Be yourself.
That’s the kind of crap they teach kids nowadays. Alongside “Everyone is special, each in his or her own way”. Not that it’s not a nice sentiment but when everyone grows up thinking they are some sort of unique being unaffected by the influence of their parents or the media, what’s most likely to happen is they become slaves to a single ideology which they are convinced are innate parts of their beings.
This is the kind of mentality that has you being born and dying largely as a carbon copy of your parents or the people in your hometown. It’s more convenient than exploring multiple sources of ideas or lifestyles and rarely has any immediate repercussions in one’s life, just a slow burning feeling of inadequacy that is considered to be inherent to existence.
Those who work in creative fields however quickly learn the drawbacks of having a single influence. As a musician you may love rocking along to AC/DC, but after your third album of prime Angus cuts, when things still haven’t quite taken off you may wonder what you’re doing wrong. That riff on your third album’s lead single kicked Thunderstruck’s ass yet here you are, still stocking shelves.
No idea’s original.
That’s the kind of sadistic rot that gets bandied about by people who never formed a full sentence themselves that they didn’t pick up third- or fourth-hand from some ignorant colleague or other. “Oh, you may be proud of your song,” he’ll posture, chin pointed to the horizon, “but it sounds just like Ben Howard to me.” Then he flits off back to the pub to find out what he feels about the economy, the Romanians and the best ways to ignore that ever-present feeling of profound worthlessness.
Of course that track you’re proud of probably does sound like Ben Howard. Even if you’ve never listened to Ben Howard, you probably share an influence or two with him. But that’s what originality is; drawing the best of your favourite music together like ingredients into a casserole and making it into something of your own. Originality comes from being aware of how things influence the way you think, the way you see the world and the way you create, and then taking control of what you allow to influence you.
This is why the history of music is so fascinating, you can play band mathematics with nearly everyone. What do you get if you mix The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Pixies? Nirvana of course. But take those influences and how do they break down? Pixies are surely just a mix of The Stooges, Captain Beefheart and Black Flag. Early Beatles are little more than a mix of Elvis and Smokey Robinson, Elvis = Hank Williams + Ray Charles, Ray Charles = gospel music + rhythm and blues and these family trees of music always find their way back to roots music.
Radiohead don’t hide the fact that ‘OK Computer’ was a hot mix of Beatles melodies, Ennio Morricone guitars, Miles Davis’s ‘Bitches Brew’-era sonic whirlwinds and Krautrock’s electronic sensibilities. The Talking Heads and Brian Eno influence on any number of modern acts has dominated most of the best music of the past ten years, from the drawn out single chord that makes up LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends, to the prominence of vocal samples in Daft Punk, to the world music rock of Arcade Fire’s Here Comes The Night Time, to the melodic percussion on St. Vincent’s Cruel, to the entire second album by Vampire Weekend.
Neither did David Byrne appear out of the ether. ‘Remain in Light’ arguably Talking Heads’ most original album is made up of the poly-rhythms of Fela Kuti, the rapping of Curtis Blow and the electronic sounds of ‘Low’ (which itself draws from the music of Kraftwerk, who were influenced by the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and he was not the first man to experiment with sounds, electronic or otherwise).
Death of the Author.
But there is an element of creation that is more than just an assemblage of already existing materials; the individual element. It’s that abstract ingredient that makes it so that the first guy to bring together the sounds of The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Pixies on one album doesn’t automatically get to be Nirvana. That element that Kurt Cobain brings himself as a personality and a voice and a perspective are what make these influences more than just an arbitrary mishmash. They give it life, they make you believe it and they make it original.
As a writer I’m conscious of what other scribes influence the way I try to communicate with words. I admire the simple logic and clarity in the journalistic writings of Christopher Hitchens, the surrealist humour and use of colloquialisms of Flann O’Brien, the passion and arrogance of Lester Bangs’ music writing and the pathological truth-seeking and sparseness of George Orwell. But there’s also the influences you can’t help. The inevitable Americanisms, internet-speak, inadequacies caused by inexperience and an innate desire in the writer to over-analyse and categorise.
Surely the same is true for music. The difference between a song when the lead guitarist has been playing guitar for three years as opposed to six, the lyrical unwieldiness of a songwriter who hasn’t started reading poetry, the accent in which a singer speaks and the extent to which they allow that to come through in the singing. All of these things are at once a means of and the reason for communicating something about one’s self.
Lisa O’Neill is one of the few Irish artists who can sing in her own accent and make it sound good. She sings with a Woody Guthrie-style howl, but in a Cavan accent rather than in a Southern drawl the way so many other Irish artists who draw from American folk music do. She has landed on a voice and a style that is decidedly her own by taking influences from American folk, Irish trad and whatever else, and in the process is able to effectively tell us about herself, her sense of humour, the events in her life and the place she comes from.
It’s the inseparable blending of form and content, so that the way a thing is expressed is as valuable as what is being expressed because it says as much about the artist as the artist is consciously saying in his or her words or chord-progressions. If you like The Sex Pistols you probably enjoy a bit of bureaucracy-bashing, if you enjoy the music of Lyrnyrd Skyrnyrd you may be inclined towards white supremacy. Music has always been about community, and the community you’re a part of affects the person you become and the ideas you have. Knowing where an artist is coming from musically is the best way to find out what makes ’em tick.