Max Bemis, the singer/lyricist of Say Anything is lyrical genius. If you don’t know who Say Anything is, they make fun, sometimes silly, pop-punk music. But their work is immensly creative and beautiful, which I think helps to show that most anyone can do creative things. And I’m not saying:  ’even Say Anything, the shittiest band ever, is creative, genius even, so everyone must be,’ I’m just using Max as an example because his music really speaks to me. I get his sense of humor and I identify with his tone and topics.

Look at these lyrics:
“Life is not a spark in space, an episode of Will & Grace, controversial yet mundane, Debra’s Messing with your brain.”

It’s an observation about life (as compared to an episode of Will and Grace [which is controversial, yet mundane]), and then to take Debra Messing’s (the actress who plays Grace) name and using ‘messing’ literally, that takes creative thinking. Not to mention you can bring it back to the life observation, ans talk about how ‘mundane’  TV is messing with our brains. My interpretation anyway.

But that’s a lot of thought and meaning to squeeze into one line, especially one that on the surface seems so silly.

I’m not here to dissect Say Anythings lyrics, and I’m not here to say there’s anything special about that band, because there isn’t. What I’m saying is that we tend to dismiss each others creativity for various ego reasons. We encourage each other to ‘critique’ everything an artist does. Rather than respect the fact that they are doing anything creative at all, we learn to pick things apart, find anything we don’t like and use it as an  excuse to dismiss a band or a book or movie.

You can say you don’t like something, but to say it’s not ‘good’. What the fuck does ‘good’ even mean? It’s subjective.

Not everything is for everyone and that is what’s great about all this media saturation online we’re experiencing. To me, Charlie from the Love Police is a celebrity, but his videos generally only get around 10,000 to 50,000 views (sometimes up to 100,000), and thats tiny by television standards. But who cares? His creativity is touching people and that’s all that matters.

And what is creativity? Am I creative? Maybe not, lot’s of times I can’t even think of my own post titles. I use song lyrics.  ”They let us play with markers, but I keep trying to draw infinity” is another Say Anything line. “But if I wait for a Holiday, could it stop my fear?” is a Vampire Weekend line.

That whole post I did from the Edmonton airport last month was stylistically a complete rip off of the Love Police.

I wear my influences on my sleeve. I take words that other people have said and use them the way I want to use them. We’re never actually making something new, we’re just building on the backs of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

Carl Sagan: ‘if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe.’

I guess what I’m saying is that all creative enterprise has merit. Don’t shit on music or movies you don’t like, just accept that some things are for you and some aren’t. Arguing over whether something is ‘good’ basically amounts to verbal masturbation.

…….. to end some quotes i found searching for the title of this post:

Abraham Maslow:
The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

Beatrix Potter:
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Michael Vance:
Innovation is the creation of the new or the re-arranging of the old in a new way.

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
- Marie Antionette