Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Creative people have specialties. But they also have restlessness. That’s part of the paradox: how do you keep your talent sharp while still exploring ways to expand your talent? How do you keep doing the thing that you’ve been doing while also doing other things?
The answer, at least as far as I can tell, is a version of the principle I outlined in the section on micro-meditation. The trick there was to simultaneously be present and be absent, to immerse yourself in the moment but attain a state of mind that momentarily suspends you and takes you away from the task at hand. There’s a broader, less internal version of this same strategy, and that’s something I’ll call “the departure.” Make an effort to make your life different. It’s the only way that it will stay the same in terms of creative inspiration and creative energy. Meditation helps you switch the channel when it comes to what is moving through you. The departure helps you switch the channel when it comes to how you are moving through the world.
Singers obviously sing, but one of the other things they commonly do is paint. I remember reading an interview with a famous singer who was also a painter. It might have been Joni Mitchell, who made paintings for a bunch of her album covers. It might have been John Mellencamp, who has done the same for some of his albums. It could have even been Tony Bennett. Whoever it was talked about how painting was more than an outlet, how it was a translation of their musical ideas. The paintings they made were not bad. Critics liked to call them “accomplished.” (That’s always the word that gets used when they want to say that a singer is a good painter but not as good as someone who has devoted their entire life to painting.) This singer talked about the way that music and painting share some qualities. You have to pick a palette, whether it’s hot and energetic or cool and controlled. You have to pick a rhythm, whether it is rapid and frenetic or slow and languid. You have to pick a volume. You have to decide if you’re organizing everything in an easy-to-understand way, like a pop song or a figurative portrait, or in a more difficult way, like an art song or an abstract. I don’t remember exactly which singer was talking about painting, but I know for a fact that it wasn’t Miles Davis.
During the late 1970s, Miles started to paint regularly. He painted faces, and bodies, and his idea of what music sounded like. There are two quotes from Miles that stick with me. One is about his clothes. “I’ve been painting and sketching all my life,” Miles said. “For my tailor I used to draw my suits, ’cause he couldn’t speak English.” I like this quote because it makes me laugh. The other one is more useful: “Painting is like therapy for me, and keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music.” Therapy isn’t only about solving problems: it’s about pacing out the process of wrestling with problems. During the period where he took up painting more seriously, Miles was hobbled by health problems and addiction issues, and he took an extended break from playing the trumpet. He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t recording. People wondered if he’d ever release another record. He didn’t, however, take a break from making things. He knew instinctively that he had to keep his mind occupied, but he didn’t really mean his mind—he meant his creativity. He meant that he needed to engage with the process of encountering a blank space, whether in time or in space, and filling it in with his sense of how things should be.
Again, a new skill doesn’t mean a new talent, necessarily. Often, you’re dealing with the same talent. You’re just putting it into a new place, where it can acquire new energy. There’s some scientific basis for this. Neurologists have proven that brain plasticity matters, and that when you broaden your life even in small ways, you broaden the brain that helps you to understand your life. Monomania may sometimes seem like the answer, but only if you don’t think about anything else. It’s not about taking breaks, or pauses, or naps. It’s about excursions. It’s about departures.
Even as I make this point, I step away from it, to some degree. After all, this works against the ten-thousand-hour theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. Or does it? I want to suggest a correction: for every hour you spend doing something, spend at least a few minutes doing something unrelated. That’s Questlove’s corollary to Gladwell’s Ten Thousand Hours. Getting into a groove can be dangerously close to getting into a rut. There have been times when I have worked for hours and hours on a drum part, only to realize that it was no longer nurturing me, even as I got close to perfecting it. I needed to go elsewhere to be able to make the most of my time behind the drum kit.
This is somewhat abstract so far. What does it mean in real terms? Start by thinking of the specific places in the world that encourage creativity in the broadest sense. The great creative director George Lois was a big fan of museums. He used to recommend that everyone in advertising or magazine publishing or fashion who worked in New York City spend an hour after lunch walking around a museum. Even if it wasn’t your thing, it could energize your thing. That’s much less dirty than it sounds.
Today, the world gives you a million different kinds of museums. Search through Spotify by random keywords. When you’re choosing a movie to watch on Netflix, watch the next one in the alphabetical list instead. Taking unexpected turns will yield great rewards. For a creative person—a person who’s following this overall path toward ideas, and the other steps in this specific process—those unexpected turns are often reinvestments. Michael Solomonov, one of Philadelphia’s top chefs, told me that most of his food ideas come when he’s experiencing different kinds of art: when he’s listening to music or watching theater. The artist Wangechi Mutu told me that she likes to listen to audiobooks, or at least to recordings of authors reading their own work: “Right now,” she said, “I am listening to Derek Walcott reading his poems. Tiepolo’s Hound in particular. His voice is like an ocean brain. I also recently loved hearing Ngugi wa Thiong’o talk about memory and the power of erasing a people’s memory in order to replace it with new memories so that their past shall no longer exist. When frustrated, I try putting mysterious things and pieces together, creating a whole that is tougher and more beautiful, and makes more sense than the individual bits.” The way tradition gets used, conserved, and extended is central to the way creative minds work. Cornel West often calls himself a “bluesman in the world of ideas,” by which I think he means that he draws on existing traditions, injects a deeply personal dimension, and tries always to locate the universal component of his idea. The best way for him to explain himself is through a metaphor. We have metaphors because people’s minds try to make two unlike things like each other. We have creativity largely because of metaphors.
Shaken and Stirred
All of us have places where we feel comfortable with our surroundings, and we hope that we’ll find our way to at least some minor inspiration if we stay there long enough. Moving away from those familiar spaces and places raises the stakes. It puts us in a position where we will find either major inspiration or no inspiration at all. It’s an adrenaline rush. It renews the risk.
Shaking it up doesn’t need to be dramatic. It can be simple. The Bee Gees famously wrote “Jive Talkin’” because the causeway over Biscayne Bay had an interesting rhythm under their car tires when they drove across it for work every morning. Barry Gibb started hearing it in his head: tun-ticka-tun-tucka-tun. That became the basis for their biggest hit up to that point, and an important transitional song as they moved from chamber pop to disco.
Be receptive to ideas all around you. When I walk through my food salons, I’m listening for fragments of conversation that I can incorporate into new ideas. It’s like being in an airport. Whenever I am in one, I think about the final scene of the first new Planet of the Apes movie—the one with James Franco. At the end, there’s a scene in an airport, where a pilot who is sick with a virus is about to board a plane. The final scene shows a red line that illustrates where the pilot is traveling, and that shows the rise of simian flu, the virus that will kill off much of humanity and lead to the rise of the Planet of the Apes and the next movie in the series. So that makes me a little nervous—call me paranoid—but also, when I think about it, it makes me excited. There is no simian flu, as far as I understand. But there are hundreds of thousands of other ideas, and they spread in real life the way the flu spread in the movie. I hear snippets of conversation that turn into rhythms. I hear references that spark other references. I hear words I don’t understand, which motivates me to go and look them up and create new ideas. I’m not unique in this, nor are airports. They are nexus points. But they are also gateways to departure.
Get Actively Away
These examples of departure so far are relatively passive ones. That doesn’t mean they’re not good examples. They are. And they come with advice. If you’re a musician, don’t forget to look at paintings. If you’re a songwriter, read about subjects that are unfamiliar to you. Those departures will inform you. They will enlarge you. They will shape your sensibility, or reshape it. They will nourish you in moments when you might otherwise feel as though you’re starving, creatively speaking.
But there’s a second level of departure. When you’re practicing a creative discipline, practice another one. If you are a singer, draw cartoons. If you are a writer, try to sculpt a little bit.
There are some familiar channels of expansion and outreach. Many jazz musicians paint—there’s something about the way they see songs in their mind that lends itself to reforming and reorganizing pigments on canvas. And many painters branch out into filmmaking. They already understand visual composition and working with light and color.
It’s not about taking breaks, or pauses, or naps. It’s about excursions. It’s about departures.
What’s really interesting to me, at least in terms of creativity, is what skills they bring across from one art form to the other. From my unscientific—but not unartistic—survey, I think they make a point not to bring all their skills across, but rather to learn new skills. In the mid-nineties, there was a movie about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat called Bold Strokes. Just kidding: it was called Basquiat. The movie was directed by another painter, Julian Schnabel, who was trying his hand at becoming a filmmaker.
People loved Basquiat. Or rather, some people did. Some people didn’t, for pretty specific reasons—the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch boycotted it because he remembered how Basquiat himself hadn’t liked Schnabel when the two of them were painters. Creative lives are complicated. But many people accepted Schnabel as a director after they had accepted him as a painter. (It didn’t happen for everyone. Robert Longo, another decorated artist, branched out into film with the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic, which very few people liked, and which didn’t succeed commercially.) With Schnabel, it’s interesting to think about how he embarked on a second creative career and succeeded. Were certain skills transferable? Did he see moving pictures a certain way once he had spent a life with still pictures?
At around that time, David Bowie gave an interview. He had just finished acting in Basquiat and some other movies, and the interviewer asked him how Schnabel was as a director. Specifically, he wondered how a painter translated his creative skills into the world of film. He asked Bowie to compare Schnabel’s filmmaking approach to the approach of Tony Scott, a much more commercial director who Bowie had worked with some years before. (The Tony Scott movie was a vampire movie called Fangs for the Memories. Just kidding: it was called The Hunger.) Bowie’s answer was interesting:
Tony’s priority was creating a complicated and asymmetrical frame. And the visual was nearly all of what he was doing. He didn’t particularly instruct me or have great ideas on the throughline of the story. It was about moving one interesting visual against another. One would have thought that’s how Julian would work. It was about narrative, about forms. I wouldn’t say that the visual was secondary with Julian but definitely the momentum of the story he was trying to tell had equal priority to the visual.
What I learned from this quote was that people travel from one art form to the other in complex ways that put all kinds of fascinating pressure on their creativity. A painter making a film doesn’t just set up painterly frames and then turn on the camera. In fact, as Bowie suggests, Schnabel’s motives for going into film in the first place might have had nothing to do with relying on his visual ability. He might have been confident about that and wanted instead to strengthen his storytelling or his sense of building character. This returns to one of my earliest points, which is that creative people are creative. I thought of that! What I mean by it, as I’ve been saying, is something a little bit less obvious and idiotic than it might seem at first (but, sadly, only a little). I mean that creative people have some impulse inside of them that compels them to approach material. That material can vary. But when they approach it, they approach it with a certain attitude. It’s an attitude of change, or of active engagement, or of balancing reason and irrationality, or of channeling personal passions and obsessions and fetishes. There are lots of options. But if you have one of these creative attitudes, you’re a creative person. And if you’re a creative person, then the things you make are by definition creative. A Schnabel movie can potentially articulate a set of ideas as completely as a Schnabel painting.
That doesn’t mean that it’s just as good. That’s a discussion for another time. Maybe Jim Jarmusch was right to boycott Basquiat. The point is more about the departure. When an artist in room A goes down the hall to room B, what does he learn there? Is he bringing all his tools and notes from room A, or is he just walking in cold and presenting himself as a new student? There are lots of answers, depending on who you are, where you are in your career, how far apart the rooms are from each other, and so on. But the departure itself is a vital part of any creative life. Otherwise, you’re trapped in one place.
Speaking of trapped—and this will seem like the most obvious segue in history—Schnabel would go on to direct The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is an amazing movie about creativity and departure in its own right. It’s about a French journalist, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was the editor in chief of French Elle. Bauby suffered a massive stroke in his early forties and found himself locked into his own body. He was completely aware of everything around him, but he was also completely physically paralyzed. He couldn’t move his arms. He couldn’t move his legs. He couldn’t speak. All he could do was blink his eyes, and one of his eyes had to be sewn shut because of a tear-duct problem. The man couldn’t even cry. He developed a code that involved blinking his left eye to send messages. And then he wrote a book. It took him, it is estimated, two hundred thousand blinks to write it. I get dizzy after ten. Without the ability to move or speak or really even touch anything anymore, his other senses sharpened, especially memory. Is memory a sense? If it isn’t, it should be. (This idea, that blocking up one path in life enriches another path in interesting ways, isn’t new. In fact, there’s a common notion that blindness makes musical ability more intense: Blind Willie Johnson, Ray Charles, José Feliciano, Stevie Wonder. I could have just used Stevie Wonder as an example. You don’t need more examples than that. Stevie wasn’t blind from birth. He was put in an incubator and got too much oxygen, and it damaged his eyes during infant development. One thing that I like to think about with Stevie, and it doesn’t exactly belong in this section, but I’ll put it here anyway, because I don’t need an excuse to think about Stevie Wonder: How do his songs have images in them? In a song like “Bird of Beauty,” he’s writing about a bird, and he talks about colors. Where do his visuals come from? Does he hear them in other songs and move them over to his songs, knowing that colors have certain emotional content even if he can’t see them?)
Travel is as much about the place you’re leaving as the place you’re going.
Schnabel adapted The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into a movie. This was about a decade later, and it was something different all over again. If the first movie was a departure, this one was a kind of synthesis. You can see all the things that Bowie was talking about, but because it was an adaptation of an existing book, Schnabel could also focus more on the things that Bowie said Tony Scott was doing. Bauby remembers much of his life in flashback, and those scenes are sometimes composed like paintings.
The writing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the most extreme case I can think of where someone abandoned one creative pathway and started off down another, only to find that the second one had its own rich set of benefits and drawbacks. But it’s not only about the extreme creative resourcefulness that Bauby needed to write his story in the first place. It’s also about his sense that life is all about being trapped in certain environments and habits and trying to break free of them. That’s what the diving bell in the title is—it’s an old-fashioned compartment that’s lowered into the ocean. In the movie (and I guess in the book, too, though I haven’t read it), there are portraits of other people trapped by fear or by conservative thinking. They’re in diving bells of their own. The butterfly represents freedom and the beauty of that freedom. When you escape your diving bell, you enable yourself to become a butterfly.
No one would recommend locked-in syndrome as a form of creative motivation. That would be crazy. But Bauby’s forced departure from his old life had interesting creative consequences. You can stage a version of that in your own life. You can artificially force yourself into a certain departure, then see what effect that has on your work. It will have some effect. And because I’ve spent so much time roaming around in other people’s life stories, I’ll end with a story of my own. When I first started working on Mo’ Meta Blues, I had never written a book. I had written before, both in school and out. I had written blog posts and online essays and some newspaper and magazine pieces, but I had never taken the time to sit down and write a book. It was a collaborative book, which was a perfect way for me to do it at the time, because it let me both teach and learn at the same time. But it was a departure. I started to think in different rhythms. The unit changed. It wasn’t a bar or a measure; it was a page or a chapter. The idea of revision changed. The idea of how I could or should incorporate other people’s thoughts changed. Rich, my manager, was more experienced at writing, and Ben, my cowriter, was more experienced than both of us. But I got out there and did it. I went into that world and made that thing.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
A departure is never quite what it seems. Or rather, travel is as much about the place you’re leaving as the place you’re going. I know a woman who grew up with me in Philadelphia. She went to Rome when we were in our early twenties, and when she came back, she told me about it. Her description was good and detailed, but it was also based on Philly. This plaza reminded her of Rittenhouse Square, a little. There was a building that had some of the same feel as the Academy of Music. It wasn’t just that she had a limited context, though that was part of it. It wasn’t just that she was talking to me, who also had a limited context, though that was part of it. It was that new ideas grow out of old ones.
If you think about it, they don’t have much choice. Pick your metaphor. Pick composting, where organic materials (including some unmentionables) become powerful fertilizers. Pick an echo, where you send out a sound and it comes back to you at a slight remove, to the point where you can (and should) imagine that it’s someone else saying it. Hey, that’s a good idea that’s being suggested by that other voice. I should do something with it. I have, throughout my career, seen so many examples where I stepped into a new field—embarked on a departure, in the language of this chapter—only to find that it was deeply connected to something I had done earlier.
That’s how I got to the lazy Susans. Lazy Susans, of course, are those circular platforms that sit in the middle of a dining room table. They spin around, which means they can be used to pass things from corner to corner without reaching through the middle. I have mentioned them before, but I will mention them again. Time is a flat circle, just like lazy Susans are. In 2015, I manufactured a few limited-edition lazy Susans made from Corian, a countertop material, and displayed them at my food salons. But they weren’t ordinary lazy Susans. They were decorated with strobe-disc patterns, so they are lazy strobes. Strobe disks are tools of the trade for DJs—they are record-size discs that have, printed on their surface, black-and-white patterns. The patterns look nice, but they’re also functional. When they’re spun at a certain speed, they look like they’re not moving at all. It’s a way of checking the running speed of your equipment, verifying that the RPMs are accurate. The lazy Susans I manufactured didn’t spin at turntable speeds. If they did, the food would fly off onto people’s laps. But they drew on music, technology, and food in ways that connect all three disciplines. They reminded me that music is divided between artifact (the disc) and experience (the sound) in much the same way that food-art is divided between the permanent (the dish) and the temporary (the food). They also reinforced ideas of circularity and slight returns, in the True Detective sense—time is a flat circle, whether it is in the recording studio or the kitchen. Most important, they reminded me that I was forever in the position of being reminded. I thought I was having a completely different idea, but it turned out to be an idea that connected to ideas I was already having. Creatively speaking, that’s often the case—the more things travel, the more they stay at home.
Take Me to the Other Side
But when you depart, you also have to be open to what’s on the other side. You have to be willing to pack for the trip with everything you think you need, but also to use what you find when you get there. Rich Nichols, the Roots’ late manager, my mentor, used to travel with us all the time. He was on the plane. He was in the bus. At some point, he developed a strategy for packing. He would only take a day or two of supplies. Anything else, he figured, was easy to acquire. He could buy underwear. He could buy T-shirts. It turned out, later on, to be a good practical calculation. If the airline was going to charge (or overcharge) for checked bags, it made sense to cram everything inside a carry-on. But Rich didn’t do it for financial reasons. He did it for creative reasons. He needed to rethink himself in that new environment, even for a minute. He needed to experience real change, even if it was fleeting.
This is the other element of the departure. Allow yourself to change. Rich devised a packing strategy, but he was always that way, and because of that, we were always that way also. No matter what you already have, understand the desire to remake yourself. This is part of the creative constitution, a restlessness. When the Roots have made records, we’ve tried each time to strike a different tone, to use a different approach, to employ a different process. We know that this is the way we’ll end up with a different record. We aren’t afraid that it will be less creative. We want to see what happens.
Expect change. Demand change of yourself. Try, as always, to keep it within the bounds of the attainable.
Expect change. Demand change of yourself. Try, as always, to keep it within the bounds of the attainable. There are many stresses in the creative life, so it’s important to limit the self-inflicted ones.
One example springs to mind. In 2014, while working on my book somethingtofoodabout, I spoke in depth a few times with the chef Dave Beran. Dave and I became friendly. At the time, Dave was working at Next, a Chicago restaurant with an innovative setup. Every three months, Next became a completely different restaurant. They might be a steakhouse for a little while, and then become a Thai place, and then become a French bistro. Change was built into the DNA of the establishment.
What this meant was that he had to hire a certain kind of cook. I assumed that he would need people who were generalists, rather than people who were good only at one thing. Dave agreed, and then he disagreed a little bit. He didn’t necessarily want generalists. He wanted people who could see themselves as a specialist in one thing and then, a few months later, see themselves as a specialist in another thing. They had to have passion, but that passion had to be convertible to other passions.
There’s another, considerably different example that also springs to mind. In 2016, Spike Lee made a documentary about Michael Jackson, specifically about the years in his career spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he went from being the frontman of the Jackson 5 (and then the Jacksons) to being a solo superstar with Off the Wall. In the documentary, Spike shows a handwritten note that Jackson wrote to himself.
MJ will be my new name. No more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look. I should be a tottally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang “ABC,” “I Want You Back.” I should be a new, incredible actor/singer/dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer. I will be better than every great actor roped into one. I “must” have the most incredible training system. To dig and dig and dig until I find. I will study and look back on the whole world of Entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off.
I forgive him “tottally” and “masterer,” and even the weirdness of “I will be better than every great actor roped into one.” And I am not sure that this is the right mix of self-awareness and self-protection. Remember: we’re dealing with someone with limitless talent and drive who burned himself out in every way that a person can burn himself out—unhealthy habits, bad associates, questionable choices, disrespect for reality, and in the end an early death. But even as I warn everyone else (and myself) against this letter, I start to see its appeal again. There’s something amazing and affirming about a person who sees so clearly how he’s going to change, who sees the cocoon and the butterfly coming out. It’s the best line in the letter: “I will be magic.”
And yet, don’t allow yourself to change too much. Departures have to be handled judiciously.
Who are the most creative people in human history? Duke Ellington? Picasso? It’s hard to say, because the most creative person in human history might be someone you never heard of. It might be someone who moved restlessly from new challenge to new challenge, always flitting, never alighting. Departure is not a license to go away and keep going away. You still have to make things along a consistent line, to return to the site of your principal project, even if pure creativity keeps pulling you further and further afield. The purely creative Ellington might have made music in the morning and then turned to a quilt, after which he wrote a comedy sketch and drew a cartoon. Creativity is at least partly about discipline, about staying on the same line. Well, more or less staying on it. It’s like a closeup of a rope. Mostly it’s the rope, sturdy and thick, holding things in place, but there are fibers shooting off in all directions. You can shoot off in all directions, but don’t forget to also be the rope.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that departures are not relocations. You depart, but the countermovement is a return. You’re not a nomad. You’re not rootless. You have to preserve your sense of your original mission and the importance of coming back to it. It’s not so much “Wherever you go, there you are.” It’s “Wherever you go, there it is.” Your central creative ideas move with you, and you move through them. Departures don’t upend that apple cart. They just cart it around.
Speed Is Distance Over Time
Departure can be dangerous, in theory. People worry about becoming different things. Artists, especially, worry. They know they should branch out. They know they should take risks. But how far? And when do they know they have gone so far that they are somehow jeopardizing the integrity (and even the existence) of that original artistic being?
An obvious example here is Liz Phair. When the Roots were just starting out, Liz Phair was an indie-rock darling for her first record, Exile in Guyville, and she put out two more records in a similar style, Whip-Smart and Whitechocolatespaceegg. Then, in 2003, she changed. Her fourth album, Liz Phair, was almost shockingly different than the three that had come before it. It was slick and overproduced pop in the service of songs that had none of the rawness or toughness of the ones she had been writing before. Many of her fans hated the record. The New York Times attacked her for the shift, accusing her of becoming boring and riskless. This seemed like a little bit of a paradox to me. Moving away from what you had done—from the only thing that had earned you your fame—seemed like a tremendous risk. I can’t say for certain what Phair’s reasons were. Maybe she was fed up with being an underground recording artist and the limited commercial gains that came with that life. Maybe her record company was fed up with her limited commercial gains. Maybe she was genuinely interested in a more polished kind of songcraft. Maybe she was evolving personally and wanted to make music that reflected that change. Maybe her motivation was even more complex, bringing in elements of self-sabotage and preemptive undermining so that her audience (which had sprung up fairly—and Phairly—quickly) couldn’t take her down. I can’t get into her head. But I can say with confidence that she embarked on a departure.
There’s another example a little closer to my heart: Chubby Checker. Everyone knows him for “The Twist,” of course, and for his name, which is a weird variation on “Fats Domino.” He was one of the stars of early rock and roll, when it was uncomplicated dance music. In the early seventies, he was living in Holland, where he ran across some young rock musicians. They were simpatico enough that Chubby Checker decided to make a record with them. And what a record. It’s a bizarre psychedelic artifact that has at least one song, “Goodbye Victoria,” that’s a little-known masterpiece. It’s derivative of some of the other music that was happening at the time, like Hendrix, like Lee Moses, but for Chubby Checker it represented a major departure. I don’t know if he ever considered recording it under the name Ernest Evans, his real name. I do know that it ended up in the rubbish bin of his career, forgotten by all but the deepest collectors. But it’s just as authentic a Chubby Checker record as “The Twist,” and arguably more so, since “The Twist” was an artificial novelty record. These cases are part of a broader genre of Sounding Different but Still Sounding records. At the height of his fame as a hitmaker, Stevie Wonder made a mostly instrumental record, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, as the soundtrack for a nature documentary. The Beastie Boys picked up their instruments and played live. Some people didn’t like those departures and dismissed them as experiments. Other people understood they were part of the Journey Through the Secret Life of Art and went along for the ride. Who gets to determine when an artist is on track and when an artist is off track? The artist is the track.
Moonlight Mile
The other thing about departures is that they let you do multiple things in the same vein, or in nearby veins. Back when we first started touring, more than twenty years ago, with the Beastie Boys, Mike D would disguise himself with a beard and DJ between the opening act and when the Beasties came on. People wanted to know why he was doing that. He had a reason. He wanted to set the mood and the atmosphere for the audience. Eventually they found out. When I was DJing, I didn’t disguise myself. It had an effect on the rest of my work. Suddenly what was once my hobby was threatening to become the thing I was best known for. It was a strange reversal.
And when you depart, come back. In 2016 I started Questlove Supreme on Pandora. It was a departure for me, in a sense—I have talked about how it gave me a new way of using the DJ part of my brain and activating the formal curatorial impulse. One of my favorite shows was interviewing Stephen Hill, then the president of BET. We talked about how he started as a DJ at Brown University, and how he remained interested in the energy of being a radio personality. I’m fascinated by his passion for radio. As the president of BET, his fantasy was still to be an afternoon jock. That’s someone who understands that departures work in two directions: that when you move on to something else, that earlier thing becomes your departure, in a sense, as well as your anchor. You need to both push toward new ideas of yourself and push back toward the earlier ones that encouraged you to push toward the new ones. I think of it as a road. I have been to places where the sides of the road drop off into deep ditches. That’s terrifying, and it limits creativity. When you are making things, you can’t worry too much about the ditches. You need an infrastructure that allows you to stray productively from the middle of the road. If you have that, if it is sound, if it is properly maintained, you can go as far as you want over toward the edge, which is as far as you need.
This princple has a related political component. I don’t want to use this space to be too explicit about those matters. This isn’t the space to litigate Russian interference in the election, or to identify the forces that swept our forty-fifth president into office. But I do want to talk about the immediate effect the election had on the very notion of our nation’s creativity.
By the end of November 2016, everyone in the arts community was in full crisis mode. Everyone wondered how the new president was going to affect the things that we do. Would it make us more empowered? Would it recharge us? Would it put us at risk? How do you make art in uncertain times?
Just after the election, I participated in a keynote event at the Kennedy Center on the NEA’s Day of Creativity. I was talking onstage to Eric Deggans, NPR’s TV critic. (Before the event, I found out that he was also a drummer, and in fact he had interviewed me all the way back in 1994, when I was in Germany, right after the release of Do You Want More?!??!!.) Jane Chu, the chairman of the NEA, introduced us and raised some important questions. How can communities be strengthened? How can people connect? “The arts give us those tools to discover and celebrate our assets and transform our challenges into advantages. The arts can connect us with our neighbors, and they give us an opportunity to celebrate our differences rather than automatically view them as a sign of division.” People nodded. “The arts can level the playing field. They are a source of enrichment.” People nodded some more.
When Eric and I came out, we tried to keep the conversation light. We talked about people I had worked with. We talked about keeping our chins up. But there was the sense that art needed to engage with the world, and that the world was crystallizing in a way that was hostile to the aims of art. This is a line of thought that connects a number of other things in this book. It’s about stilling the voice inside you so you can locate the proper destination. It’s about finding like-minded creators—and sometimes about resisting the need to affiliate with them too closely at the expense of your original vision. A few days before I was at the Kennedy Center, the author Jacqueline Woodson presented an award to younger writers as part of the ceremonies surrounding the National Book Awards. She spoke about how she had been marching all week, how she was tired of marching. But she urged writers to write toward the revolution no matter how tired they became. In the Roots, we have always tried to do that. But there was a countermovement, too. At that same ceremony, the comedian B. J. Novak, who was hosting, wondered if he would now be drafted into a political discussion. It struck him as complicated. He knew that the administration’s ideas were dangerous. He didn’t agree with many of them. But if he started making himself a more overtly political artist, what would happen to his ability to just play around with ideas, to write things in air, to experiment, to wonder?
Back to Black Cool
I am deeply sympathetic to both sides of that argument. There’s an idea that circulates through the culture, Black Cool, that identifies the ways in which African American artists occupy (or at least used to occupy) a spot in the culture where they serve as trailblazers in terms of fashionable affect and cutting-edge ideas. These days, that’s shifted somewhat. African American culture may no longer be the principal site where conventional culture is resisted and rejuvenated. The bloom may have come off the rose to some degree. But the change in status is also an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to stop addressing the politics of black creativity and talk about the trickier hope that black creativity might become, in some sense, productively apolitical.
I’m very much aware that the role of black people in entertainment has been limited to four microcategories. They blur somewhat between personas and actual personalities, but they work as containers for the way that black artists are perceived. Number one is the vicarious bad-guy fantasy. Everybody loves the bad guy. Number two is the Mandingo, the oversexualized image. Number three is the ambiguous, diluted, apolitical safe route: no opinion, no rocking the boat, an artist who doesn’t really have a personality. And fourth is the hardest to shake off, and that’s the idea that black creatives are somehow out of this world—that they’re operating with a level of talent or genius that can’t be rationally understood. That’s flattering, on the face of it, but it’s part of a larger mechanism that is anything but flattering. Dave Chappelle once told me that the best thing that President Barack Obama could ever hope for is to be seen as just a mediocre dude. What happens instead is that there’s a narrative of superhuman ability that dogs black creatives. Think of it for athletes. You see a LeBron James: he’s out of this world. Michael Jordan’s not human. But on the other side of it, O. J. Simpson is an animal. Every plus-two in genius points creates a deficit somewhere else that lets too many people in the world think of too many black people as subhuman. We’re never level. Last year, Donald Glover created a show on FX called Atlanta that was the first time I’ve seen surrealist comedy done in that particular way. The characters are three-dimensional people, not caricatures. They break category. They relate to others because they are fully human. At the end of the day I want to be seen as three-dimensional and relatable, more than anything else.
Once again, this puts me in a conflicted place, a place of tension, and—by extension—of creativity. At the same time that I feel sad that Black Cool has faded, I feel hopeful that its fading will give me (and all of us) a new way to be visible. And at the same time that I feel hopeful about the fading, it makes me sad in specific ways. The saddest and most specific is that it forces me to consider the unraveling of one of my most closely held secrets. For years, people have been asking me what creative projects I want to do but fear I’ll never be able to do. Sometimes I say I don’t have an answer, but I have an answer. I want to bring back Soul Train. It’s the show—the cultural moment—that meant the most to me in my youth, and I want to try to bring it back into the spotlight. But even as I say that, I realize that the moment of Soul Train may no longer exist. Soul Train sprung up in a moment of Afrocentric identity, when there was Black Cool, and when expressing it could speak directly to an audience. In an increasingly multicultural audience, where there’s less black and less white and more of whatever we’re becoming—rainbow? gray?—I can no longer clearly grasp the role of that old model of cultural expression. I’m not saying that it isn’t there. I’m just saying that I’m not sure. Again: tension. Again: creativity.
Expand Experience
If you’re a musician, go to an art show; if you’re a painter, study dance.