Scenius has its limitations. An understanding of these limitations, and of the strategies that artists use to overcome them, is necessary if we want to understand the final stage of our path.
To this end, the following observation from Blissblogger provides a helpful starting point (with scenes rather than “genres" in mind):
We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)The difficulty Blissblogger identifies here is that the energy that an ecology of talent generates is fragile and unsustainable in the long term. Eventually it dies down. Instead of producing exciting art, the scene increasingly produces uninspired and rigidly formulaic art. Mutual reinforcement and likemindedness—the very features that allowed the scene to flourish in the first place—ossify into orthodoxy.
Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it.
But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.
With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts.
This ossification is often accompanied by a newfound sense of disillusionment, the departure of an “anything is possible” spirit formerly in the air. I’m not sure which comes first, loss of creative optimism or stagnation on a formal level. But regardless, the whole situation forces a choice: either accept the ossification or get out.
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One artist who saw the writing on the wall and took the second option was Delia Derbyshire. Later in life, she recounted how “something serious happened around ’72, ’73, ’74: the world went out of tune with itself and the BBC went out of tune with itself”. The shift that she felt in her surroundings prompted Derbyshire to leave the Radiophonic Workshop, and more broadly, Swinging London—a creative environment in which she had thrived for over a decade, and which her partner described as being “[Delia’s] heaven”. Derbyshire recognized how valuable her stay had been—but looked around and concluded that it would not continue to be so. There comes a point when if you want to keep developing creatively, you have leave the scenius stage behind.
But although abandoning ship can be a wise course of action, it doesn’t always work out the way you'd hope. This was likely the case for Derbyshire. She spent the second half of her life writing music but never, in all that time, published anything. Practically none of her work past ’75 amounted to fully realized music. That such a fate befell someone who was extremely driven and imaginative is telling. Leave the scene as it begins ossifying, and you can still easily fall into a kind of stasis of your own. It’s unlikely that an organism will thrive once removed from the ecosystem that nourishes it.
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Yet there’s another way to escape a scene that’s in decline: simply move from your current scene to a different scene that’s going strong. If the scenius stage amounts to a sort of apprenticeship or schooling, then this tact is transferring to a different school (whereas the previous course of action is essentially dropping out). Music critics absolutely love when artists do this. Rock musicians and pop stars who can gracefully maneuver from one ecology of talent to the next are held on perhaps the highest pedestal by critics. And their veneration of this approach makes some sense. It allows you to capitalize on the advantages of being involved in a scene without suffering the drawbacks.
But as great as it looks on paper, this solution has its limits in practice. The problem is that you can only transfer schools so many times before you age out. Hardly anyone has the requisite mental flexibility—no, malleability—to spend an entire lifetime jumping from one scene to another. Each scene comes with its own set of shared values, reference points, and experiences. So each jump requires you to effectively replace one set with another in your mind. Our brains are wired to build upon existing knowledge, yet with this “transfer student” approach, you are perpetually starting over. (Even if, as a person, you remember your past experiences in other scenes, as a creator you must forget them.) At best, most artists have maybe one or two successful “scene transfers” in them. If they do try again, they most likely won’t land the jump. Which is to say that they will fail to tap into the shared energy generated by the new scene. For example, take one of popular music's most adept scene-jumpers: David Bowie. Droid describes Bowie’s attempt to harness the energy of jungle in the 90s as follows:
The reason I think this is instructive in terms of the earthling disaster is that its indicative of Bowie's inclination to take the easy path in his later career. His success was built upon a highly astute personnel choices. Ronson, Vandross, Eno, Rodgers and (perhaps most brilliantly) Davis, Alomar and Murray. After Let's Dance this sense seems to dissolve. he works with whoever is convenient or at hand. You would think that the man who pulled together so many brilliant bands would have the nous to do the same when approaching an occult genre like jungle... throw Rob Haigh, Photek or 4Hero a fat cheque - fuck it, even get Nookie or something, at least find someone who knows what they're doing instead of some random rock producer who cant cut up a break to save his life. I mean, Mark Plati... who the fuck was Mark Plati? So yeah, he couldve made a decent stab at a jungle LP if he hadn't been so lazy and he could have come to proper jungle nights full of manglers instead of some corporate astroturffed Bono shite, and I could've been at that secret gig in 97.Droid sees Bowie’s problem as laziness, yet I think we can also interpret his problem as a reluctance or inability to truly immerse himself in the scene he had his sights on. He was unable to adopt the junglist mindset enough to recognize who was "real" and who was not, i.e. who was channeling the genre's true creative potential and who was not. In the past, Bowie had been more discerning—but with this attempt, he overextended himself. A revealing case study for scene-jumping, I think. Ultimately this solution simply inverts the problem: instead of the power of scenius eventually failing you, you eventually fail to channel it.
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There is also a third option: loyalty. You don’t need to change course when the things start slowing down. You can freely accept this depletion of energy. You can conclude that where you have ended up must be the best of all possible worlds. How could the scene be wrong? I already essentially covered this approach by complaining about Plaid’s attitude (as expressed in a recent interview) here. When they say that they are proud to make (almost) the same album over and over, and that, currently, "revolutionary sounds . . . [are] just not possible", Plaid exemplify the mindset I'm talking about. The advantage of this approach is that it’s less likely to result in outright failure than the previous two. If you stay the course, you'll neither lose focus nor take an overt misstep.
This disadvantage is that, as I argued in the linked post, no one ever seems to make their best album 25 years into the refinement process. It's exceedingly likely that they'll make their, I don't know, seventh best album, but exceedingly unlikely that they'll outdo their previous work in any meaningful sense. Which raises the question... why even continue? FFS, I want to hear the best music ever, not music that's just like something else I heard years ago, except not quite as good.
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But wait. Surely none of the transitional approaches we've identified lead to the master's study. So what was the point of discussing them?
For one, I just find them really interesting in their own right.
I also wanted to convey is that the transition from scenius to master's study is dangerous. It's the spot where most artists (including many really amazing ones) take a wrong turn. But if you manage not to, you might find that the best is yet to come.
And finally, we will see that the master's study has something in common with each of these "wrong" approaches.
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