Creation Myth

The following comment, which I've taken from a file-sharing website, exemplifies the misconception in our culture (common since at least the 19th century) of the nature of artistic creation (it's also Exhibit A of why fans are, in general, the worst possible people to review albums). The bare minimum of context you need here is that this reviewer has downloaded the new album by a melodic death metal band and is upset about the perceived "derivative" nature of the music:

Some examples how absurdly derivative this crap is:

Emancipate:
:20 Oh look, it's a Veil of Maya riff and accompanying awful keyboard sound!
:38 baby sounds and music boxes... awesome.
1:05 Hey, it's the ending of the Ancient Covenant minus the robot voice and interesting rhythms! It's even in the same key!
1:47 Holy direct quote of the first part of Devin Townsend's 'The Mighty Masturbator'! Not only is the music and texture (guitar+keys) identical, but even the lyrics and vocal delivery are the same.... I really hope this was deliberately meant as a direct tribute, because it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
2:28 Identical strumming pattern, tempo, and chord types to the chorus of The Eidolon Reality, accompanied by two-part vocal harmony in the same way.... yet the chord progression isn't quite similar enough to make it sound like he's establishing a recurring theme, especially since it only comes back in one other song. I'm thinking he's just short on ideas here.
3:30 Mellotron and Akerfeldt's guitar sound and solo style.... sounds straight out of an Opeth song.
3:40 How many times have we heard this kind of arpeggio in a Faceless song now?

Deconsecrate:
0:00 another Opeth solo
1:13 horror carnival bit, similar to the middle of Opeth's 'By the Pain I see in Others', complete with the 'God is Dead' lyric from Opeth's 'The Devil's Orchard'.... Mr. Bungle, Arcturus, Between the Buried in Me and others have pretty much turned the disturbed carnival music into a cliche at this point, and the silly 'la la la' vocals certainly don't help the situation (didn't BTBAM use those?)... the way he says 'my child' also recalls Townsend again, who used those exact lyrics and that exact expression on Deconstruction.
1:26 LOL @ the non-transition
1:36 Hey, it's the intro of The Ancient Covenant, only minus the awesome bass licks!
2:13 see 1:48 of The Ancient Covenant and the intro of Coldly Calculated Design
4:06 It's the outro of Sons of Belial!

Accelerated Evolution
The title is the name of a Devin Townsend album, so I guess it should come as no surprise when there is yet another melodic quote of The Mighty Masturbator in the chorus, this time over a Cynic riff!

In Solitude
0:00 Is this a Metallica cover?
1:58 No, wait - it's an Opeth cover!
2:09 Just kidding, it's a Cynic cover!

etc, etc, etc. In short, I don't think there's a single riff on this album that I can't name a very strong precedent for.

This is so myopic, overly reductive and captious that it almost beggars belief. And yet, although it reads almost like a parody, I chose to highlight this comment because it is typical of the kind of obsessive-compulsive picking-apart engaged in by fans of certain types of "underground" music, particularly certain subgenres of extreme metal. However, this condemnation of so-called "derivative" or "un-original" elements is also characteristic of our culture as a whole and its mythologizing of the creative artist. We think of the (true) artist as this semi-mystical being who communes with the celestial spheres and somehow, like magic, plucks original works out of the ether. They are essentially godlike creators with powers beyond mere mortals.

So powerful is this concept of the artist-deity in our culture that, even when given strong evidence to the contrary, rather than question our assumptions about what it is that artists do, we assume that it is the artist's fault for not living up to our lofty expectations. We dismiss them as ripoffs, charlatans or fakes. In certain cases we even prosecute them for copyright infringement.

Not only is it ludicrous to demand that every individual piece of content within an artistic work is so brand-spanking-new, so mold-breakingly original, that no one has ever seen or heard it before, it is likely impossible. If it were the case that artists were automatons who generated content randomly, regardless of any human concerns, then yes, it would make sense to expect every piece produced by such robotic "artists" would bear little or no resemblance to any other. I needn't belabor the point here: that, in fact, the concerns, thoughts, feelings and abilities of artists are decidedly non-random, for all of the obvious reasons as well as more technical, medium- and genre-specific ones.

That is all general enough. To take the specific example quoted above, the commenter is talking about a new album by an artist within one of his (presumably) favorite genres. He is objecting to the fact that he is able to hear what he considers similar or identical riffs and stylistic approaches, not only to that of other artists' riffs/styles/chord changes, but to riffs/styles/chord changes in other songs by the same artist.

Let's back up a moment here and discuss context. Metal is a genre of popular music with formal conventions so strict that some scene-specific websites (such as metal-archives.com) won't even recognize the existence of certain artists if their output is not deemed "metal" enough. The idea of anyone complaining about the "derivativeness" of such an inherently inbred and self-restrictive musical culture is almost laughable just on the face of it. But to also assert, as the above-quoted metal dude indeed does, that the artists in question are being derivative because of the similarity of their music to THEIR OWN MUSIC is one of the most dizzyingly silly arguments I think I've ever encountered.

The final irony, of course, is that the analysis he gives could be used as an aid to enhancing one's enjoyment of the album. Given that the nature of creativity depends on memorization (every genius you can name has in common the twin powers of enhanced memorization and concentration), the reality is that recombination of pre-existing elements is the main activity of the artist. That, in fact, is what creativity actually is. Creation ex nihilo is a myth. Even our intellectual property laws (which also date from the time in which artists began to be mythologized as some combination of rebels/prophets/deities rather than mere craftsmen as in earlier eras) reflect this superstitious belief. Rather than worship at the altar of artists in a naive celebration of their seemingly mysterious powers, we might try instead to appreciate the very human, very practical craft of what they do. Like a master blacksmith or tailor, a good artist works with the materials at hand to create superior goods. If you're not interested in the kind of thing the craftsman makes, you don't go to that craftsman. You don't blame the blacksmith for being "unoriginal" just because you're bored of horseshoes (or whatever).

As noted above, originality was not always prized in our culture*. Francis A. Waterhouse, in an essay published in The Sewanee Review while he was Professor and Head of Department of Romance Languages at Kenyon College, lays the blame on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote, "If I am not better than other men, at least I am different." Waterhouse continues:

With that famous boast, [Rousseau] started the sophistry that was destined to modify profoundly the basic standards of western civilization. The desire for celebrity is, of course, nothing new, but previous to Rousseau it had been effectively restrained--save in exceptional instances--by the stern necessity of achieving prominence through mastery of the difficult. If you wanted to be noticed, you had to do something better than others. The substitution, on the other hand, of 'different' for 'better' changed all this over night. Different being susceptible of elastic interpretation, people were not slow to realize that it could overlap more easily; if you could not do the thing better, or even as well as others, you could substitute something easier and call attention to its difference.

In other words, once the paradigm changes from excellence to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed--say, while visiting an art museum--that older artworks are much less the reflection of an individual personality and much more the reflection of a culture as a whole. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century, by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics.**

There are many examples in our culture of the vilifying of the act of copying. Even children make fun of "copycats." Cover bands, inkers, ripoff artists, plagiarists

There's also a neat trick pulled off by the advertising industry where they have managed to conflate the concepts of "different," "better" and "new." It's easy to see why this would be a 

If you still think there's something special about originality, try this example on for size: you start watching a film and are introduced to several characters. Do you automatically like the last character to whom you're introduced more than the characters to whom you were introduced earlier? Do you like the last thing that happens in the film more than whatever happened before simply because it's the last thing that happens? (Maybe you do if you hate the film and are happy it's over, but that's another matter). Perhaps you think that's a silly example, but that's really all originality is: it's the latest notion to work its way out of some human being's head. If that's good enough for you, then go ahead and worship at the altar of originality. But don't do so under the illusion that what you're celebrating has been something artists have strived for since the dawn of time, because that's absolutely not the case. 

Instead of pressuring ourselves to be startlingly original all the time, in this current embarrassment of cultural riches within which we find ourselves, we might try connecting the dots a little bit more. A little more synthesis and coalesence, a little less breadth and a little more depth. We needn't worry ourselves unduly about the latest (I had to restrain myself from adding "and greatest") cultural items to aggregate their way onto the front pages of all our favorite blogs and news sites. It may seem incredibly urgent to read and learn about and understand everything new, but remember that's just a bias, an illusion; and one that for most of us has become an addiction. The new has its place, but it doesn't automatically usurp the old until we make the decision to only pay attention to the latest shiny things that move the fastest across our collective field of vision.

Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that***. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*In Shakespeare's time, for example, audiences "favoured likeness: a work was good not because it was original, but because it resembled an admired classical exemplar, which in the case of comedy meant a play by Terence or Plautus" (The RSC Shakespeare - William Shakespeare Complete Works, Introduction to the Comedy of Errors p. 215). This might be an overgeneralization, but it's certainly the case that Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, borrowed most if not all of his storylines from existing texts.

**No personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's why we love anti-heroes, even serial killer anti-heroes like Dexter. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special--even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad, perhaps the only truly moral show currently airing on television.

***There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.