The Geniuses Known as The Beatles

I logged onto Facebook not too long ago to get a message from a close friend, Guilherme (we called him Gui), who was a foreign exchange student from Brazil a few years ago. When he was in America for that year, and during visits throughout the years he's been back home, Guilherme and I would always get together at least once or twice a week and have a jam session. We would goof off and write our own stuff or would make cover songs of music that we both adored. In the message that Gui had sent to me, he informed me about his band down in Brazil, Dunas, which were starting to get quite the reputation in Curitiba. He sent me a link to their SoundCloud account and I instantly heard the connection to the band that Gui had stated years before, in 2010, he was majorly influenced by--The Beatles. 

In the rare case that you haven't heard of The Beatles, they were a 60s British rock and roll band who has come to define the many different rock genres all over the world. They have become one of the biggest game changers of the music industry, and are considered creative geniuses in the modern era. Robert Greenfield, the editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, mentioned the Beatles as the Picasso of the music industry, "artists who broke through the constraints of their time period to come up with something that was unique and original...in the form of popular music, no one will ever be more revolutionary, more creative, and more distinctive". 

The Beatles were one of the many bands that found their way across the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-1960s, when the British Invasion flooded America. This "invasion" was a pop-culture phenomenon where music, fashion, and other areas of British popular culture became huge in the United States. The British Invasion's roots began in America, in the 1950s, where the rock and roll and blues/jazz musicians highly influenced the sound created in the United Kingdom. This attempt of replicating the angst-filled rock music failed, but created a more blues influenced sound mixed with the native sound of rock in England. This new genre of music became known as Merseybeat. This new sound, also known as "beat boom", mixed with the looks of two "gangs" that engrossed the teenager population in Britain, the Mods and the Rockers, equal to the Socs and Greasers of America, birthed The Beatles. 

The Beatles were formed best known as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. The group started in 1960, and within three years, grew through playing in club-like venues in Liverpool. In 1962, their first single "Love Me Do" went viral in the United Kingdom, and in another two years, they became international stars, especially known in the United States. The band began as a skiffle band, where homemade instruments are used to create music within jazz, blues, and folk, and later grew into many other genres including pop and rock. The band separated in 1970, meaning they had left their influence in the music world within ten years.

The Beatles were one of the biggest bands that had arrived in the USA with the British Invasion, and they had left their mark on many different aspects of pop-culture within the states, especially music.  During the Invasion, many radio stations across America forbid any music that had been made previous to the Beatles to be played. They were one of the first bands to make promotional videos for the music, which soon flourished into videos that depicted a story or background images for the songs, which was a huge influence on the modern music video. The group performed as an opening act in the 1965 North American Tour, where over 55,000 people were recorded to have shown up in order to watch The Beatles play their music. This is one of the largest recorded audiences in concert history. Before The Beatles, albums contained one or two hits and the rest were "fillers", and are one of the very first groups to consider an entire album to be an artistic piece. 

The Beatles have influenced many modern rock and pop groups, and have been imitated by many of them, as well as up and coming bands. British pop boy band One Direction has imitated the famous Beatles picture of the Fab Four walking across a street. The Residents, The Knacks, and The Smithereens all imitated The Beatles' "With The Beatles". Prince, Boyd Rice, The Damned, and Jay-Z all mocked The Beatles' "The White Album" by separately releasing their "The Black Album". A soundtrack for Spongebob Squarepants also imitated this record by releasing "The Yellow Album", while Weezer released three different album spoofs, "The Red Album", "The Green Album", and "The Blue Album". The Beatles had many songs covered by Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, and many other classic rock and modern rock and pop groups. 

It is hard, if not merely impossible, to compare any other musical group to the genius of The Beatles. Within ten years time, they had impacted fashion, music, and pop-culture heavily. To me, the group is the epitome of musical genius. I've always found that in order to be a genius, you had to change the way something was perceived. You had to be a game changer. You had to be able to produce something creative, something unlike what any other person has shown to the world before. They have made numerous records of their own music, and also helped to spread the word of women's rights, gay-straight-alliances and gay rights, environmentalism, and bohemianism. The Beatles have forever altered the sound of music, fashion, and pop-culture globally, and still continue to do so today. The Beatles had begun a revolution, and it's still intact today. Although it's been around forty-two years since the group had broken up, they still manage to play a major role in how music is made today. Just look at Dunas, slowly rising high in the music industry, at the same pace as The Beatles, playing similar music. It is quite apparent that The Beatles have forever changed the game known to us as the music industry.  

Listen to Dunas here..

Genius, the Game Changer: Part 2

Sometime last week I was told to question the definiton of what a genius is and place it into my own description. After pondering the term for what felt like ever, I finally came to terms with settling that to me a person who is a genius is a "game changer", that they alter the way that we, members of society, percieve something in life. One week later, I still stand by my definition. I still like to think that different aspects in life--sports, music, art, television, culinary, basically everything--has their own game changer.
I had vaguely mentioned some people who could be considered game changers in the recent past--Babe Ruth, da Vinci, and Poe just to name a few. A game changer doesn't necessarily have to be a person though--sometimes the most brilliant ideas and concepts are thought of by a man of little knowledge. Although there are other things that could be considered brilliant and genius, I still like to think that it's easiest to relate it to a person. Sometimes, I like to think that even game changers have game changers, if that makes any sense.
To break that down a little: To me, music is a huge game changer in itself. It's made the adolescent's life easier to deal with, as well as allow everyone else to cope and express ourselves better, and enables another side of us to be shown, either the free spirit or the emotional that's hiding within all of us. Music is one of the things in the entertainment industry that has allowed human beings to better understand another person's feelings  as well as our own since as long as we can remember. There have been many game changers who have affected the sound of music--Bach and Mozart to name a few. A more modern group of people who have utterly changed the world of music would be The Beatles.
In the rare case that you haven't heard of The Beatles, they were a 60s British rock and roll band who has come to define the sense of rock genres all over the world. The Beatles have been mentioned by the editor of Rolling Stone, Robert Greenfield, as the Picasso of the music industry, "artists who broke through the constraints of their time period to come up with something that was unique and original.... in the form of popular music, no one will ever be more revolutionary, more creative and more distinctive". If interviewd, the majority of bands in the contemporary music world will voice that the British Invasion group has helped to define the music that they were attempting to put out, even if just a song was influenced by them. Many rising bands and solo artists have also made cover songs of The Beatles, like Aerosmith's "Come Together". I can even say that in modern times, the group still largely influences up-and-coming bands, like my friend in Brazil's band, Dunes.
There were radio stations that had forbid any music to be played before The Beatles, and they were one of the first bands to make music videos. As an opening act in the 1965 North American Tour, over 55,000 people showed up just to watch The Beatles perform.
If The Beatles are not considered a genius today, especially in the music industry, then I don't really know who is.

Genius, the game changer.

Genius, like creativity, is a word that we see all the time. It is also one of the terms that we use nonchalantly, but when we are asked to define it, we struggle. To me, a genius is a game changer. If you think about it, there is someone out there who changes the way we see things. Babe Ruth changed the game of baseball; The Beatles altered the sound of music; Edgar Allan Poe composed a new genre of novels; da Vinci painted masterpieces and changed the way that art was perceived. Everything, not just "creative" activities, have different game changers; they all have a genius that alters our own perspectives.

Does Education Kill Creativity?

       It's been argued before that education kills off creativity. The main focus of schools is to educate us on what we should expect to know in the future, and they constantly better the newer generations compared to those previously schooled before. School focuses on mathematics, sciences, literature, and writing. It only dabbles on the fine arts such as art, dance, and music. This can be justified by the fact that throughout my education in high school, I had to take one credit of the fine arts compared to three or four years of general education courses, like science, history, math, and literature courses. 

       Personally, I would say that school does help to kill off a person's creativity. Because we aren't taught to explore the side of us that whispers, "what if this happened?", we are deprived of expanding our creative mindset. We are forced to accept that the fine arts are less important compared to the other subjects. If they were more important, if we were supposed to focus more on the creative aspects of life, then why do we barely note them in our education? 

       Throughout school, I was blessed to be given the chance to better explore the more creative sides of who I am, which helped me to become more of who I am today. From middle school, I partook in band as a flutist and had the chance to have an art class one per year for a semester. In high school my schedule was loosened because I no longer played in the band. From freshman year through to my senior year, I was granted the chance to have at least one course per semester that I could take which was focused on creativity. I had creative writing courses where we had focused on particular elements of literature, but could write anything we pleased as long as it played to the element in discussion. I took various art courses, which gave us a main topic to focus on, like the emotions, and granted us to paint whatever came to mind when we thought of that topic. I had even been given the chance to take a multimedia class, where we made our own movies and posters using photo shop and Microsoft Movie Maker. 

       Because I had been given the chance to further explore the more creative parts of myself, I took the opportunity outside of school to allow that part to grow. I had bought the equipment needed to do the things I had learned at school in my spare time, and it had really helped me to develop my creativity. Although schools don't focus primarily in the creative aspects of life, we still get a small taste of what it's like to play on with those parts of life. If we enjoy them, we have the chance to care for them outside of education. I do believe that education malnourished our creative portions but we cannot blame their deaths solely on our education. We must take the time to care and mend for them. 

The Importance of Revision

Revision is a huge part of the creative process despite what many people believe. There are a lot of people who would argue that by revising one of your pieces, you're also cutting down the level of creativity it possesses. They would say that by moving around selections of your article or by ridding it of unnecessary and repetitive information, you're destroying its imperfection, the part of it that makes it original and different compared to other pieces of literary work. Although this is the dominant argument, it is not the actual truth. Revision is really important because it doesn't only allow us to move pieces of what we're writing, or possibly selections of audio or videos, but it helps us to organize and refine our project into its most perfect form. By revising, we can better transition both individual topics and the entire piece as a whole, as well as organize what needs to go where in what order (chronological, spacial, etc). Revision also allows the audience, readers, or listeners to better grasp what exactly is being said in the piece, and understand the context better. So by revising, you're not "ruining" a creative piece. Your story, article, video, or audio is like a diamond in a rough--if you don't refine it, it will never come to be at its full potential. This is why refining is a major portion of my creative process. 

The Mystery of Henry Darger.

     What would you do if you knew a man who had the minimum amount of social life, who spent the majority of his time inside his home unless it was to go out to the store to get paint supplies or photocopies of newspaper clippings? This was Henry Darger's life. The way he lived seems to be anything except interesting, yet inside his mind a world unlike any other was flourishing. When Henry died in 1973, his landlords found the unexpected--a 15,000 paged novel, completed with an additional 15,000 pages of artwork to go along with the story, as well as a complete autobiography, the weather record for ten years, and a complete list of soldiers in his fable and full background on each character. 

       The tale Darger composed focused around a group of seven young girls who had the male reproductive system, magic, war, flying mythological beasts, and punishment. Throughout the story, the young girls, probably ranging between the ages of seven up to twelve, were highly important soldiers in a crusade to spread Christianity and faith in God and His doings. Darger's characters were given the opposite gender roles than accepted in society--females were brave, strong warriors while males were occasionally shown as weak and frightened by meek animals like mice. Inside of his story, beauty played off as dangerous and violent. 

       Despite the obvious masterpiece that Darger had created, there is an underlying problem--is the man who wrote such a beautiful, complete story ill-minded or was he just different? There seems to be a lot of evidence that faces towards insanity. Henry's mother passed away when he was younger, and since his father didn't make enough money to support a family of three, Darger's younger sister was given up for adoption. Most of his youth was spent in a boys' home, and then later, around his teens, he was sent to an asylum where he was forced to stop schooling and partake in strenuous work. While working inside the asylum, Darger was a victim to abusive and harsh beatings. Later in life, Darger was denied the access to adopt--one of his sole yearnings in life.

       Although there were many events in his life that could have led him to be on the edge, these events may have been what fueled Darger's imagination. Having almost no experience with the opposite sex and having to leave school prior to the age where taking an anatomy class is appropriate, Darger would have no idea as to what a female's body should look like, which justifies why the girls in his novel had male reproductive organs. The obsession with female protagonists may have also been born from the same lack of female association in his life. Since Darger was unable to adopt a child due to the questioning of his sanity, the ages of his heroines may have arisen from his constant yearning to have a child of his own. Having been a victim of abuse, the violence in his tale has an obvious upbringing.

       The debate of whether his novel is a product of his own insanity or a creation from a different take on life is in constant motion. There is justification either way--he had a rough life which may have led him to have many different personality disorders, but because of his upbringing, we could assume that Darger just coped with life differently. In my take, I believe that Henry is just another victim to the cruel way society analyzes us as people. Darger's sanity may be constantly questioned, but I have come to feel that he was reckless, but not crazy, that the way he perceived reality was in no way altered by his mind. 

       If one should read a caption from his story, they would find that what he endured throughout his life is directly noted in his novel. With the opportunity to adopt a child torn away from him, his female characters were punished. When he struggled with his faith in God and religion, Darger's characters were struggling with their faith and the war seemed to be going downhill for protagonists. Yet, when he returned to attending church every day, three times a day, his characters' faith was renewed and the heroines' lives were beginning to get back onto the right track. Like any author, Henry put his life into his work. He put his emotions into the characters. Every single author out there has left some part of them inside their novel, even if that was just their take on the world at that given point in time. So the question of whether Henry Darger is insane or eccentric may still be lingering on the lips of many out there, but I would like to believe he kept his sanity intact. 

       There is, however, one thing many people will continue to struggle understanding. After having been sent to the same home his father passed away in, Darger began to deteriorate at a rapid pace. The few people who grew to love him came in to visit, and gave him their appraisal at the marvelous and majestic world he left in their wake. Darger had only a few words in response, "It is too late now." What exactly was too late? Maybe he was talking about the double ending he had left the people with; one of the endings detailed our heroines' success in winning the war, while the other showed their demise. The thing is, we may never know why Henry decided to place this double ending. Maybe he regretted his decision to originally have the group of young girls win, or maybe he decided that we, as the readers, should decide their fate? 

       "Just because there are questions doesn't mean that there are answers." And that may just be something we, as the audience of his biography, as the curious viewers, will have to learn to live with. 

How many bloggers does it take...?

      John Cleese--there's a lot that one could say about the man. For starters, he's an esteemed writer and film producer, actor, and comedian in Britain. He's probably best known for his Monty Python skits and movies. What else is there to say? How about his phenomenal ability to give speeches? Oh, did I mention that he also is a renowned expert on creativity? Of course, one should already assume such things when Cleese is mentioned. 

      A few nights ago, I watched his speech on creativity that he gave during a convention. In the speech, Cleese talked about what creativity is, how we can become more creative everyday, and of course, cracked a few interesting versions of the classic light bulb joke. In the beginning of his lecture, John stated that "creativity is not a talent" rather than a way that we, as human beings, operate daily. He went over the "closed mode" and "open mode" to being creative--open mode is where we are humorous, curious, and fully relaxed, while closed mode is where we are serious, tense, and aware of daily life pressures and problems. He mentioned how being in the closed mode makes it impossible to find creative solutions and ideas, but to be in the open mode makes it near impossible to initiate the said solutions or place the ideas into something productive. So, according to Cleese, there must be a balance between open and closed modes. 

      Cleese also talked about the process to take in order to find your oasis called the "open mode". The first step is to make space for yourself, to find your own "creative oasis" hiding within the desert we call our minds. Next you must have time. This time is needed to get into the open mode, to think thoroughly, find your creative ideas, and then return to the closed mode. Thirdly, you shouldn't settle for your original idea or solution. Make sure you thoroughly explore all the possible creative branches and outlets. Then comes confidence. Once you find an idea that you completely adore, you must place all your confidence into it. You can also play off "what if" questions, to see just how much further that will take you. Lastly, one must add humor. In order to be creative, Cleese says humor is the path to take, that it helps us to leave our close-minded state and venture further into our imaginations. Unfortunately, despite being a huge fan of the Monty Python movies, I find myself disagreeing with Cleese on his statement. Creativity is creativity—there’s nothing else to it. I believe that sometimes, or rather much of the time, seriousness can bring out the most creative sides of people.

       Today, media surrounds us with serious themed movies, shows, plays, books, and songs. While a lot of these may be based on a true story, which sucks some of the creativity from the story line, they are creative nonetheless. How so, you ask? Well, many movies today are under the genre “history”. Once placed inside this category, it's obvious to the audience that the topic is based off either an actual event in history or a historical figure. Although it's core of being is true, that does not mean it is full of actual facts, dialogue, or people. 

       For example, in Titanic, the author of the script had done some serious researching. On the actual ship, in the passengers' log, there was a woman named Rose staying in the first class quarters who ended up surviving the tragedy, while a man named Jack Dawson lived in the lower quarters of the ship. His body had never been recovered. This being said, despite having the same name and fate as real people, the characters in the movie and the story line we have all grown up to love is fictitious. The tale leading up to and throughout the ending of the movie is nothing more than a figment of the writer’s mind. Despite knowing they were on the ship together, there is no other facts or evidence to validate that Rose and Jack had actually met on the Titanic. We are left to believe that Rose’s famous line, “I’ll never let you go, Jack”, is just a catchy phrase the author created to enrage the movie’s fans when she does, later, let him go. Despite the passengers’ log, there is no other documentation, evidence, or witness that can vouch for the love story we all adore. We are left to face the fact that their love never really existed.

       By taking a serious topic and adding a few comedic flares to it, the movie was born. It is a prime example of how seriousness can lead to great spurts of creativity. Think about it: Your favorite song is more than likely about a bad breakup or a misfortunate event in the musician’s life. It is more unlikely to draw inspiration from a good event, but if so, the song is still more serious than one originally thinks. Your favorite war movie is most likely not a documentary, nor is your favorite horror story. The most popular form of theatre, other than comedy, is tragedy, which is based off a serious issue and instills its audience with hidden morals of life. So, while Cleese may be right that comedy is a direct outlet of creativity, we cannot disregard that seriousness is one as well.

      Despite the disagreement on close-mindedness and open-mindedness, I really enjoyed his speech. Although it lasted a little over a half hour, I found it entertaining, enlightening, and of course, creative. By the end of the video, not only did I find myself craving to watch Monty Python and The Holy Grail, I also felt so inspired to take everything I do and look at it through a different perspective. There's only one question I have left...     

How many bloggers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is two: one to change the bulb and the other to write a reflection on how it made them feel.