Creative Quest by Questlove

Author:Questlove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Sample Sale

The George Clinton examples demonstrate how important creativity is to hip-hop, or maybe how important hip-hop is to creativity. Throughout this book, I’ve been making an effort to branch out and look at a broad set of disciplines—at other kinds of music, but also at cooking and comedy and painting. But I want to come back to hip-hop for a little while. I want to think of it in light of all the things we’ve been talking about: stealing from others, stealing from yourself, making the old new, and discovering ways to jump-start and sustain your creativity through all of these behaviors.

The earliest hip-hop singles, like “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Breaks,” used studio bands, though those bands were just re-creating music from existing records. Then hip-hop entered an era of sampling. Technology made it possible, and aesthetics followed technology. For a little while there, most bands bit pieces of existing songs, both melodic and rhythmic, and arranged them into sonic beds over which MCs would rap. It was simple at first and then, in the hands of masters like the Bomb Squad, it became elevated into high art. There’s a moment on “Rebel without a Pause” when they take a second of Clayton “Chicken” Gunnells’s screeching trumpet. Clayton was in the J.B.’s—James Brown’s backing band. In its day, it was a kind of imitation of the far-out sounds of John Coltrane. It was a funk appropriation of the liberating principles of the headiest jazz. But then the Bomb Squad found it and gave it to Public Enemy, and it became something else all over again, a warning, a call to arms.

I could write a whole book on the supreme creativity of the Bomb Squad. Maybe I will. Until then, I’ll mention them whenever I feel like it in the books I write. They were able to take existing materials and make something bracing and new from them. You might think that a definition of pure creativity includes the idea of creating something from nothing, but that’s also a little bit of a dodge. Nothing is nothing, really. That seems like a paradox, but what I mean is that when a saxophonist plays a note, he’s using an instrument manufactured by Selmer or Yamaha or Keilwerth. Which manufacturer depends on level of experience and price range and lots of other factors, but the noise comes from somewhere. The same is true, and maybe more true, of filmmakers: the cameras, the lights, the film. Most directors don’t fabricate those things by hand.

But wait, people say. Those are only the tools. That’s only the hardware. The creative person writes all the software. When that sax makes a sound, that’s a sound that comes straight from the player’s heart and soul. This is even less true. There are notes. There are scales. The most experimental jazz player still has to reckon with them, partly because the destination of that sound is yet another piece of equipment that came predesigned: the human ear.

This is a little far afield.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.