it's one in the morning and i stumble upon vh1's behind the music: christina aguilera. i get caught up in the program at the exact moment the creation of the song "beautiful" is being explained. what i learned was that the song was written by linda perry, inspired by her own personal experience and, essentially, the seed of her bare emotions. my first thought: so christina aguilera is just the voice and the face of linda perry's heart and mind. i mean, yes, i'm sure christina could identify with the song and that added to her own emotional performance of it, but i can't help but hold on to the fact that it wasn't her original idea. i always used to believe that being the singer automatically meant being the songwriter and the producer, the genius behind a song, but some years ago when i realized that that wasn't true it nearly blew my mind - it proved that there could be a difference between talent and genius, between performer and creator.
i respect all artists as long as they take what they do seriously, but i give more props to the cats that work behind the scenes, the ones who perform with their minds far from center stage. i thought back to the episode of "so you think you can dance" that i was watching earlier. i think it's safe to call mia michaels a genius when it comes to choreography and the contestants on the show are there because they exhibit talent, right? so in conclusion, choreographer :: dancer as songwriter :: singer. a choreographer's or a writer's career is not meant to be in the spotlight. being a creator takes courage, control and a level of humility that most are unable to achieve seeing as we're all egotistical by nature. it's hard to grasp the fact that your work will always precede you. makes me wonder if my arrogant ass could sit back in the audience and applaud at the end of a fantastic film, watching my name scroll by a mile a minute in the credits under "screenwriter," no one around me having any idea who the hell i was, or if i could sit in the back of a bigtime listening party, vibing to an incredible song, the only one in the room who knew or cared that my name was all over the inside of the album cover booklet under "songwriter." knowing myself, i would have a mid-life career-crisis and shamelessly become that one actress that ruins a great movie or that one wack autotuned voice on an otherwise damn good song, all because i couldn't stick to what i do best - sitting off to the side somewhere, thinking for everyone else's benefit.
talent - ashley valerio & kupono aweau , genius - wade robson
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sum total: yep.
ReplyDeletecourage, i think, is the big thing. because there's creation and then there's the enactment of the creation--which is never what the creation was intended to be. or, rarely ever is. the play always goes a little bit wrong, the movie casts a blonde instead of a brunette, the singer goes for vibrato two counts early. so the creator not only has to sit back and be, for lack of a better word, unacknowledged, but also be completely cut off. because if they screw up your work, you actually have to let it go.
makes me think of ben jonson, english playwright. didn't really understand the "letting go" bit so he would direct all of his plays and send his actors into nervous breakdowns because he would nitpick until they did it exactly as he envisioned it.
hmm. i guess playwrights have it a little different. people acknowledge them--or the big ones--but they, too, have to give way to the actor's interpretation. like how shakespeare wrote caesar but people will pit brando and heston's antony against each other.
lots of stuff here. +500, Raymond, +500.
i think about this all the time.
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