Definitely Jobe

The Meaning of Life Part 1: True Grit (Do Your Work)

I’ve seen people give up on themselves and sit still. It is what it is. But the best way to get out of the rut is to do some work. This is a hacked up manual for myself, to remember why I do the things I do in life. Music, family, friends, and the works. It’s a short trip, might as well have a manual.

First The Mindset

It’s hard to talk about life. You have to have a certain presence that comes off the right way so that you don’t sound overly glamorous, or on the opposite side, too subtle. Then there’s a whole other group of the “woe is me” type. There’s essentially 2 ways to think

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” - Albert Einstein

That simple decision of whether you believe the world is mostly friendly, or hostile, is a large portion of your mindset and how you view things in life.

“Wisdom is about experience which, hopefully, would include risk taking and being somewhat adventurous.”

“you don’t stop doing things because you get old, you get old because you stop doing things.”

“you can describe parts of me, but who i am, and what i need, these are things I have to find out myself.”

“If you wait around for the clouds to part and bolt of lightning to strike your brain, you’re not going to make a lot of work.”

“You’ve got to learn to love something deeply. I think it’s love. It sounds sentimental as hell, but I really think it is.”

In the previous posts, which was the inspiration for this one, Andrew Zuckerman breaks down the process of him making his work that I’ve been referencing lately (Music and Wisdom) and his project being a sort of “graduate school on life.” Check it out

The basis of the half-hour lecture is it’s not so much inspiration, but curiosity and rigor that get works completed (especially creative work). As this post title suggests, you gotta dig the good shit out of life. I have to say that curiosity is a main inspiration in itself. It’s just that people seem to think inspiration is magical and that it’s a gift from the gods, and it just happens randomly. It’s more so you arrive at it by having dignity, rigor, a work ethic and …

applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials

Watch all of Everything is a Remix

Austin Kleon in his book, STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST says,

Be Boring, It’s the only way to get work done.

Working

It’s no good to just sit around and wait for a wave of inspiration, as if it’s some magical thing that is bestowed from the creative Gods. Some people think some people have it and others don’t. Well, thats not it either. You arrive at good work by working. You arrive at new ideas by questioning, not sitting around waiting for the muse, or good ideas to strike. It’s about trying different things, opening your heart and mind to the world, and taking what you get from that and give it back. Give, take, give, take. Smashing ideas together, and the right combination of words and ideas leads to a higher sense. Taking in the now and reflecting it out.

The number one rule is to accept every idea as valuable. It’s not the idea that translates and connects us anyways. It’s actually the presentation of the idea that’s crucial. The relation to the human experience that life is. So including the senses in creative work is almost always necessary to create something evoking to people, whether it’s dealing with matters of the heart (emotions) or the mind (thought).

The problem is most people want to create meaningful work, so in return you get a lot of cliches like love your neighbor and something that sounds like it’s preaching morality, trying so hard to sound meaningful, which comes off as sounding boring (a lot like this posts). When talent is had, you realize the emotional connection you create through subjects and specifics is more important. It’s the underlying deeper meaning that you may not even understand, even if you created it, or at first glance of others materials. So, by nature, ideas aren’t good or bad, it’s a matter of presentation and representation.

Quick Tips

The right combination is what you’re after. So the idea = the vessel for the human experience. The remedy is encourage play and don’t try so hard to be what you already are. Let your subconscious and intuition, or natural thought lead the way. There will be a lot of B material, but crap is the best fertilizer. So pull the resonance from the fertilizer and combine them, add too them, and ask questions about all of it. You get the story, meaning or main point, after the sketch, much like a painter makes a painting after a sketch. Work on an emotional level, and live in process and quit thinking in terms of an end goal, like “oh, this has to be meaningful.” If you are honest to yourself, and recording sketches the meaning will generate itself. It’s not something you force. But if you look to the end of a process to bring you happiness, you will reach it less often because you are thinking about the future and not the now. The key is to learn to enjoy being in process rather than looking to the external world, and thoughts of the future panning out. It creates space for you to truly be content.

The Now

Think about it, the now is why people enjoy all those thrill seeking things, or why they get lost in the world of their hobbies. Personally speaking, skateboarding stops my busy mind from auto-piloting into worrying about the future constantly. Bills, and anything to come is put on the back burner. Songwriting on a musical/playing level, puts me in the now, in a more flowing state. On a writing level, It makes me more aware of things in life to draw from. Extracting the human experience from things in life and translating them. 

I find that in whatever I’m doing,  I’m attempting create something that gives flesh to the soul of the mystery, the awe of the world.  A lot of times, in songwriting, I attempt to capture some undefinable, unexplainable thing. I break it down into specifics and detail and build it back up. The ultimate, desired effect is giving the soul of the idea/inspiration/subjects some flesh and clothes, to present it as honest and potent as I can, maintaing the mystery factor. Paul Simon has truly captured the difficulty of Songwriting in a well put quote.

A songwriter’s supreme challeng is being complex and simple at the same time

There is something magical about the world working this way. Complex and simple at the same time. I’ll follow up on this idea in the next post (Sparsity, And Art)

Much of creative work is just pointing your camera and taking a picture. Thats the heart of the matter. Later, you go through and look for a bigger picture and adjust the furniture in your newly built house, the idea. You may start with a simple emotion, but flesh is needed to give it that human experience that everyone can relate to. 

Modern Youth’s True Grit. Do Your Work

…so the remedy, is the simple 10 steps of Steal Like An Artist. But first, be boring and do your work.

Andrew Zuckerman’s Wisdom Project

I have a post coming called True Grit. Doing Your Work. Which was heavily influenced by this interesting lecture on Wisdom which Zuckerman says made him “a sort of graduate school on life.” Other influences for the coming posts include rockstars who lyrics where so abstract and egotistical (They thought they were so cool for being so ambiguous), Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist, and the video series, Everything is a remix. 

WARNING HUMANS. The next few posts will be preachy and sort of a summing of how I view life and what I think is most important in the significance of each of our tiny existences in the scheme of how large the concept of life and the universe is. Enjoy.

Music is Universal

Music is universal. Music is love. Music is my religion

There Is No Bad Music

It doesn’t matter what you do like or what you don’t like. It’s all here for us either way. give and take. Two of my favorite Excerpts from Andrew Zuckerman’s Music project.

Chick Magnet, Ezra Koenig

Crazy Girl, Fiona Apple

Music Tastes: Indie-R&B

Relatively fresh on the scene, as in past 2 or 3 years, and probably the genre I visit most frequently.

First of all, the term “indie” today is growing in use and not much can’t be pinned to the term. I think it mostly represents a wide group of musicians who are promoted by smaller independent record labels. Ultimately, it results in a truer representation of the subject material and music being created, thus a better artist.

For instance, these songs are different than the more recent hits, collaborated on by 5 different writers and 10 producers for a single track. Indie brings in a wave of freedom, imperfection, and unique visions of sound to the forefront. I think of The Beatles as the perfect Indie band. Think of how much their sound changed over time due to influence, strange instrumentation, relationships, recording freedoms, and drug use. There you go. Indie.

Over the last couple of years a lot of dipping has been happening, blurring genre lines in all fronts, not just indie music but also in other genres like pop.

They pull inspiration and techniques from R&B icons like Boyz II Men, Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, and Mariah Carey. Later, R&B hit mainstream and was represented in popular music like Hall & Oates. More recently, Beyonce and others sprung onto the scene blending it with the current electro-pop trends of dance music and the UK wave of underground music like dub-step, house, trance, and the works. Despite the differences R&B has had over the years, they all have one thing in common. It’s a very polished or distinguishable production sound. For the longest time, Indie heads have been openly admitting R&B influences, sampling R&B, and now they’re replicating it in their own voices. 

The Sound

As always, I’ve handpicked several of my favorites bringing us the blessings of their creative talents, translating the spirit that created the universe. It’s a learned language. And thank the gods for all the classifications so I can nitpick for the rest of my life. 

Most importantly, I think there is always a hip-hop drum machine rhythm holding the track together, creating the foundation of the groove or slow jam. Sometimes they come grimier than others, or more minimal, but almost always danceable. Yes, even if you don’t like the song it’s still highly danceable. If you were to extract the drum loop, I guarantee you would want to record your own tracks over it, or for you less fortunate, at least you’d be spiritually driven to move your feet or shyly bob your head. It’s human nature.

A Drum Machine

There are also heavy doses of synths driving the tracks. Maybe there is a sub bass helping hold down the foundation with the drums. Maybe it’s a pad morphing, and swelling in the background, or a lead melody line weaving in and out of the holes in the track, filing the musical spectrum. Frequently, as in the art of remixing, a sound effect will transition sections. A loud thunder, or some white noise are all prime choices to be inserted as transitions between an Indie-R&B verse and chorus, or maybe you just filter it, or chop up the vocals and create some crazy stutter sounds.

A Synthesizer

The Vocal

The most important aspect of any song is generally the vocal. It’s the message. In indie-R&B, there may be auto-tune or other heavy vocal processing. As far as performance, a lot of character and soul always exists in the vocals. They linger on notes and seem to float in and out of phrases like fog. It’s almost charismatic. 

Lyrically, the themes are usually simple. Love, love, and more love, and more specifically….PASSION. Passion starting or dying. I think it’s something about the nature and spirit of the danceable tunes that lyrically set the themes up to evoke a simpler emotion than other lyrically dense music that I enjoy, like the self-reflection of folksy stuff.

It is called rhythm and blues, so most of the inspiration for the tracks comes from passion stirring lyrics, or the beat. Some bands include The Weeknd, James Blake, Bon Iver, POP ETC, Frank Ocean, Discovery, How To Dress Well, Janelle Monae among others.

Enjoy some tunes…