Artist’s don’t get enough Royalties…
Creative outcomes are clearly derivative of the conditions that immediately preceded it.None the less, society feel their advancements novel. Creativity has always manifested the culture that defines popular trends, changes perceptions and defines societal norms. The evolution of creativity is very well defined in music. Minstrel evolved to Blues. Blues evolved to Folk. Folk evolved to Rock. And more recently, Disco evolved to EDM. Bob Dylan was one of the frontrunners of the Folk to Rock movement. Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album when described through Lévi-Strauss’s concept of an artist demonstrates the type of “creativity” that instigates movement to progress culture.
Creativity is not created in a microcosm. Many of Elvis’s most famous hits, such as “Hound Dog”, were actually just covers of other people’s work. Mikal Gilmore, in his book Beatles Then, Beatles Now, discusses how the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band didn’t invent “the psychedelic or avant-garde aesthetic that their music epitomized — “infact its spacey codes and florid textures and arrangements had clearly been derived from the music of numerous innovative San Francisco and British bands.” Bob Dylan was the same way. He said, near the beginning of his book, Chronicles: Volume One, “I’d heard Van Ronk back in the Midwest on records and thought he was pretty great, (I) copied some of his recordings phrase for phrase.” 2 Does that make these artists not “creative”? No. They were very creative. They were epitomizing creativity. The concept of creativity being novel is antithetical. When someone does something truly creative it will have roots in someone else’s work. Dylan sums it up best, “Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.”
Lévi‐Strauss¨ in his book A Savage Mind provides the reader with a definition of creativity that shows how creativity is a derivative process . Lévi‐Strauss defines a “bricoleur” as someone that creates, builds and makes, but unlike the engineer, his tools “represent a set of actual and possible relations; They (the tools) are ‘operators’, but they can be used for any operation of the same type” 3 . Expressed more colloquially, a bricoleur uses the materials that are readily available to him or her to create something that feels novel even though it may actually be derivative. Lévi‐Strauss elaborates on the makeup of an artist “It is common knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist and of a ‘bricoleur’. By his craftsmanship he constructs a material object, which is also an object of knowledge… the scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events” 3 . Lévi‐Strauss is saying that one who repurposes old concepts while merging them with new concepts embodies the idea of an artist. Because art is a byproduct of creativity, Lévi‐Strauss is giving us a definition for creativity. Lévi‐Strauss leads us to conclude that creativity is defined as repurposing old concepts and merging them with new concepts to create something different.
Bob Dylan is a perfect example of an artist. Dylan alludes to the importance of the value of taking a fresh perspective on old concepts, “I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale … that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself.” 2 Dylan recognizes the importance of the concept of creativity. During Dylan’s early career he was clearly emulating his idol, Woody Guthrie. “There’s a lot of things that I (Dylan) didn’t have, (I) didn’t have too much of a concrete identity” 2 . Dylan idolized Guthrie’s folk contrarian attitude. Dylan’s time as a Guthrie copycat was quintessential to his creativity without it he would have had the building blocks for creativity. He eventually moves to create his own identity, but he never forgets the importance of Lévi‐Strauss’s idea of creativity.
Dylan changed the framework of music through his creativity . He uses clever imagery and lyricism to incorporate and repurpose old concepts and ideas. For example in the song “Desolation Road”, Dylan references Cinderella, Romeo and Einstein, to name a few. These references not only tie his art back to the current roots of society, but also make his message very relatable to the everyday listener. This is very creative of Dylan. Dylan is able to convey so much information to the audience with these allusions to icons. The strong symbolism of these icons make his message extremely palatable. Dylan repeatedly does this throughout the Highway 61 album. In “Ballad of a Thin Man” he refers to Scott Fitzgerald. Even when he does not specifically reference pop culture, he uses colloquial nomenclature to convey an image that is so crisp and relatable that the listener is forced to accept Dylan’s story. Dylan specifically demonstrates this concept in the song “Like a Rolling a Stone” where he tells this story of a once beautiful young girl who relied on her looks and charm to get her through life then finds herself at a dead end when she grows out of her beauty. This is not an unfamiliar story. There is nothing innovative about writing about a washed up beauty queen. The story is quite derivative but it is communicated in a novel way. The story is the scientist. The medium of “Rock and Roll” music is the “bricoleur”. The combination of these two is art. Art is created through creativity.
In conclusion, Creativity is not created in a microcosm. Creativity is built through years and years of iteration by many different people. This progresses society. It is built on the three pillars of “experience observation and imagination”. The Beatles, Dylan, Elvis and many other popular artist used creativity to advance culture and captivate audience. This ultimately made them famous and progressed society. The notion of Dylan being the voice of a generation, was not about what his songs exactly said, but about what his songs represented. Dylan was able to express himself through the lens of the past, but while using present. This is creativity. This what drives a movement. This is what drives culture.
Sources Consulted
1. Mikal Gilmore, “Beatles Then, Beatles Now”
2. Dylan, Bob (20041011). Chronicles: Volume One . Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
3. LeviStrauss, (1964) A Savage Mind
