—actually, it’s more purple. She gets to be totally round, and then the Oompa Loompas come and take her away to the juicing room. They’re going to squeeze all the blueberry juice out of her and try to get her back to normal. When I was little, that scene terrified me. I didn’t like the idea of the juicing room. In that scene, especially, Willy Wonka seemed like a psychopath. I don’t even remember if they show her later on to assure us that Violet is okay.
But as I have gotten older, I have thought about it a little differently. Willy Wonka was trying to make gum that was dinner. He was trying for a kind of cover version. But what he ended up with was gum that reminded people of parts of dinner with exaggeration that was funny and a little grotesque. What he ended up with was parody. And as I have gotten older, I have come more and more to see how important parody is as a creative exercise.
Let’s go back to “She’s Always in My Hair” for a second. D’Angelo did a faithful version of it. But sometimes when I play Prince songs at home (on my iPod, not on a keyboard or a guitar) I start imagining fake versions of them. Sometimes it’s simple takeoffs on the lyrics, tweaks so simple that they wouldn’t even have appealed to Baby Weird Al Yankovic. (That was my favorite Saturday morning cartoon for a little while—Baby Weird Al Yankovic. It doesn’t matter to me that it never existed.) Maybe she’s always at the fair. That’s stupid, but it’s funny for a second. The whole family goes to convince her to come home, and she’s not having any of it. She likes corn in the husk and the pig races, and she’s going to stay until she gets her fill. Or maybe she’s always in the air, flying from place to place so often that she starts to be uneasy when she’s back on the ground. Or maybe the thing that I parody isn’t the lyrics. Maybe it’s Prince’s falsetto. Where he holds a note, sweet and creamy, for a full three seconds, I imagine him doing it for thirty, or sixty. It’s an impossibility, but it sounds funny in my head. Or maybe it’s a guitar solo. I don’t create these parodies, but I think about them.
When I think about them, I am thinking about more than them, obviously. I am thinking about new ideas, even though they are new ideas grown in the soil of old ones. Parody, even at this completely foolish low level, is a way of taking something I love and trying to understand it. As you take the machine apart, you want to try to notice how it works. Are Prince’s backup vocalists—who are usually Prince himself, multitracked—always echoing what he’s about to sing, or are they sometimes anticipating it? How many different guitar textures are there? Parody can be extremely analytical. But think of the nonsense lyrics, too. They are a way of making that work less intimidating. “She’s Always in My Hair” is a great song, but it’s not monumental. Other Prince songs, from “Little Red Corvette” to “Let’s Go Crazy” to a dozen more, are monumental. If you parody them with nonsense, you make them approachable again. And if they were just ideas that a human being had, then maybe you can have them, too. Mock them and liberate yourself. Note: I am not recommending releasing those parodies or making a career of them. You are not Weird Al. You are not even Baby Weird Al. But you can play around with someone else’s creative work and free yourself up that way.
There’s an excellent if strange example from the world of food. When I was working on somethingtofoodabout, I visited Nathan Myhrvold in Seattle, at his Modernist Cuisine facility. I say “facility” because it’s not just a kitchen. It’s a warehouse and a laboratory and also possibly the future seat of world power. There are strange things there that I can’t describe, or won’t, for my own safety, but one thing I can mention is this dinosaur’s tail that Nathan built to prove a pet theory of his that dinosaurs flicked their tails like bullwhips.
Copying, or covering, is always a valuable creative exercise. It gets you going.
Anyway, we ate there. And one of the things I noticed is that Nathan loves the idea of masquerade. At least three of the dishes pretended to be one thing but were in fact something else. There was a pasta that turned out to be geoduck. There was a stick of binchotan, a hard charcoal, which he tapped on to show us how hard it was, and then he served it to us—but it wasn’t that at all! It was pâté. And then there was a quail egg that turned out be mango and passion fruit. These were like magic tricks. They were illusions. That’s one kind of creativity, maybe the oldest, when art imitates life but then throws a wrench into that process, thereby proving that it’s not life at all. But the food that Nathan served was also a kind of parody. The thing that it looked like, but wasn’t, communicated a set of expectations. That level of trickery seemed baked into the way that he worked. Nathan was already making delicious food, but he felt as though he wanted to increase the degree of difficulty by forcing another creative challenge upon himself: not only should this taste good, but it needs to look like something else. When I started to ask around, I found that this was more common than I thought—the idea of layering ideas over ideas, especially if there was a joke loaded into the process. Often, that trickery took place at the end of the process. The original work was done, but packaging it created an opportunity for parodic treatment.
I collected many examples of this principle while I was writing this book, but one of the best came from the music world, from the pub rocker Nick Lowe. I remember 1977 as the year that my dad listened to pop constantly in the car, such as Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” and the Emotions’ “Best of My Love.” I was too young to see all of the other things that were happening: punk records like the Sex Pistols’ debut and the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, high-modern classic rock like Pink Floyd’s Animals, political reggae like Bob Marley’s Exodus. It was also the year that David Bowie released the first record in his Berlin trilogy, Low. Nick Lowe took offense, not seriously of course, at Bowie using a misspelled version of his last name, so he did the same, releasing an EP called Bowi. The first time I heard that, it sounded silly, sure, and snotty, but also like one of the most purely creative things I had ever heard. He was turning tables that I didn’t even know were there.
I thought about these kinds of tricks often during the writing and editing of my food book. The cover of that book is based on the artwork of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a sixteenth-century artist who made portraits of people as assemblages of gourds or trees. When I first saw his paintings, Arcimboldo reminded me of hip-hop—he was taking existing images and reordering them into something new. For the cover of that book, a version of an Arcimboldo portrait was made of me. The act of making a food-face for myself wasn’t completely serious, in the sense that everyone knew that it was ridiculous. But it was completely serious as a creative act. The artist had to find shapes and textures and colors that matched, and then had to assemble the thing so that it was a plausible photograph. In a sense, this was harder than Arcimboldo, since he could paint a face made from food. For our book cover, we had to find food that looked like features. There’s radish in there, and squash, and a doughnut for a bow tie. It’s a parody of an existing style (Arcimboldo’s paintings) that gains meaning by also incorporating elements of another style (hip-hop sampling).
The other example I ran across recently is Documentary Now!, a show that was cocreated by Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. Both of them were on Saturday Night Live (Fred played Prince, of course), and both have done excellent work outside of it. Bill has done voiceovers for Pixar movies and written for South Park, and Fred cocreated Portlandia with Carrie Brownstein. The two of them loved movies, and in particular they loved documentaries. What they decided to do was remake them. They did a version of Grey Gardens called Sandy Passage. They did a version of Nanook Revisited called Kunuk Uncovered. They did a version of The Thin Blue Line called The Eye Doesn’t Lie. And they did a massive two-part takeoff of the massive two-part Eagles documentary, History of the Eagles, called Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee.
When you are parodying a world, you need to pay attention to details. It teaches structure. It teaches rhythm. It teaches nuance. It also demands an incredible amount of specific technique. In the case of Gentle and Soft, Bill and Fred recorded an album for their fake band. When they did their takeoff of Grey Gardens, their directors, Rhys Thomas and Alexander Buono, used the same camera lenses as the original so that the movie looked the same. And in their parody of The Thin Blue Line, they shopped around for a courtroom artist to make their sketches look similar. As it turned out, it was the same exact guy. That’s one of the coincidences that warms my heart.
My final anecdote about copying and parody goes back to the world of music, and to an article that my cowriter Ben Greenman wrote for The New Yorker. There’s a British band called the Wombles that isn’t exactly a band. They are costumed characters from a kids’ show, sort of an across-the-pond version of the Banana Splits. They came into existence back in 1973, which was right around when I came into existence. The main singer and songwriter for the Wombles was a man named Mike Batt, who went on to have a long career in the music industry. One of his other bands was a classical group called the Planets, and at one point they had a track on an album called “A One Minute Silence.” The composition was only silence, just like John Cage’s famous conceptual piece “4′33″”—the only difference is that the Planets’ piece was, like the title says, a minute long. Batt credited it to “Batt/Cage,” though the Cage in his credits wasn’t John Cage, but Clint Cage, a pseudonym that he created just for the occasion of the recording of “A One Minute Silence.” John Cage’s publisher, Peters Editions, wasn’t amused. Peters sent a letter demanding that Batt pay royalties and saying that the idea of the silent song belonged to Cage. Batt didn’t agree. He released his one-minute silence as a single, and went a step further, registering hundreds of other lengths of silent songs. “If there’s ever a Cage performance where they come in a second shorter or longer,” he said, “it’s mine.” I remember seeing the piece (the article, not Batt’s silent song) and laughing, because it was such a ridiculous idea. But I have rethought it slightly. The dispute between Batt and Cage’s publisher revolved around issues of copyright. But they are just as powerfully ideas of creativity. If you thought of something first, does that mean the same thought can’t occur in someone else’s mind with as much power and as much authenticity? If someone else thinks of something first, does that mean the same thought can’t occur in your mind? And is it even the same idea if it grows in a different mind?
These aren’t new questions. People have asked them and answered them millions of times. But part of what creative people do is keep reopening them. Parody is new but never new. It’s funny but also tries to identify some serious issues. It’s accessible (because people have to get the joke), but it can’t be too accessible (or else you are settling for the worst jokes in the Scary Movie franchise). That means that it requires exactly the same creative skills and sensitivities as making the original artworks.
Physician, Copy Thyself
The example of Documentary Now! raises a question that requires a little more consideration. Who should you copy? In that case, they’re copying some of the best and most important documentaries in movie history. On the face of it, that makes sense. Why would you want to copy something terrible?
But you should also copy yourself. This doesn’t violate the rule, which is to remember to copy the best, because you are the best. In an earlier chapter, I explained that every creative person is ultimately his or her own judge, audience, and role model. You occupy these stations at different times in the process. But don’t demean or diminish your own work when it comes time to practice parody. This sounds circular, but it’s actually an arrow that stretches out into eternity.
Let’s go back to the example of D’Angelo, and how he dealt with the creative paralysis that settled all around him after Brown Sugar. When he was blocked, he started copying existing songs. When he was unblocked, though, he didn’t start basing his new music on influences that drifted in from the furthest reaches of left field. He was working off his own touchstones and keynotes. When he sat down to make a record, he was sitting down to make a D’Angelo record. There were glissandos he owned. There were vocal intervals he owned. Other people may have owned them also, or thought that they did, but for his purposes, he was sole proprietor.
I have been lucky enough to meet George Clinton. At the Miami Book Fair in 2014, he and I did a joint interview onstage with Ben Greenman, who was also Mr. Clinton’s cowriter. Ben knew that Mr. Clinton and I had overlap in our careers, that we shared some of the same foundation, so he wrote questions for Mr. Clinton and questions for me and then swapped them. He asked me about the importance of doo-wop, which I could answer easily since my father was a doo-wop singer. He asked Mr. Clinton about the evolution of hip-hop, which he could answer easily, since his music provided the basis for much of West Coast G-funk. It was an interview about creativity that was also itself creative. Afterward, we were hanging backstage, talking and taking pictures, and Mr. Clinton mentioned something about his creative process. My ears went up like a dog who hears the food dish rattling. I know when a genius is in the room and talking. He said that one of his methods had always been to revisit his old work, without reservation, without fear, without shame. His doo-wop group, the Parliaments, had its first big hit with “(I Wanna) Testify” in the late sixties, after years of working the seams of Detroit soul. A few years later, because of the flowering of the psychedelic era, the Parliaments had morphed into a pair of bands: Parliament, a kind of pop-soul outfit, and Funkadelic, a so-far-out-you-can-see-in black rock concern. Both of those bands reused Clinton’s early compositions. Parliament would go on to rerecord “Testify” on its Up for the Down Stroke album, and Funkadelic’s debut contained reworkings of “I’ll Bet You” and “Good Old Music.”
Partly Clinton wanted those songs to get a hearing, now that his platform was bigger. But it was also a creative method, as he kept proving in his career and his life. In the mid-nineties, during one of the golden ages of hip-hop, Parliament-Funkadelic released an album called Dope Dogs. It was a concept record about a drug-sniffing dog that incorporated commentary about addiction, identity, lust, and the hypocrisies of federal drug policy. Clinton produced that record himself, with a technique that was both retro and groundbreaking. He explained in his memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kind of Hard On You?
I had listened to lots of hip-hop by that point, and certain styles in particular impressed me. I loved the Bomb Squad and the work that they were doing with Public Enemy, so I started to do my own version of the same thing, sampling older P-Funk records. I tried not to use the most obvious samples—other people had mined the ore right out of them—so for the most part, I drew from outtakes, rarities, or live tracks. I produced that album myself, in the most labor-intensive way possible. I took a loop of three or four seconds and ran it from the beginning of the song to the end, after which I muted the parts of the loop I didn’t want to use.
Clinton knew that there was more sophisticated technology available to him. But he didn’t want to use it. It didn’t fit his metaphor, which was gene splicing. He had been playing with that idea since the mid-seventies, on The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, and here he played with it again. There was a quality present in every single second of P-Funk music, and if you moved it to another compositional body, it remained. You could snip a hair—a metaphorical hair, so a note or a phrase—and still identify it as P-Funk. He had already created, and he used those creations to make new ones.
Sometimes, though, George didn’t even use pieces of old songs. He used old pieces that never found their way into songs. Maybe in 1974, Bootsy Collins had played a bass part for “Ride On” that was abandoned as the song evolved. Maybe in 1977, Junie Morrison had come up with a keyboard squiggle that couldn’t find a home in “Groovallegiance.” George called these pieces of music seeds and stems. The idea is that when the smoking was done, those were the leavings at the bottom of the bag. They weren’t the real dope, but they were from the same plant. George figured that he might as well get use from them. He might as well grow new songs from them.
I urge everyone to revisit earlier work. I know lots of actors who say they never watch themselves in movies. I know lots of authors who say they never reread their books. I don’t understand that. I can understand not sitting in a penthouse repeating your own lyrics to yourself over and over. I can understand not being slouched on a couch in front of a huge TV watching yourself on screen. But I think that you have to go back and look at your own work with a clear eye. And, hopefully, with pleasure. It should keep you feeling good about yourself to know that you completed projects in the past. I was talking to the New York–based portrait painter Kehinde Wiley at one of my food salons. He said that he would sometimes walk by one of his paintings and just have a flash of appreciation, not in an egotistical way. But he would see the size of it and the complexity of it and remember not just the work that went into it but the fact that he had survived that work and lived another day, to make another thing. In the last year, Tariq and I have followed a similar philosophy. As we started to get ready for the next Roots album (titled Endgame, out in 2018), we made a conscious decision to take a half step back and listen to our own body of work at a slight remove, listen to our records the way a younger artist like Thundercat or Kamasi Washington might listen to them. We would be Roots fans, and we would make a record in that spirit.
Revisit earlier work. Go back and look at your own work with a clear eye.
Luckily, we had everything. The whole photo album, musically speaking, was available. This is one of the most important principles—don’t throw anything away. Technology today makes it easy to keep your old ideas at your fingertips: the half-baked ones, the ones that seemed to peter out. You will be able to go back to them, and you should. There’s no such thing as garbage. One of my favorite restaurants to visit is Next in Chicago. I developed a kind of friendship with Dave Beran, the chef there. Once, Dave told me that he wanted me to try a new dish. I was excited. He came out with a plate that looked like what you’d see in a Warner Bros. cartoon to communicate the idea of trash—a fish carcass, mostly stripped to the skeleton except for the eye staring outward, a clump of garbage next to it, and a piece of what looked like broken glass. It had everything but a fly buzzing around it and stink lines. “Try it,” Dave said. He was deadpan. I did, and it was one of the most delicious things I had ever eaten. No such thing as garbage.
When you are recycling parts of past works, be smart about it. Recognize that there was a reason an idea didn’t pop the first time around. Maybe the time wasn’t right. Maybe the context for it didn’t yet exist. But also realize that many ideas flower eventually.
This loops back into the idea of parody. If you reuse your own old ideas, you shouldn’t always be so stone-faced about it. You can approach it, at least initially, as a kind of self-parody. George Clinton didn’t suffer from block like D’Angelo. He’s never been blocked in exactly that way, as far as I can tell. Just take a gander at his discography. But he must have felt pressure to live up to his old works. When you achieve a certain amount in this (or any other) business, getting crushed by expectation is inevitable. Whenever I look at Pitchfork and see that a band has a new album, I am always on the alert for this kind of sentence: “This work represents an advance over the last one in this way.” It’s usually there, but is it usually true? Why is every new work an advance? Is that just how time works? I think it’s part of the creative psychology. No one wants to do worse than they did the last time out. No one even wants to be the one who accuses someone else of it. And yet, we are at the mercy of our past work.
Generally, be willing to be lighter. The consequential work—the work that eventually ends up weighing something—isn’t always undertaken with such paralyzing seriousness.
Sample Sale
The George Clinton examples demonstrate how important creativity is to hip-hop, or maybe how important hip-hop is to creativity. Throughout this book, I’ve been making an effort to branch out and look at a broad set of disciplines—at other kinds of music, but also at cooking and comedy and painting. But I want to come back to hip-hop for a little while. I want to think of it in light of all the things we’ve been talking about: stealing from others, stealing from yourself, making the old new, and discovering ways to jump-start and sustain your creativity through all of these behaviors.
The earliest hip-hop singles, like “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Breaks,” used studio bands, though those bands were just re-creating music from existing records. Then hip-hop entered an era of sampling. Technology made it possible, and aesthetics followed technology. For a little while there, most bands bit pieces of existing songs, both melodic and rhythmic, and arranged them into sonic beds over which MCs would rap. It was simple at first and then, in the hands of masters like the Bomb Squad, it became elevated into high art. There’s a moment on “Rebel without a Pause” when they take a second of Clayton “Chicken” Gunnells’s screeching trumpet. Clayton was in the J.B.’s—James Brown’s backing band. In its day, it was a kind of imitation of the far-out sounds of John Coltrane. It was a funk appropriation of the liberating principles of the headiest jazz. But then the Bomb Squad found it and gave it to Public Enemy, and it became something else all over again, a warning, a call to arms.
I could write a whole book on the supreme creativity of the Bomb Squad. Maybe I will. Until then, I’ll mention them whenever I feel like it in the books I write. They were able to take existing materials and make something bracing and new from them. You might think that a definition of pure creativity includes the idea of creating something from nothing, but that’s also a little bit of a dodge. Nothing is nothing, really. That seems like a paradox, but what I mean is that when a saxophonist plays a note, he’s using an instrument manufactured by Selmer or Yamaha or Keilwerth. Which manufacturer depends on level of experience and price range and lots of other factors, but the noise comes from somewhere. The same is true, and maybe more true, of filmmakers: the cameras, the lights, the film. Most directors don’t fabricate those things by hand.
But wait, people say. Those are only the tools. That’s only the hardware. The creative person writes all the software. When that sax makes a sound, that’s a sound that comes straight from the player’s heart and soul. This is even less true. There are notes. There are scales. The most experimental jazz player still has to reckon with them, partly because the destination of that sound is yet another piece of equipment that came predesigned: the human ear.
This is a little far afield. The point is that creativity has ideas, but it also has materials. And the Bomb Squad’s materials happened to be certain pieces of technology, samplers and sequencers, and a world of recorded music that they could feed to that technology. They didn’t play any instruments, but that meant that they played every instrument.
The Bomb Squad perfected a certain kind of sound bed. Their production on the Young Black Teenagers album—a white group discovered and nurtured by Hank Shocklee and supported by Public Enemy—remains one of the crowning achievements of production in any era. It’s George Martin level, Brian Wilson level. It’ll blow your mind out when you start to see how they assemble the bricks.
That came out in 1991. The same year, there was another release that completely turned my sense of the genre on its ear. Since 1989, MTV had been broadcasting a show called Unplugged, where bands went onstage and played stripped-down versions of their hits. It was a way for rock artists (and sometimes pop groups) to show that they had real chops and that their songs had real structure. The series started with acts that were naturals for the treatment—Squeeze did the first episode, Graham Parker did the second one—and then they started to branch out a bit. I remember the Hall and Oates episode in 1990, because they were Philly superstars, and because when I heard about it I imagined exactly what it would be—the leanness of the melodies and syncopated rhythms preserved, and Daryl and John getting back to their roots as basically white soul singers.
Then, in 1991, the series tried an experiment. The first stretch of the season included a bunch of usual suspects (Sting, R.E.M., Paul McCartney). On April 10, though, at Chelsea Studio, the show assembled a number of hip-hop acts, including MC Lyte, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest. They set about performing their hip-hop material in an acoustic setting. There was political capital invested in this, of course—this was in the middle of a period where much of white America, including music stars who should have known better, dismissed hip-hop as something less than music. But there was also a creative dimension, which was to let the artists rethink their songs in this new acoustic setting.
All the acts on the bill performed admirably, but the undisputed star of the show was LL Cool J. His set was beyond amazing. It was transformative. For starters, there was the way LL looked—he dominated the stage, ripping through performances of songs like “Jingling Baby” and (especially) “Mama Said Knock You Out,” white deodorant clearly visible. The audio was as exciting as the visual. Under the music direction of the guitarist Mike Tyler (whose band, the Philly outfit Pop’s Cool Love, backed LL for the show), the songs were reborn and renewed. Re-creating the riff of “Mama Said Knock You Out” rather than playing the original Sly and the Family Stone sample made it somehow more organic, earthier, almost a folk music. That was obviously the touchstone for the Roots when we backed Jay-Z on his Unplugged performance in 2001. But I also think that the unplugged hip-hop game is a uniquely effective way of flexing creative muscles, of taking songs that are already Frankenstein’s monsters and giving them another shot of electricity.
That original LL Cool J performance has stuck with me in important ways over the decades. When I think about its effect, I think I can distill it down to one short, sharp piece of advice: change your materials. I know writers who mostly write on their laptops—maybe that’s every writer now—and when they switch to longhand, or an old typewriter, or a tablet with some weird Bluetooth keyboard, they enter a new creative phase. It’s not just that they get a new perspective on their own work. They actually have to adjust their creative habits. Maybe things that were easy before (like spelling, say, which was corrected by the computer) become more difficult and require more of their attention. But maybe things that were hard before (like setting aside a page when it’s filled with words and moving on to the next page) become easier. Material changes matter because they change the process of creative production.
On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon and the Roots have this recurring bit where we accompany singers on classroom instruments: recorders, xylophones, wood blocks. We’ve done it with Mariah Carey, on “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” We’ve done it with Adele, on “Hello.” We’ve done it with Idina Menzel, on “Let It Go.” When we play those songs, it makes them fun and approachable. Big stars become somehow more human-sized. But it also forces us to re-create these polished, manicured ballads in more modest and rough-hewn conditions, and that means creating them again. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on classroom instruments isn’t the same song as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on the most expensive professional instruments. This is why D’Angelo keeps his studio setup anchored in 1997 technology and feel. It maintains the purity. It doesn’t corrupt the process with modernization. There’s no trivial future to chase.
Look Over There!
The modern world is an improvement over other eras in many ways. We have smartphones and smart houses. We have top-of-the-line scripted TV. But in other ways, it’s a problem. More than ever before, we’re distracted. My life is incredibly packed and overprogrammed. I work at The Tonight Show and make albums with my band and produce other artists and teach a college class and produce television and film and occasionally write books. I don’t have much time to be distracted. But I feel the pull of it all the time. Fifteen years ago, I didn’t have a little hum at the base of my skull reminding me to check e-mail or Twitter or read the latest gossip about the celebrity couple of the moment (Are they really in love? Is it just a publicity stunt?).
The problem is trivial, of course, but for creative people it’s also consequential. The one thing you can say about creative work is that it requires your time and effort. More than ever, these days, that’s difficult to guarantee. The very same tools that let you work so efficiently—word processing, Wikipedia—are connected to other tools that rob you of efficiency and focus. They don’t destroy your will to live, but they do destroy your ability to live in the moment.
Homer Simpson: Wait, I’m confused about the movie. So the cops knew that internal affairs were setting them up?
Man 1: What are you talking about? There is nothing like that in there!
Homer: Oh, you see, when I get bored I make up my own movie. I have a very short attention span.
Man 2: But our point is very simple. You see, when—
Homer: Oh, look! A bird! [Homer runs away, giggling.]
We think, or tend to think, that creativity is the enemy of distraction. Or at least some of us think that: Charles and Ray Eames certainly did. In the middle of the twentieth century, the Eameses were one of America’s premier creative forces. (They were a husband-and-wife team, by the way, not brothers. Ray was a woman. You may already know that, but if you do, you’re in the minority. I can’t tell you how many fancy events I’ve been at, including some from the design and art world, where people say “the Eames brothers,” like they’re the Wright brothers or the Chambers Brothers. The Eameses designed the Eames chair, but also made the famous film Powers of Ten.) And the Eameses didn’t like having music in their office. They thought that it distracted their employees. They didn’t even like having the idea of music around, really. It led to humming and whistling, also massive distractions. Charles said that to him it was like chewing gum. But they also recognized the human need for organized sound. They designed a sound tower. It was a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption. You dropped a marble down it, and as gravity rolled it along its track, the marble struck different tiles and produced different sounds. They commissioned a piece by the composer Elmer Bernstein. In theory, the tiles could be swapped out to create a new piece. It worked in their office to create background music, but also to eliminate distractions; they thought that they could program music that contributed to concentration rather than disrupting it. It showed creativity in producing sounds that, in other forms, they thought undermined creativity. That was how the Eameses solved things.
We think, or tend to think, that creativity is the enemy of distraction.
A Swiss design publication asked me to rethink the design and composition of the Eames tower. I thought about the lazy Susans I had made for my food salons and sold in a small shop in SoHo, large Corian spinning discs that were designed using strobe disc patterns, and how I had imagined that one day there would be a second generation of them that actually functioned as music-making devices as well as art objects. I had imagined actually putting the lazy Susans up on the wall and using their rotational speed to create a beat. That hadn’t happened yet, but the Eames tower project gave me a chance to do something similar. I worked with designers and created an updated version of the tower. My version is actually two towers. The reasons have to do with the way that hip-hop works at its foundation. In its early days, it took existing songs and used them as the foundation for new songs. I thought the best way to duplicate the DNA of hip-hop was to build not one but two towers, and then to let users mix and match them the way hip-hop producers mixed and matched samples into a new song, the way that DJs mixed and matched turntables.
I thought the best way to make music—hip-hop music specifically—was by doubling the Eames equation and placing a rhythm tower next to a melody tower. I chose the song I wanted to re-create. It seemed difficult to think of one at first, but then it seemed obvious: “Good Times,” by Chic. The song was a major hit in the disco era, but also became the foundation for one of the first hip-hop anthems. The bass line of “Good Times,” played by Bernard Edwards, was the basis for the first huge rap song, Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” After that, it has reappeared in dozens of hip-hop songs over the years, sometimes in the same form, sometimes in slightly altered form. I wanted to let one tower stand in for that basic Chic sample and let the other tower add accents that would call to mind some of the many songs that used “Good Times” as their basic sample: not only “Rapper’s Delight,” but also the Beastie Boys’ “Triple Trouble,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” Blondie’s “Rapture,” and Vaughan Mason & Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.” “Good Times” is one tower, because it’s a towering achievement. The other tower permits variation. You can see both from anywhere in the office, or you can see one from the other. They are towers, but they are also pillars. They are structures, but also foundations. They are building blocks in the same sense as DNA. All life, all music, all creativity comes from those same basic ingredients.
The towers, in the end, were a lesson in production, in assembly, in mixing and matching, in fun. They both produced and represented creativity. Most important, they fought boredom without creating distraction, in the same way the original Eames tower did. At least that was the theory: If you were sitting in your office and you heard the plink of the vertical xylophone, you might find it pleasantly diverting. And at least you wouldn’t be making that infernal whistling noise. But they also provided an object lesson in the way early hip-hop was created. Finally, they worked as a kind of metaphor for distraction, and how it didn’t have to defeat creativity. When those early hip-hop artists were sitting around their garages or their bedrooms, burning with the desire to make something, and they heard “Good Times” on the radio, they didn’t resent Chic. They didn’t worry that the time spent listening was somehow detracting from their own creativity. Instead, they heard the song and decided to use it to make their own. They reinvested what they heard in a new artwork. The process began to pay dividends almost immediately. The two towers re-created that process of creation. There was no such thing as distraction. There was only traction.
That’s another thing that creativity is—taking the existing world and making something new from it.
When I was in D.C. at the Kennedy Center being interviewed by Eric Deggans, he asked me an interesting question about the difference between musicianship and musicality. In his view, one was chops and the other was the ability to access that ability. I thought it was worth submitting that to a little class history. In the fifties, families of color started fleeing from down south and went to industrial places: Michigan, Ohio, Indiana. Families got these well-paying jobs that allowed them to purchase houses with garages, and they had extra income for instruments. That helped bring bands into existence. Funk sprung up in Dayton, Ohio. But soon enough, factories shut down and there were foreclosures. There was no room for the music room. If you were born after that, the circumstances were different. You had to find your way to music. Grandmaster Flash desperately wanted to play instruments, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make much noise in the projects.
We have just discussed how creativity can come from distraction, how it can be an outgrowth of the process of recognizing which things are taking your eye off the ball. That was what brought the Eames tower to life. But the distractions can work differently. They can be a matter of seeing the whole world around you, then using this power—this energy—to identify a new particle, a new spark. That’s another thing that creativity is: taking the existing world and making something new from it. Andy Warhol was able to take preexisting logos and icons and recontextualize them. Jagger and Richards were able to do the same with blues. Hip-hop artists were able to see the world not as a familiar set of limits, but as an exciting spray of possibilities. Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles Eames and the son of Charles’s daughter Lucia, defined creativity for me in a way that harmonizes with this idea. “Somewhere at its heart,” he wrote in an e-mail, “[creativity] is the ability to see something else. In the end everyone looks at essentially the same words, notes, colors, problems, answers, numbers, cities, people—all, or at least meaningful subsets of each, are in some sense available to us all. But creativity has to do with how you arrange and construct what you pull out of those familiars.” I would add to that that it has to do with how you pull yourself out of those familiars, which Eames gets to in the second part of his definition: “The astronomer and cosmologist Vera Rubin, who found 90% of the matter in the universe, often said the role of the observer was to confound the theorist. I think creativity in a sense is confounding yourself in both roles as if in an endless chase—when you are satisfied with what you have imagined, you confound it with new patterns you see, and then when you are pleased with that, you conjure up an impossibility, which in turn will be challenged by your new perceptions—always surrendering to the journey.” You lock in to what is there, you see things that others do not, you create, you distract and disrupt yourself with what is not there, and you start the process over again. It’s a cycle: specifically, it’s a life cycle.
Distraction and Traction
Every creative pursuit has its own kind of distraction. I have said several times that where I work is almost as important to me as what work I’m doing, and that the move to Late Night and then The Tonight Show was important for the Roots because it gave us back a small, scrubby practice room that we could use as a recording studio and took us away from the increasingly cushy, increasingly fancy studios where major labels try to stash their acts. The smaller, sparser room created a feeling of leanness, and also minimized distraction. It didn’t eliminate it, of course—Kirk might ask a question, and Mark might make a joke, and someone else (I won’t say who) might have their head turned by something on Twitter or Instagram. But at least the distractions are happening within the space rather than happening as part of the fundamental character of the space.
There’s also another kind of distraction that I have had to endure away from the band, on my own. I remember when I was working on Mo’ Meta Blues. There were days when I would wake up, start a document called “Today’s book thoughts,” and then a cloud of nothing would settle. Ten minutes would pass. Twenty minutes would pass. I couldn’t write a word—and that was a book where what I was mainly doing was relating the circumstances of my own life.
Well, it wasn’t really a cloud of nothing. It was a cloud of distraction. I had, all around me, the Internet. With just a single mouse click, I could listen to an Outkast demo or read about zoning in Philadelphia or hop back in time and find a vintage interview with Wilson Pickett. The one I liked was from the mid-eighties, when he was performing in the kind of package shows that my parents played in when I was a kid, a group of artists banding together to bring back audiences from the past. His was called Night of the Living Legends, and he was on the bill with Lloyd Price and James Brown. James Brown wasn’t up for doing press, but Pickett and Price went on TV with Bill Boggs, a New York–area TV host. They reminisced about the old days, about the chitlin circuit, about soul superstardom, and they compared their package tour with Michael Jackson, who was at that time the biggest star in the world. Michael could draw a crowd of a hundred thousand in a night, they said, while they could draw ten thousand a night seven nights a week. Either way, it added up. His math was a little suspect, because Michael could have played to the same crowd of a hundred thousand every night, but I knew what he meant. There was more than one way to skin a cat.
When the distraction shifts into boredom, that’s the seed of something creative.
Why did I bring that interview up? Distraction. But it was for more than giving you an example of my own distraction. One of the things that Wilson Pickett said has stuck with me. He was long past his prime as a commercial force. There wouldn’t be another “Mustang Sally” or “Land of a Thousand Dances” or “634-5789.” But he was eager to get back onto the air. He told Bill Boggs that it was all a matter of material. At his height, he could command the best songwriters, and he fully understood the kind of songs that were hitting the charts, because the songs that hit the charts were Wilson Pickett songs. He was a pace car. People said, “Get me a song that sounds like Wilson Pickett!” More to the point, he wrote some of those songs. He created songs whether or not he was a songwriter—what he did to “Land of a Thousand Dances” was different from what Chris Kenner had done, and it was unquestionably creative—but he also wrote some of his biggest hits. He wrote “Mustang Sally.” He wrote “Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do.” He wrote “I Found a Love.”
By the time of the mid-eighties interview, he was more tentative, both about finding songs that were right for him and about writing his own. He said that he was playing shows all around Europe, making a living, but that when it came to getting back into the studio he didn’t know what to record. He was a dynamo, still—a powerful man with a powerful voice. But he couldn’t lock in. He couldn’t get what we called traction. I imagined him sitting around backstage and feeling a kind of numbness that he wasn’t connecting with the songs people were sending him. What was he supposed to do instead? Read history books? Go for long walks? He was a singer. He was designed to sing songs that he was designed to sing, if that’s not too circular. In their absence, he seemed frustrated and uneasy.
At one point, Pickett said something optimistic to Bill Boggs. He said that he was hopeful that he could find his way back into the studio. When I was trying to write Mo’ Meta Blues, and instead finding my way into the Wilson Pickett interview, I thought about that simple idea, getting back into something, and how what I was dealing with was almost the opposite. I was always in the Internet. I was always in the middle of all the mouse clicks. What I had to learn was how to get out of something before I got back into anything else.
Because of everything that technology has given us, it prevents us from seeing that the Wilson Pickett feeling—that nervous sense of creative disengagement, that restlessness where you can’t locate any new ideas within yourself—is still everywhere. But that emptiness is now cluttered and crowded. I remember a passage once from a pulp mystery novel where a character said he had emptied a liquor bottle and now felt just as empty as the bottle. That’s sometimes the exact effect of darting around the Internet. You are into everything but you are into nothing.
I have started trying an exercise to help myself untangle this knot. When I find myself going to more than one site in rapid succession—when I’m nervously bouncing from that Bill Boggs interview to the Outkast demo to a commercial for European telecom providers that I find funny because it includes a little bit of music that sounds like Yo La Tengo’s cover of the Parliaments’ “I Can Feel the Ice Melting,” then I stop. I shut the computer, or at least shut my eyes for a second so that I can’t feel the computer. I let the distraction become boredom. And when the distraction shifts into boredom, that’s the seed of something creative. On the face of it, that doesn’t make sense. Boredom seems like the least creative feeling. It seems like a numbness. But it’s actually a way of clearing space for a new idea to spring back up. The poet Joseph Brodsky has a famous essay about boredom where he urges students (I think it was a commencement address) to embrace it.
When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
Brodsky goes on to say that the point of learning about time is that it reminds us of our total insignificance. He is speaking to college students, who are convinced of their own significance. They are big in their own minds. He wants to reverse that, wants them to realize that they are nothing. They are dust in the wind. That seems a little bleak and mean to tell kids. Aren’t we supposed to be propping them up and encouraging them to have their own ideas? Forget about kids, even: Isn’t that what this whole book is about, to remind people that they’re not nothing, that they are something and can make more things? But Brodsky has a trick up his sleeve. He says that when you realize you’re insignificant, you can start feeling two things: passion and pain. Passion is the way you fight meaninglessness. If you were significant, you wouldn’t necessarily need passion at all. You could just sit back and experience things as they came. And pain is the acceptance of the truth of that insignificance.
Boredom, that sense of being disconnected, is what makes you bounce back with a renewed commitment. That’s what Brodsky was saying about Wilson Pickett, even though he wasn’t talking about Wilson Pickett at all. Let yourself go to the sense of being disconnected and meaningless. Let it wash over you and drown you a little bit before you come up gasping for air. Creativity is a fight against that insignificance. That’s all good advice, along with being very high-end philosophical thinking. The only thing I can add to it is that you kids who are growing up in the grip of the Internet have to approach it a little differently. Boredom for all of you now is about putting down the phone and letting a little silence into your day. It’s about not being so compulsive about listening and watching and participating. It’s about hanging back and then extending yourself into the space that’s created. I remember being in Hawaii, staying at the house of Shep Gordon, the legendary music manager, and having an extended period of just unhooking from all the technology that usually connects me to the world. It was terrifying at first, but then it was elevating. It was a reminder that the world needs ideas. In a way, this is the opposite of Brodsky’s idea. You have to remember that you’re insignificant, but also that you are potentially more significant than all the noise that’s being supplied to you at every moment. This is my commencement address to you. Graduates, class of now, as you enter a world that will be increasingly filled with links and apps, take some time to be bored. Take some time to navigate both distraction and boredom. Take time to make time. Now go forth into the world. I wish it was a little cooler today. This robe they made me wear is hot.
Widen Your Circle
But say you have tried all these things and nothing has worked. Say you have put your nose to the grindstone and all you’re getting is a sore nose. When that used to happen to me, I didn’t know where to turn. This feeling could creep up on me that was something like desperation: I had tried everything I knew to try, and I was still coming up empty. But as I have gone further in my career, I have seen that there’s one great option still available.
Here it is: If you’re feeling like things aren’t going anywhere (you know the feeling—stalled, lost, paralyzed, a little desperate, can’t keep food down, long walks at night), make a point of hanging out with people from different disciplines. When I started working in the food business, or rather working around the food business, I liked talking to chefs. I briefly had a restaurant called Hybird in Chelsea Market, but more lastingly, I have been hosting a series of food salons in Manhattan. I pick chefs from some of the country’s best restaurants to cook at my salons. Some of them have come from other countries, actually: Matty Matheson came down from Canada, and we’ve had people who have worked in London, France, and Tokyo as well. The afternoon before they cook, they sit around and talk, sometimes to me, sometimes to each other. I started to like listening to their conversation, and I profited from it. At first, it was just normal enjoyment—I liked hearing people who used different verbs and nouns, and who all seemed to have a similar set of experiences. But after a little while, the part of my brain that subjects everything to analysis kicked in, and I started to notice that they were acting their way through a different set of creative stimuli and responses. That led to a long-term interest in the way chefs function as creative professionals. The biggest difference, obviously, is in the relationship with their audience. Musicians have audiences making demands on them, but not in the pure sense. If the Roots don’t release an album tomorrow or next week, no one suffers. Chefs are supplying a creative product that is also a survival product. When it’s time for dinner, people open their mouths, and it’s necessary to put something in there. Chefs don’t have the luxury of not delivering ideas. As a result, they have, over time, devised a number of strategies for shaking up their creativity when they feel like a stall is coming. Sometimes they do versions of the things I have already talked about. They try to copy an existing dish down to the last molecule. Or else they line up a set of ingredients, pick one, and go from there. Or else they limit their time or their kitchen tools, or they cook with only one hand. They’re expert at the various cooking-show tricks and stunts, but turned toward their own ends.
But the other thing they do is shake it up. They go elsewhere. And elsewhere isn’t where you think. When I first overheard these chefs talking about their excursions, I thought they were kidding. One chef, who I won’t name, was talking about his highly acclaimed New York restaurant. “One day I was trying to think of a new menu,” he said, “and I was just fried. I couldn’t think of how to put it together, let alone how to take it apart and put it together in a way that would move things forward. So you know what I did?” The other chefs didn’t know, and they said so. He paused for effect. “I went to a Chinese buffet.” People laughed. But he was dead serious. “Listen,” he said, “I know it sounds stupid, but that’s a place where you have a million trays and a million ingredients, and someone is thinking about how to order them, even if they’re thinking about it in a way that we don’t normally value. There are visual choices: do you cluster all the green vegetables? There are narrative choices: What if you notice that people are spending too much time at the hard-boiled egg tray, and that’s interfering with the spinach tray right next to it? There are utensil choices: maybe you thought a spoon would be better for the chicken pieces, but maybe tongs are a better solution.” The other chefs were starting to get into it. “Yes,” one of them said. “I have a similar habit, though I don’t do it with food. I go to those giant candy stores. I’m fascinated by how they let you see so many things at the same time.” They all started talking excitedly about the places they went to think when they couldn’t think in their own place. I had to leave that conversation pretty early that day, but I started asking other chefs about this idea. The answers I got were surprising, in the sense that they advanced this theory. Ludo Lefebvre at Trois Mec told me that he goes to McDonald’s, because he loves their french fries. They give him inspiration. “What do you mean?” I said. He started to explain, then stopped, then started, then stopped again. “I don’t know if I can be very clear about it,” he said. “But they are doing something, and doing it well. If I see it up close, I can understand it or at least absorb a sense of it.” He didn’t need to be very clear about it. I understood what he meant. It’s motivation. I feel the same way when I listen to an especially good superficial pop song, even if it’s nothing I would ever try. But the takeaway here isn’t necessarily to depart from your comfort zone to spark your creativity as much as it is to be around people who are discussing the process of having done that.
If you’re feeling like things aren’t going anywhere, hang out with people from different disciplines.
Elsewhere, I have talked about woodshedding and how artists in different creative disciplines brainstorm. This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s related. Comedians, for example, are famous for hanging out backstage, not necessarily trying out material on each other, but just working through the process of being a comedian in the presence of other comedians. In January 2017, the night Michelle Obama was a guest on The Tonight Show in her final late night TV appearance as First Lady, there was a surprise show later that night at the Comedy Cellar. It started as a show by Dave Attell, and then Jerry Seinfeld performed, and then one by one other comedians came out onstage: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari. I was there, and I was around them all backstage, watching them interact. Like the chefs, the comedians had their own unique shorthand when they spoke to each other. Sometimes the point was to make each other laugh. Sometimes the point was to get rid of butterflies. Sometimes, the point was woodshedding, trying out material before it was ready for a larger venue or a more polished destination. That was the point for them. For me, though, it was watching the process as it unfolded, and it was amazingly liberating. I feel the same way on weeks where I hang out around Saturday Night Live. Tuesday and Wednesday are big days, because there are pitch meetings to try to figure out the makeup of the show. For the writers, I’m sure it’s a series of minor heart attacks around the mechanics of trying to make a sketch work in the context of the larger show. For me, it’s like the best and most rewarding vacation ever. I get to see how things work when other people are working. Whenever I have done that, I feel creatively rejuvenated.
Keep Your Comforts Close
Not too long ago, I was listening to a podcast on the edge of sleep. The guest was Seth Rogen, the comedian and actor. Rogen was talking about how he got started, and what kind of comedy he preferred, and how he learned to take risks: many of the same things that I’ve been talking about in this book. He also talked about something very different from what I talk about: drugs, and his lifelong interest in them. He started smoking pot and taking mushrooms with his friends when he was a young teen, thirteen or fourteen, and he had continued using drugs in one form or another throughout his adult life. As a kid, they were useful because they helped him deal with his social anxiety—which he realized was not simple anxiety, but a kind of enhanced sensitivity to the environment around him. That was the same set of skills that let him observe things and become a good comedian, so it was important for him to find some way to keep it controlled and focused rather than let it control him.
As he became older, as he became a professional comedian and comic actor, he noticed a shift in the way people used drugs and the way drugs affected them. On film sets or in comedy clubs, he noticed that some people reacted to getting high in ways that separated them from the work they were doing. They fell inside themselves, or became unnaturally attuned to everything that was going on around them. The drugs didn’t work to their advantage. For him, he said, they were something different. They continued to be a source of relaxation and a way of producing comfort—they could give him a feeling of well-being that kept him profitably connected to the work he was doing. Sometimes he didn’t use during movie shoots because he was nervous about how a director or costars might react, but he didn’t think for a moment that the drugs themselves were interfering with his ability to work. He even made a joke about his tolerance, and how he could smoke with friends and they’d be out of commission and he’d be no more affected than if he had just had a glass of water.
I already knew that different people reacted differently to drugs. I’ve been backstage with musicians, and I’ve seen the ones who could barely stand right next to the ones who seemed like they could still do their taxes and not miss a penny. But there was one thing Rogen said that really stuck with me. He said he had worked with actors who purposefully decided not to take drugs while they were working. They worried that it would be unprofessional, or that it would incapacitate them somehow. Those actors, he said, spent their entire workdays not wanting to be on set, because they wanted to head home so they could light up a joint. They would have been better served if they had permitted themselves drugs on set, because it would have kept them in their work. Otherwise, they were separating the idea of comfort and pleasure from the idea of creative work, and that resulted in a kind of split state where they were never really engaged in their acting. Rogen, because he’s smart and thoughtful, went on to discuss how many an actor who felt uncomfortable could achieve certain depths in a performance that might not otherwise be available, but I didn’t go on with him in his analysis. I was still stopped at that moment when he said that those actors who resolved not to get high on set were keeping themselves away from their happiness.
Extend that argument into more general creative work. Let’s say you like exercise. Let’s say you like eating. Let’s say you like listening to music. Let’s say you like hearing the voices of other people. Let’s say you like being inside. Let’s say you like being outside. Let’s say you like wearing fuzzy slippers. Whatever your personal preference, no matter how significant or how trivial, if it’s a source of pleasure, and in denying yourself that pleasure you’ll be entering a state where you think about it all the time, then you are working against your own creativity. You might think certain things are a distraction, but going without them can become a larger distraction if you are thinking all the time about the time when you will be returned to them, or them to you.
You might think certain things are a distraction, but going without them can become a larger one.
That was an interesting and lasting insight, and it leads to a kind of rule. Make your environment reflective of your tastes. Eliminate distractions, including the distraction of being without any of the distractions you need. I want to thank Seth Rogen for this insight. I also want to use this opportunity to clear up the pick controversy. A few months after I heard the interview with Seth, he went onto social media and posted a picture of himself. Well, it wasn’t just of himself—it was of himself standing next to a framed Afro pick that he had taken from me when he was a guest on The Tonight Show. People got angry at him for all kinds of reasons: that it was cultural appropriation, that he was turning a historically significant artifact into a souvenir, that it was uncool to make a Questlove Museum as if I were somehow an object of curiosity. I posted right back at Seth to let him know that it was all fine with me. I even included a picture of the bucket in my dressing room that contains dozens of picks that are identical to the one he took. The dustup was not that dusty, and it was over. (Seth: the second I release my Afro pick line, I’ll send you a case for your collection.) When I did give it a few seconds of thought, I realized that the (non-) controversy reinforced the point Seth made on the podcast. If playful, affectionate pranks are your wheelhouse, stay in that wheelhouse. Don’t let people make you feel that you’re something you’re not, or else you’ll get in your own way.
Unblock Party
When you’re having trouble thinking of new ideas, go to one of your old ideas and rework it.