Layer IV; Creativity and Autophagy

The act of creation as a concept has been put into discussion once again. Creating is a deeply human thing. It is not enough to bring together a new object, but to consider it an object of its own, to designate it as new. A crow using tools to reach its hard-to-get food doesn’t understand the tool used as an object apart from itself. Meanwhile, humans can take a bunch of things, mix them in their own (somewhat) original way, and call it an invention.

We have a bunch of musicians who seemingly all use the same tools in different ways, but somehow create completely different works. My Bloody Valentine doesn't sound like, for example, Radiohead, even though they use roughly the same instruments.

Lately in online discussions I have seen many times the opinion of there not being “new” music releases anymore. That every new project more or less just mixes already existing things, and that the creativity of it comes from the way the author mixes those things. I believe that there is no substance in thinking this way, because, as I have established before, the act of creating has always been this way.

There is a problem though, and it is that in some spaces, the creators are in fact creating and mixing their inspirations in derivative ways that has done harm to their respective niches (at least in relation to the creative aspect of them). And that is the fact that they are committing what I call creative autophagy. That is, consuming only one type of media, and fueling their creativity with only that said music/shows/etc. That way, their creation becomes automatically derivative.

I see this specifically in mediums like manga. Many authors seem to only take cues from older manga and its formulas, which wouldn’t be a problem if they inserted ideas taken from any other place too. But that is usually not the case. The same situation can be more evidently seen in certain music genres. Phonk (most notoriously, thanks to the advent of brazilian phonk/oversaturated trash), Vaporwave (though I’m feeling a revival is coming soon), Breakcore/Jungle (the Sewesrlvt kind), etc.

Anyways, it’s nothing new nor that deep. People usually like what others do, and when they want to make something, they want to make something just as good. It’s just part of the process of becoming an original artist to start from somewhere, and that somewhere usually belongs to someone else. Still, in the future I would like to analyze some of these cases in more detail.