Truth Speakers: The (Real) Magic Of Artistic Creation And Expression

Bob Lefsetz hooked me this week, via his thoughts on Holly Brickley's latest book, and I didn't know just how caught I was until I was out of the water, on the deck of his boat, choked up on a bunch of copy pasted notes and quotes. Excuse the ocean metaphors, but like the best of his Lefsetz letters, he trolls the depths without losing respect for the ecosystem like few others. This was a post about what separates the hipsters, from the critics, from the actual creators and it left me wondering why we don't discuss it like this enough.

Artists are the truth speakers. Everybody else is a variation on a truth repeater. The system doesn't work without all the variations.

Lefsetz asks if we can remember when music was run by nerds? When the industry was filled with people who'd watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, tried their hand at playing, and after discovering their limitations, found meaning by orbiting around musicians instead? Brickley nails it in Deep Cuts, when she writes about hipsters like this: "they had all been miserable kids, the boys too sensitive and the girls too willful for the social systems of the late twentieth century; and that nobody wanted to admit they were one of them."

That's the thing about creativity – it exists in this strange, f***ed up ecosystem, where the actual artists are surrounded by an entire infrastructure of people who love the art but couldn't quite make it themselves. The critics. The tastemakers. The scene-definers. All necessary, all valuable in their way, but fundamentally different from the truth speakers because they're truth repeaters at best and lying deceivers at their self-serving worst.

It's the only thing separating artists from everybody else. Truth speaking. Not necessarily a universal truth or even a fact-based truth, but their truth. The uncomfortable, unfiltered, uncompromising expression that emerges when you stop wondering how your work will be received and simply let it flow from whatever haunts or inspires you kind of truth.

I get all torn up when I read stuff like this. I think about trying to be creative and not finding enough success. I think about trying to beat the creativity out of me and follow the rungs on a career ladder. I think of stepping off the ladder, if not falling off of it, and how I keep leaning deeper and deeper towards less-collaborative creative ways with a fresh awareness of the ecosystem I never could parse out before.

I used to think it was catching fish in the sea and making magic meals. Now I see the fishing line merchants and bait wholesalers, the real estate agents and the marketing departments. If I want to be creative, if you want to be creative, art demands we forget this and see all of the contributors together, all at once.

Here's what I continue to struggle with, but maybe it's because I'm trying the hardest to learn it at a new phase of life that Lefsetz and Brickley are already more comfortable with: criticism isn't inherently bad, but you know in your gut when it's helpful and when it's just noise. Someone telling you how to better express your vision is different from someone trying to impose their vision onto yours. The latter might make you more palatable to a broader audience, but it also makes you, like Lefsetz says, a hack. And you never want to be a hack.

The magic happens when your truth finds the people who needed to hear exactly that truth. You can't care that not everyone will care or notice. The audience that matters isn't the largest one (almost by definition), the audience that matters is the one that resonates with what you're saying on an "I could see this in the darkest of deep sea murkiness" level.

When your truth finds those people, it's harmony.

Artistic expression is speaking the truth to see if you can find that harmony. It's not to be difficult or contrarian (exclusively, at least), but it's because that's what we're here for. That's the highest calling of creative work. In a world of hipsters and critics, be the one who makes, who reveals, who speaks – not just from nerd math, but from necessity.

Listen for the feedback that matters. Ignore the rest. And trust that your truth, in all its uncomfortable glory, is exactly what someone out there needs to hear.

Apparently I have to read this book now too. And keep paying attention to the critics who get me to check out more great art. So many fish in the sea, so many, and it's so inspiring.