I’m reading Robert Hilburn’s “Corn Flakes with John Lennon,” his fascinating account of decades writing about music for the LA Times.
It’s one thing to read a straight biographical stories about celebrities. It’s an interesting twist to see how they interact with journalists, who act as a direct conduit between the artist and the audience. In some cases, the artists are hyper aware of the power that the journalists have and either try to run away from it or play to it. In some other cases, they try to pretend that the journalist is just a part of the crowd, just another fan or another friend. How the individual artist reacts to the power of the journalist says a lot.
It goes without saying that Hilburn’s power as a writer for the LA Times was something that used to be an exclusive one. But now that power has been diluted online to the thousands of internet reviews, blogs, sites, and forums. An individuals opinions were rarely circulated beyond an immediate circle of friends. Now, our online opinions can be seen firsthand by a hundred people or a hundred thousand people. What’s more, these opinions are frozen in time, available to be recalled years and decades from now, even if we ourselves have moved past those opinions (or perhaps even moved past this life). For sure, Soke was right to warn us about the dangers of having online discussions.
But I digress.
A quote that caught my eye in Hilburn’s book comes from a discussion he was having with Bruce Springsteen in the late ’90s. At this point, Springsteen was a decade past “Born in the USA” and had moved on as an artist and as a performer. Rather than try to recapture the commercial success of “Born in the USA,” he was level headed enough to see that success for what it was: an anomaly that came about because he was doing what he wanted to do as an artist, not because he was chasing commercial success. He knew his audience would return to its pre-“Born in the USA” level.
The mistake a lot of musicians make, he said, is they imagine an audience and then try to make a piece of music to fit it. “They get caught up in the race, and it can be dangerous to your creativity, and probably your sanity. What you have to do is start off with a piece of music and then search out the audience for it, and if this is the audience for the new album, that’s fine. That’s where I should be now.”
Take Springsteen’s thoughts and substitute “martial artist” for “musician” and “technique” for “music,” and some clear similarities emerge between the artist who does music and the artist who does budo.
Springsteen’s thoughts reconstituted for budo:
The mistake a lot of martial artists make is they imagine an opponent and then try to make a technique fit….What you have to do is start off with a piece of technique and then search out the opponent for it.
In other words, once you have a technique, what’s the context a technique is intended for?
It seems like a self evident question, but it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, see what the opponent is doing, and trying to “make a piece of music” for that opponent. Approaching combat this way can too readily lead us down the road where we throw crap around, and because it affects our opponent, we assume that it’s art. It’s important to remind ourselves that just because something works, doesn’t mean that it was good — it could just as easily mean we were lucky.
A self-aware musician can perform and still feel the flaws and weakness in the performance, even if the audience thought the performance was perfect. A musician who lacks this awareness will only see the reaction of the audience and assume that the audience is correct in seeing perfection.
In the same way, if I judge my skill level based on what reaction my opponent has, then I will inevitably walk away satisfied with someone else’s experience, not my own. Once that happens, growth stops and a self-satisfied stagnation begins.
