Shirin Dubbin's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

SOUNDTRACK: History Repeating - The Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey

I recently read a comment from someone who felt one needn't know the history of an art form to enjoy it. This thought bothered me a great deal. Certainly I don't need to know the exact history of the flour, eggs, and vanilla that go into my cupcakes. But that's cake. We enjoy it in the moment then it's gone. Art is different, it should and must accrete with each cycle around the sun.

Art, in any form, only reaches new highs when the artists stand on the shoulders of those who came before. Otherwise every body is standing side by side and nobody reaches that next level.

Take literature. Who would J.K. Rowling's Harry be without Tolkien, Dahl, and Gaiman? She is a singular author and yet her knowledge of what came before surely played a huge part in her expansion and re-envisioning of magician fantasy. Would we have Cyberpunk without Gibson? Urban Fantasy without Windling? Romance without the romanticism of Austen? No, we wouldn't. And we certainly couldn't take our chances to improve on them—as insurmountable as those dreams may seem.

Ask Jay-Z, Mos Def, Kayne West and Talib Kweli about the history of Hip Hop and see if they won't take you all the way back. The greats before them were able to do the same. Big Daddy Kane and Rakim are some of the dopest lyricists ever—timeless. Maybe the reason mainstream Hip Hop hasn't progressed in so long is because young cats [read: folks] don't know where it comes from so they can't see where to take it.

In visual art the examples go on and on. James Jean wouldn't be so awesome without the genius of Arthur Rackham and classical painters. In film, futurist production design couldn't have developed as it has without Syd Mead. The book cover designers coming up today have far greater freedom to create because of Chip Kidd. Picture animation without Disney, Avery and Miyazaki. As I've said art must be built upon the foundation of what came before or else it stagnates.

One cannot begin to create a new style or singular voice without studying the history of one's art form—the pivotal words being new and singular. It can't happen. And if you still don't think we need our history to inform our present. Imagine going through total amnesia every ten years. Much of life would be spent rediscovering what you already learned last decade or the decade before. You'd repeat the same mistakes. In imagining this, ask yourself how much progress you would make. I say you'd be spinning your wheels, going nowhere.

~S!

A shout-out to Julian Lytle for inspiring this post.