Between Imitation and Genius

In which the snapping of Justin Vernon is discussed

Under Armour by Jonah Calinawan (image source)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the undulations of the creative journey. Looking back on the past year and symmetrical points in my life’s spiral, a new conception of creativity is emerging.

Imitation Games

During this time, I’ve become a big Shane Gillis fan. He has, to some extent, filled the void left by Norm’s death. I heard him talk about his creative journey at some point, and it surprised me. He pretty much shot to success overnight. While other comedians have to grind for years to find their voice and then make it work, Shane just found something, and he was off to the races.

In whatever podcast it was I saw him discussing this, he said he more or less copied Louis CK from the t-shirt and jeans to the stage persona of the self-deprecating everyman who exposes their weirdness and flaws and laughs at them.

I’ve seen that path with other creators. The Jungian YouTubers Eternalised comes to mind. He fell into the wake of Jordan Peterson’s brand of Jungian thinking; he found a slipstream that flowed amazingly and he put his boat in there.

This path still isn’t easy. There’s a lot of craft required to make that work. You can take the foundation — the look, the attitude towards the world, the niche — but you still have to create original content within those bounds. You can’t fake it. You have to be possessed by it, inspired. It’s not easy. It’s simpler, but it’s not easy.

Think of Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village surfing the wave of the folk protest movement (thank you, Woody Guthrie!). Think of The Beatles — soaked in the Rock & Roll of their time. McCartney recounts a great anecdote about a practice session at his house where him and the boys were playing She Loves You (Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!) and his Dad, dismissive of the Americanism, asked why they didn’t use the more proper English ”yes, yes, yes”? Because The Beatles were emerging from the American Rock & Roll paradigm. The content (love songs), the style (two guitars, bass and drums — courtesy of Buddy Holly) and the spirit of the music were taken for granted.

With these training wheels, an aspiring artist can attain mastery. If you have to reinvent the wheel while you are still learning your scales you won’t achieve shit. But if you can take on a paradigm and learn the craft of creating within that paradigm, you become capable of transcending it. The paradigm acts as a scaffold for your development as an artist.

The Snapping of Justin Vernon

The example I’ve been ruminating over is Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. In a way, his story seems typical. He seemed to be a young man who emerged out of nowhere and set the tone for his generation’s indie music. But since he released Speyside last year, I’ve found myself digging deeper and deeper into his back catalogue.

As it turns out, he was 28 when he released the first Bon Iver album, For Emma, Forever Ago. I got to thinking of a line that Emerson said of Walt Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass:

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”

More than most, Vernon‘s success had a long foreground.

Part of the reason for his massive success was the myth For Emma came packaged in (something to reflect on another day, perhaps): his band broke up, his girlfriend dumped him, and he developed a nasty case of mononucleosis and liver infection. In response to this triple threat, he retreated to a cabin for a winter in the icy isolation of North Dakota. From that “bon hiver”, he emerged with an album that ate the world.

It’s a classic myth of the overnight success and as such it overlooks the long foreground. As the old saying goes, every overnight success was ten years in the making. Before there was Bon Iver there was DeYarmond Edison. Before that, a solo album and before that his high school ska band Mount Vernon. Before the overnight smash hit first album For Emma there were 7 or 8 albums or EPs.

Listening through this back catalogue, you can hear the imitation—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—of other styles and sounds. But as the years pas,s you can slowly but surely see Bon Iver emerging from the tapestry.

And then, the snap: the triple threat, the future hollowed out by endings. And with that: the emptying of the cup.

By then, he had been honed as a tool. He had travelled far on the road to mastery with its million implicit lessons—the contours of a landscape no map can prepare you for. He knew the craft and he knew the industry. And then, the empty cup and the chasm between imitation and genius.

These are the times when we quit, compromise or evolve; you give up, you sell out or you shoot for the moon.

At such crossroads, stripped of all the trappings of extrinsic motivation, something new can emerge; intrinsic motivation: the sound of your soul. It is the closest thing an adult has to play — something that you do for its own sake because you love it. Because it’s a beautiful thing.

When Vernon went to that cabin, he snapped; he listened to his own soul now. He was convalescing; music was the balm licking his wounds. There, at the end of the road, he created just for himself, but with the armament of mastery denuded of the temptations of market fit. That place, where mastery meets liberation, is where great art is born.