Style is to genius what genre is to scenius
Style is a relative inflexibility, a patterning, a degree of predictability – the habits of a mind, a unconscious (or willed) decrease in variety and freedom
Style is invariance, self-conformity
When you read a new piece by a writer whose style is familiar to you and who you enjoy
your pleasure is basically saying “that’s exactly what X would think, exactly how X would say it - and they did”
The naturalness of style is an illusion that occurs when the will involved in writing doesn’t make itself felt, otherwise style becomes “mannered”, tries too hard –
Style feels effortless
Arriving at style is the onset of the ability to be parodied
Any artist or performer who has achieved distinction is one who becomes amenable to parody
Same applies to genre – the sign that a genre has achieved definition is when it is capable of being parodied or pastiched
Versatility and eclecticism are the enemies of style
Equally, the problem for any artist or performer is to achieve style but not become penned in by it - -a style that retains the capacity for growth, for being stretched, while still being itself
Same goes for genres
Truth is that most artists, and most genres, only have so much room in them before they must repeat themselves –
Either that or it starts doing other things - and ceases to be itself.
Style is to genius, what genre is to scenius – it is identity, personality, a set of characteristics
Like a person, a style or a genre can only be X, Y, and Z, if it precludes for itself A,B, and C
It can’t be all values, all attributes, to all people
Indeed the more it takes on and encompasses, the more it risks falling into indistinctness, lack of a defining essence, a core
The more varied, eclectic, adaptable, flexible, versatile – the more you merge into the undifferentiated array of other stuff around – jack of all trades, master of none – you are providing services that others provide, rather than the unique function
The more rule-bound the genre, the more it establishes itself – it also thereby sets up a pathway, a trajectory of evolution
The pathway is to slough away residues of earlier or other styles, it's a process of becoming ever more like itself, intensifying its own strictures
Eventually this collapses into exhaustion
(Possible example to counter this argument - David Bowie. Who kept restlessly changing, absorbing, greedily eating up new influences and ideas... But always remained "David Bowie". Then again, the face, and the voice... this becomes the thread of consistency. You can push the voice quite far - the ugliness of the vocals on much of the Scary Monsters album - but it's still one person's voice, their signature)
This is great. It reminds me of the trend in finance over the past 40 years or so of rejecting conglomerate companies and favouring specialised ones.
ReplyDeleteUp until the 1970s, many companies operated in a rag-bag assortment of industries. Pearson owned oilfields and Ladybird books, Royal Doulton China and Madam Tussauds. Then in the 1980s, as shareholder value emerged as the dominant ideology, those conglomerate companies fell out of fashion.
Their pitch to investors had been: "invest in us and you can get a little bit of the oil business, a little bit of children's publishing, a little bit of quality pottery, and a little bit of the tourist industry." To which investors very reasonably replied: "Look, if I want to be in that range of industries, I can buy shares in an oil company, and a book publisher, and pottery company, and some tourist attractions. Why do I need to buy your shares? What is it that you contribute to all those businesses, exactly?"
As consumers, wondering where to invest our time and enthusiasm, we can do something similar. You don't have to get your dance music and your grand romantic statements and your consolation in heartbreak all from the same place. You don't need big ballads from your metal bands, or political statements from your R&B. You can pick the artist or genre to suit your needs. And that process has been made much easier by streaming.
To extend the analogy, you could say that having a broad range of tastes and interests is like having a diversified portfolio of investments: the lows are not so low, but the highs are not so high. If you are all-in on just one band, or scene, or genre, you are like those funds that invest only in Tesla, or whatever. When that investment is doing well, the returns will be better than anything a more cautious and eclectic buyer might experience. But when if it crashes, then you risk being dragged down with it.
The 'diversified portfolio' is - in criticism - what people call generalism. Having a broad spectrum of interests, so that's there's always something to write about with tempered enthusiasm. It's the default stance of people who are chief pop critics at newspapers and that kind of job - a weekly column. That way you avoid subsiding into cranky complainer mode. But you never get into wild claims and bug-eyed belief states.
ReplyDeleteThe alternative modes are specialism (being a metal writer, a dance music writer) and then what i think of as 'serial fanaticism'. You don't have a lifelong commitment to one genre but you have a fanaticism that is overriding for a given stretch of time, and there's some other things you are interested in or like as well. The fanaticism exhausts itself, or the thing being fanatical about starts to dead-end and come up dry, so that's when you move on.
That's where I would sit probably for much of my writing lifetime.
Like a serial monogamist rather than someone playing the field. It creates a more dynamic emotional weather-system - extreme highs and extreme lows. Superintense excitement and belief followed by disillusionment and slackness. I prefer that up and down thing, it suits my metabolism, but also generates the kind of prose I prefer.
However just through aging out of that way of relating to music, I'm these days more like the generalist eclectic... the atemporality of music, the archiving systems of streaming, mean you never have to "go hungry".