The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
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Are you kidding me?? This is probably the most inspiring part of the whole show! This is how you create things. It's a long, "unglamorous" slog full of dead ends, muck & mire, and discovery. This is what gets an artist excited - the oeuvre in gestation, the birthing pains, the grim determination depsite not knowing whether you're pursuing genius or madness! Gets me fired up every time.
The completed creation is usually a bit of a downer, like when you finish a good book.
* I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.
Same thing happened to me when I first listened to U2's Joshua Tree and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. The first halves just sound like Greatest Hits records. But nope, they're just so ubiquitous that I've already heard half the album through cultural osmosis.
Found out that (according to wikipedia)[1]:
"is an alteration of bonavox, a Latin word which translates to "good voice"."
[0] - https://www.bonavox.ie/ [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono
This fatigue cannot be cured by decades of not hearing it.
But it also can. I caught myself enjoying old one hit wonders that I hated at the time due to listening to it so much. Then decades later, I could enjoy them.
I can enjoy a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise like, if I listen to one of two instruments within. In my opinion, playing an instrument, not matter how badly, greatly expands the joy you get from music.
I've also found that listening to a different take on the song, like hearing a live version, can extend it, too.
It's more that I'm... "done" with them. I listened so many times, I know every little sound, and I don't need to hear it again.
I'm now conscious of when I'm overplaying something and lay off it for a while.
A similar thing happens for me when songs are used in commercials or movies and I subsequently have trouble listening to them without the visual association taking over. This has "ruined" many songs for me in the past, but after enough time away I can thankfully appreciate the song on its own.
Likewise as an adult I found out about the romantic drama within Fleetwood Mac, and the Rumors album was resurrected for me. I really hope something like this happens to me again, it's a great feeling.
. Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
. Up in my bedroom (making love)
. I got up to wash my face
. When I come back to bed
. Someone's taken my place
Seriously? You're in love with a girl who cheats on you in 5 minutes? I guess if you're polyamorous but if that was the case the song wouldn't exist. The fact that they person sticks around for this mental abuse is a complete turn off. I love how catchy the song is but I can't take message of such a bad relationship and that fact that he's digging his own hole by continuing to hope she'll stop cheating.
I still ultimately prefer The Monkees.
I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.
Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.
There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2WBBcH6OPU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6MNGHeEuI
That was my joke about Shakespeare in the root comment: his expressions are so commonly quoted that they have become cliche.
If you listen to the albums, not what the DJ's spin in the radio, you got a much richer tapestry of songs, maybe a greater respect for their creativity, inventiveness.
As an example, people unfamiliar with the Beatles complete catalog have of late been flipping over "Tomorrow Never Knows" [1] (from 1966!) and overlooked gems like [2] "Hey Bulldog".
And some people thought they were just "Yesterday" and "Yellow Submarine"....
I was surprised how 2000s kids enjoyed Michael Jackson's music, even those without parents feeding it to them before.
It's become fashionable to say that the Beatles are bad (maybe you don't enjoy the music, but they were revolutionary) or to trivialize them as a boy band (they were, but even early on they were so much more). I don't particularly love them, but it's hard not to be fascinated by their fairly brief career.
https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-pau...
That kind of struck me. I save all my presentations, so I can use them again. But I never do, I always gotta make a new one.
I first thought watching Get Back might "spoil" the magic of how the Beatles made records. But somehow seeing all the quotidian banality and hard work made it all the more impressive.
It's like some form of "recency bias". Its a similar effect to when the Tennis US Open is in NYC and in the weeks before and after the event its impossible to get a tennis court.
Peace and Love
That is what Wikipedia is for? Who knew?
"Genius" is just practice, and deliberate at that. You don't see it. It's not some dramatic characteristic that you see in Paul McCartney, or whoever; No, John Nash was not intensely examining numbers and equations as they were dramatically floating around him like in "A Beautiful Mind". He did exactly what you do, only without the neuroticism; without the time-wasting; without the rumination.
Just plant the damned seeds. See what happens. Stop wasting your time ruminating. Imagine if Bach, or Da Vinci, Palestrina, Van Gogh, or Von Neumann decided to wait, and wait, until everything was just right, before they begin their studies/work. Nobody today would recognize those names. You would not be able to listen to Missa Papae Marcelli. It would just not exist. These people would be called "workaholics" today, an incredibly unfortunate term. Bach wrote over 1,000 pieces in his career. Van Gogh has over 900 paintings in less than 10 years.
As far as I can see at this point, "geniuses" are simply people who do not waste their time. Q3/Q4 of the Eisenhower Matrix is another planet to them. They live on the "Important" row, and they utilize that time.
To tie this into the HN community - think of the people who "want to learn to program" and yet they spend all of their time ruminating on which book to read, or language to learn, et cetera.
Definitely true that they had a remarkable result, but I don't know of anyone who actually works/worked that hard and 'failed' (by any reasonable definition). Most people tend to dramatically overstate their persistence and work ethic.
Every person in that group who worked hard at it has had success at some level. That varies from making distributed indie films to running a network television show, but some level of success.
None of the successful people half-assed it, none of the hard workers utterly failed, none of the half-assed people made it.
The degree of success is largely out of your control. Innate ability, luck, etc are all factors. But the time and effort expended are in your control, and they're the primary factor of being able to make a run of it.
Are you seriously handwaving away survivorship bias?
It's like saying "I'm not going to begin to exercise and attract a partner until I meet them first" - a recipe for failure. You must become the attractive person, and then, when they happen to enter your life, you attract them.
I apologize. I'm riffing.
The fact that the work is necessary is what most people overlook. I just worry a little that if we expect too much then that itself can be a barrier to sustainably putting the effort in.
It’s OK to work hard and achieve a modest amount. We should take pleasure in what we do achieve.
Work Don't
hard try
.-----.-----.
Get | :-) | :-( |
lucky | | |
|-----+-----|
No | :-( | :-( |
luck | | |
'-----'-----'
You have to merge this table with a S-curve of growth so you can work 'a bit' hard in a lucky enough context. And repeat the cycle.
I'm the kind to grind hard for long but blind.. it leads to a boring death. Find where, when, how to spend your mental energy is crucial.
Needless to say, he did nothing of the sort, and the world passed him by.
The topics are always similar; "which book", "which audio course", "which foreign language", et cetera. They seek perfect conditions, and they do not exist. They fantasize about how great their life will be once they obtain these perfect conditions. Eventually, they may move on to another subject, as their interest wanes, and repeat this cycle.
Also, most importantly, don't expect popular acclaim - the Beatles are an extreme exception - and don't measure your 'success' that way. Especially in art, have faith in your vision and accept that the public may not grasp it now, soon, or even in your lifetime. Even many great artists recieved little acclaim (or worse) in their lifetimes.
> They did not wait for ideal conditions.
In fairness, they didn't need to wait because ideal conditions were there - in culture (esp. at time that valued innovation and creativity), in music (ditto), in recording technology, in television, in mass media generally. It's a bit harder to be the Beatles today. (Who is doing it?)
People usually are conforming their interests to their society. Most people are not dreaming of being baroque composers today, but perhaps audio engineers, or whatever. The Beatles are a product of their time. They saw what was being encouraged, and it influenced them. A Beatles does not exist today because our society does not encourage it.
Frankly, there exist many contemporary painters who I consider clearly superior to Van Gogh, and their society thought so as well. For whatever reason, our society doesn't value them as much as him. Our views have reversed.
I do not know if this makes sense at all. I'm sure that I'll see this tomorrow and wonder what I was thinking.
It makes great sense, thank you. It's a cliche'd point in most situations, that people are products of their time, but in this case it explains and joins two mechanisms - the Beatles not only benefitted from 'ideal conditions', but were possibly driven (in part) by them.
Please let us know about/link to at least a few of these many? Maybe the best ones. Thanks.
Hard work and resolve will get you far, and genius alone is no guarantee of success, but true genius isn't simply the application of enough hard work and resolve.You either win the genetic lottery or you don't.
Often one might think that results are the indicator. But I don't Crick and Watson were genii (prefer to sound of geniuses) just hard workers but when the payoff of their hard work came out you would probably be excused for thinking they possessed that special gift.
You say that like it's some sort of indictment. Being an expert, possibly even a master, sounds great.
But without doing that, you will never know.
In addition, many "geniuses" were never acknowledged in their own time. So, were they actually "geniuses"?
>Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
>Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
>Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
>Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
>Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
>You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
>And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
>No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
>And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
>Racing around to come up behind you again
>The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
>Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
>Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
>Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
>Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
>The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Secondly, neuroticism is a big problem with creatives and its not like these people didn't have the exact same motivation and mental block issues, its just they found their own ways around them. Drugs and alcohol were often the answer for many of them.
Thirdly, a lot of them led pretty hedonistic lives. Especially your painters. They led Parisian-style cosmopolitan lives of late nights, affairs, hiding gay affairs from the authorities, dealing with hangovers, not showing up for work on days they felt uninspired. Nearly all of these people were self-employed and sold directly to buyers or were funded by patrons. They didn't have any idea of the 9-5 grind and would probably consider it horrifying. Remember, almost everyone on your list lived in pre-capitalist societies and as such had different economic freedoms and systems than ours, and ones that, for successful creatives, meant that actual "work" was entirely different than what you may think it meant.
Art studios for many of these people were a bit like a corporate setup. They'd dictate an outline and leave reference work and a young apprentice or skilled artisan would do a lot of the painting. The master would show up occasionally to correct them and contribute stylistic tones and outlines. The master's real job, like a CEO, was marketing and he was off wining and dining with society to keep his avante grade status as an elite who is welcome in elite circles. These people's social lives were like Versailles's court. They had a great deal of dealmaking and alliance making to even be seen as a viable and important artist. This business and social skill is as important as the art.
And yes high performers were incredible perfectionists. There's no shortage of stories of a famous artist having violent fits because the work didn't match their vision. Mental healthcare back then was poor and Van Gogh obvious was into self harm for example. Perfectionism is the price of entry, imo. It makes us strive for excellence but weighs us down as well. If you're not perfectionist motivated, you may not be able to compete against those who are.
Yes you can cherry pick the prodigious, but they also have artistic block periods, slow work days, etc. And a lot of the higher content creation came after fame when they could afford to farm it out to the factory studio.
So yes, try hard and get over your fears, but there's no magical state of being a "do-er" that fixes everything. Like everything in life moderation is best and a lot of these guys had pretty pleasant lives compared to the stressed out office worker of today. When was the last time you got drunk or had sex at lunch or decided to take a few weeks off to go to Vienna because you were bored with life? Or you decided to move to another kingdom because a low-level regal wants to farm you out to her friends.
tldr; the modern grind is historically inaccurate if you apply it to the past masters. Leisure lifestyles were far more the norm for creatives back then than grindy ones. The nosleep, work 3 jobs, prance on social, never be "off," live with puritan middle class morals, stimulant driven grind is an artifact of our unregulated capitalism, not history.
You misunderstand. I poorly use the term of "blue collar" as a mindset, and not to their socioeconomic status. It's definitely not the ideal term.
I disagree with your words on perfectionism. I believe that their work exists in spite of their neurosis.
Van Gogh, Von Neumann, Bach, The Beatles; all of these people were industrious with exceptional outputs. Van Gogh is famous for it, as he discusses his process in his letters, adopting the ethic of farmers, painting quickly & in poor weather, et cetera.
It's not relevant anyway. It was an excuse to preach. I did not intend to submit the parent and, as usual, regret it.
Actually, in the case of the Beatles we can sort of see it. Half of their first album was covers, and the originals, while nice pop songs, were still a long way from their greatest work a few years later. During that time, they worked really hard, they wrote and released a lot of songs, and their songwriting improved immensely. How they were able to work so hard and stay focused while in the maelstrom of Beatlemania, though, is hard for me to grasp. Most others would have gone astray.
My own Beatles preference is for the middle period, roughly from Help! (1965) through Revolver (1966), when they were still polishing their pop songwriting skills and only beginning the experimentation. Though there’s great stuff later as well, of course.
Their whole existence was really only a few years. That said, even "I saw her standing there" kicking off the first album is a really good 'basic rock' song that has become a classic (they're all classics, I know, but it's... just still so fresh 60 years on). Not 'greatest' piece, of course, but holds up well compared to a few other originals on that album.
> During that time, they worked really hard, they wrote and released a lot of songs, and their songwriting improved immensely. How they were able to work so hard and stay focused while in the maelstrom of Beatlemania, though, is hard for me to grasp...
Their progress is astounding. From "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (October 1963) to "Day Tripper" and "Drive My Car" and "Nowhere Man" and "In My Life" (October 1965) - that level of progression in writing/recording/production in a self-contained band which also produced 2 films, 5 albums and more than a hundred shows around the globe... it's just not going to be repeated. Between changes in the entertainment business itself, as well as the talent/skill combination we witnessed in those four... it just won't happen again. But we have all the recorded legacy to enjoy :)
I made a comment about One After 909 in another thread last week. It's the only(?) song we have of theirs with a recording from both 1963 and from 1969. The evolution in their playing, their approach to their own song - is really something to ... I hesitate to say 'marvel' at, but just really engaging for people who want to hear their progression. IIRC it was slightly under 6 calendar years - March 1963 to January 1969. They were good as a group in 1963 - they were so much tighter (yet looser!) just a few years later in 1969.
It's unsurprising that the Beatles' music they created as a group was better than what they did afterwards (much better). After all, if you're John Lennon, who is going to tell you your latest song sux, and btw, here's an improvement to it? Nobody but a fellow Beatle.
I think very few bands since have worked as hard as the Beatles. Their 2 years in Hamburg playing long hours in night clubs daily is something few bands can do (or would want to), and that forged them into something special (not just in technical musicmanship). The Beatles never shied from putting in the work.
Other 'factors of the time'. They wanted to play rock and roll. There just wasn't THAT MUCH of it. In 1961... there were a few years of the genre, several albums by their heroes, but... it's not enough to play and attract people in bars for weeks on end. There were other factors too, but that constraint was one, that helped push them to expand a bit beyond just 'rock' stuff (some earlier standards, etc) to help differentiate themselves from other bands (and eventually self-composing as well).
By coming back from... IIRC, their second or third Hamburg stint, they had somewhere around 800 hours of playing together as a band. That just wasn't a thing (yet). I mean - not even most of their heroes/idols didn't have that much stage time as a single unit. The "self-contained rock band" really wasn't a "thing" yet.
I've been in bands, and we were never even in a position where we'd be able to play 6-7 hrs a night for weeks on end. I'm sure no one would have wanted to anyway (like you say).
That's just an absolutely crazy amount of hours to be performing in such a short period of time, and nearly impossible for most musicians to actually get paid for (outside of relentless busking).
"Like the Beatles" how?
They were at the right place at the right time (that is, the time where pop music was starting, hence you had less granularity), and singing in the "correct" language to get a massive audience.
Further than that, they were lucky to not get broken up or faded out early.
This in no way diminishes their work, but it was a hole in one.
In a way it's kinda of a Fermi paradox of bands, except there's no paradox because nowadays there are multiple bands (at smaller niches) with several very competent musicians playing. Or "manufacturing" bands.
Is Max Martin a lesser musician than Paul or John? Probably not really and I don't like most of his songs.
Of course, to realize their potential they also had to work hard, and collaborating with other exceptionally talented artists also no doubt helped.
I would also push back on the idea that the music they created as a group was much better than what came after. George, in particular, released arguably his best work (all things must pass) after the breakup, and both john and paul released great albums afterward (imagine, ram)
That said: All Things Must Pass is unquestionably George's best work and the overall best Beatle solo album. But I'd argue that every other solo album was considerably less interesting than, say, Abbey Road or Revolver. Imagine has two classics, some interesting stuff, and some filler.
Scene starts at 1h02 in Part 1. His talent is depressing.
encomiums, anomie, Antipodean, recce, &c.
I love language and people using the rich breadth and depth of it, beautifully and resonantly. Here, these words are either misused or my understanding of the author's meanings are far off the mark, over and over, to the degree that I don't know what they could mean (beyond misuse of these words). I haven't seen the documentary, however, so maybe that is the case.
The essay doesn't need them, these words fall (IMHO) awkwardly into sentences.
Ha. I didn't catch that (though I still think anomie doesn't make sense there - see the other subthread).
Lovely writing overall. I especially agree that “the anomie and the ecstasy” is delightful.
Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
Anomie: lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable.
Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
recce: another term for reconnaissance (only found in the British English dictionary) We see how much [Paul McCartney] relishes his physicality, scaling the gantry, climbing the chain, leaping up to the rooftop for a recce.
> Durkheim’s term for this “froid moral” in which morality breaks down is anomie, a state of deregulation, in which the traditional rules have lost their authority.
That seems like a different meaning. Or am I missing something from the documentary? Is there some sort of anomie in the sense of the IEP quote (which roughly matches the Oxford English Dictionary, which in term cites Durkheim).
> Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
As I understand it, it's not 'praise highly', but "A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric." (per the Oxford English Dictionary) Reed's praise isn't that.
> Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography, but what? Why should we think Jackson's tools or process or ... (or what?) are somehow upside down? What is upside down? How are they upside down? Why use a word, one that stands out, if there is no way (afaict) to understand its meaning? One (at least) suspects it means nothing.
Note that Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and presumably was in the country while editing, so the editing suite was ‘Antipodean’ in the sense of the dictionary.
In this case I took “Antipodean” to have the additional meaning of extreme remoteness from Britain (both the setting of the documentary and implicitly the centre of the universe from the British perspective).
Writing in British as opposed to American covers quite a few subtly different shadings of word meanings, as well as a willingness to use words a fourth-grader wouldn’t have encountered.
That was a long time ago. We could bear in mind that for most of human history, people in Britain had no idea that Australia or most of the world existed.
A number of us have done our best to explain what the author is conveying with the choice of language he is using but if you don’t believe us then there’s not a lot more we can do.
> "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
Maybe. Maybe it was meant to emphasise the distance and isolation from much of the rest of the world. Or maybe it was just a turn of phrase that is common and understood in a context and experience outside your own.
People who criticize someone else for trying to show off linguistically, er I mean, live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.