What He Twat...

As I spent a lazy afternoon munching on the soft pretzels my wife made today, I let my eyes glaze over as I stared at Twhirl, with its never-ending parade of “I am here, doin this” comments. (Guilty as charged.) Then this twat from William Gibson floated by and woke me up:

Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the “now” factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum.

I was, like, huh. While I was chewing on that, he followed it up with this:

Less creative people believe in “originality” and “innovation”, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.

I’m not entirely sure how to phrase what I’m thinking when I read those two statements, but the fundamental truth of them rings fairly loud to me. One of the things that bothers me about hanging out with musicians is the Gear Knowledge Ass Sniffing that goes on. Al Jourgenson’s old engineer Critter was the fucking worst for this. “OMG, I can’t believe you don’t know about the new Phattmatic Pro! You’re still working with the original Phattmatic? Didn’t you read the latest issue of Mix? It has like 12 extra nanowebbers!” That sort of shit. (Of course, all my conversations with Critter predated the inventions of “OMG” and “phatt” but I’ve put the statement in to modern vernacular for poetic effect.)

I’m guilty as charged in that, as well. I’ll drop some science on a motherfucker if he shows his belly in any way. One opportunity I missed that I greatly regret is when the keyboard salesman at Apple Music was trying to sell me on a CS70 they had in there, and told me it had new tines. I uncharacteristically shook my head and just walked away, but that’s exactly the sort of opportunity I normally relish. And you do too, admit it.

And that right there is the rub, isn’t it? I think I’ve misread Mr. Gibson’s point nicely, but you see where I’m going with this. Our quest for having (or at least knowing about) the absolute bleeding edge of our business at all times blinds us to the existence of a fairly gigantic wealth of software, hardware, and technique that is right behind us. While it is true that, if you’re a professional, this is a competitive business, you also know, if you’re professional, that very little “latest and greatest” can make up for technique and imagination.

I like to think that, while it’s nice to sit down next to this $15K rack of high end convertors and effects every day, I’d be perfectly capable of making a song with just about anything. Whether that’s true or not is up to others to judge, but sometimes it’s good to reflect on the fact that a bigger modular or a better A/D/A convertor or a MIDI controller with more knobs or a guitar with more… uh… strings? won’t take the place of knowledge, and knowledge in this age of marvels is free as the air.