The Creative Revolution Will Not Be Optimised
It will be lived, messy, and impossible to predict
What happened to proper rebellion? Did it disappear with social media and bland identity?
I watched as people claiming to be creative rebels urged everyone to vote yesterday. How dull. If it worked they wouldn’t let us do it - but until more people realise this, then we’ll just have to suffer the virtue bores who say things like ‘you just have to choose the lesser of the evils, it’s important that we just vote’.
Now, I was of this opinion too - I thought it was my duty to vote and to pay my taxes, and to doff my cap to the (as Miri AF referred to them recently) ‘the devious world stage directors’
However, I’ve got pretty tired of staying in my lane. Being just like everyone else in the creative industries. Virtue signalling when I wasn’t praying at the altar of Apple, Adobe and other large scale corporations that everyone secretly wanted to work with.
The 90’s is having a current resurgence and no wonder! It was the last time that we weren’t being fully monitored. There was barely any ‘online behaviour’, or data to scrape. All your documents were paper based - and QR codes didn’t exist (invented in 1994 but primarily used in the auto industry for tracking parts until around 2000)
It started as a period of strong creative spirit - with the Hacienda, rave culture, house music, Pulp Fiction and grunge but ending with being urged to wear ‘sunscreen’ by Baz Luhrmann, and the millennial bug (the clues were starting to appear!)
When left to our own devices, as people, we tend to find joy and our fair share of hedonism - but end up being held back by the ‘powers that be’.
Now though, while creatives still state they are being rebels - their ‘powers that be’ are prescribed. They aren’t just ‘any square in authority’ anymore but chosen ‘baddies’ to rebel against. Some suits and voices are allowed to continue to have power over us - some politicians get away with being as hypocritical as possible, or as greedy, or as nasty - but as long as they are the ‘right sort’ then they don’t face any backlash. Likewise for that wonderful beast - ‘the celebrity’. The Met gala was truly awful again this year - not one of those people had a creative thought the whole time - it was all about show, status and goodness knows what else, judging by the underlying themes of some of the outfits.
The 90’s is having a current resurgence and no wonder! It was the last time that we weren’t being fully monitored. There was barely any ‘online behaviour’, or data to scrape”
People want to appear ‘educated’ - and so to be seen as that they have to have the right opinions - even if it goes against their real beliefs and what they can see happening in front of them, in their towns and cities, and generally in the world.
It makes me think of that anarchic band The Happy Mondays (a stellar offering from the said 90’s (and 80’s ) - with full on rebellion and two fingers up to authority) my favourite song of theirs ‘Wrote for Luck’ - and the line ‘you used to speak the truth but now you’re clever’.
Our times summed up in one line. I know so many people who have rolled over to the comfortable embrace of the state, and all that goes with that (or at least to the authority and bureaucracy of their immediate environment) so as to appear ‘smart’.
Will there be a rebellion? Will our youth again rise up with their own take on counter culture (and not the pseudo one we currently live under) The kind that frightens industries, confuses parents and offends the gatekeepers. The sort that is always one step ahead of the state.
Creativity in the 70’s onwards was raw, and didn’t wait for permission.
Now it’s built on strategy, instead of instinct. Branding before experimentation. ‘Content’ is not the same as culture. Culture leaves scars. Content is scrolled out of existence.
Young creatives face a different challenge. The enemy is numbness and apathy. The endless information at your fingertips, the constant inspiration and comparison online.
Historically, creative revolutions are born at the moment when people can no longer tolerate artificial culture.
We need physical spaces again, tiny music venues, independent magazines, experimental online projects, mistakes and mess. The spirit can return - but not through nostalgia. Every meaningful creative era begins with a dissatisfied youth. Maybe, just maybe they’ll eventually have enough of smug twenty and thirty somethings demanding they ‘get an education’ and ‘go out and vote’.
Meanwhile - crank the speakers up and listen to the lyrics of a song that could be the soundtrack to a young 90’s generation getting the last chopper out of ‘nam. Maybe it’ll inspire some to rise up again.
Enjoy! Until next week - and many thanks for reading 😊
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