The Case for Creative Generosity
Tucked away in Paul McCartney’s recent book The Lyrics, deep in the first volume, is a surprising and little known story about the Beatles’ relationship with the Rolling Stones. It’s summer 1963 and Paul and John are on the Charing Cross Road, ogling guitars they cannot, just yet, afford. They hear a shout from a passing taxi. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are leaning out of the window and they offer the lads from Liverpool a lift. In the cab the four young musicians chat about how things are going. The Stones, who’ve only recently signed a record deal, thanks largely to the Beatles recommending them to Decca, have a problem – they don’t have a song to release as their second single. Without a second thought, in an act of creative generosity counter to everything we’ve been led to believe about the rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones, Paul pipes up with a solution: there’s a tune on With the Beatles which will never make it as a single, because, well, it’s Ringo on vocals – why don’t they have that? And this is how ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ becomes the Stones second single and their first big hit.
The Rolling Stones perform ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’
Contrast this scene with one played out last month at the High Court in London. Ed Sheeran emerges looking exhausted and strung out, having just won the latest copyright claim against him. A judge has ruled that Sheeran did not in fact plagiarize the song ‘Oh Why’ by Sami Chakri on his global hit ‘Shape of You’. The victory, though important, is a hollow one. Ed and his co-writer, Snow Patrol’s John McDaid, talk about the ‘extraordinary strain’ they’ve experienced in this case and several similar ones, and the immense cost, not financially but to their creativity and their mental health: “The stress … is immense. It affects so many aspects of our everyday lives and the lives of our families and friends. We are not corporations. We are not entities. We are human beings.”
Sheeran explains how the most joyful part of the songwriting process has now, for him, fallen under a dark shadow: “I personally think the best feeling in the world is the euphoria around the first idea of writing a great song. That feeling has now turned into 'Oh wait, let's stand back for a minute'. You find yourself in the moment, second-guessing yourself.” He explains how he must now film himself every time he sits down to compose a tune or explore a melody, to protect against any future claims.
Copyright disputes were not unknown during the time of the Beatles and the Stones, and instances of creative collaboration and generosity are of course not unknown today, but it seems to me that these two stories, some fifty years apart, illustrate an unfortunate trend within the creative industries, and among society at large, to double down on the ownership of ideas.
The emergence of NFT’s is part of this trend. I attended a talk recently where NFT’s were heralded as ‘a new frontier in creativity’, when all they really seem to be is a new frontier in capitalism; a new mechanic for saying ‘this is mine and you can’t have it, unless you’re prepared to pay’. The intrinsic value of art is obscured by rampant speculation, where all that matters is who owns what and how much they can sell it for.
Original artwork by Mr Bingo
To believe that any one person can have ownership of an idea is a myth, a myth that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human creativity. Nothing comes of nothing. Everything we create owes a debt to that which has been created before. As Isaac Newton famously said, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. What is less well known is that he borrowed the saying from John of Salisbury, who had himself acquired it from Bernard of Chartres.
It was recently discovered that Neanderthals had a greater brain mass than us Homo sapiens, which puzzled scientists: if Neanderthals had larger brains how come they fizzled out while we have become the dominant species on the planet? The answer lies in the region of the brain known as the cerebellum – ours is larger. And because the cerebellum is responsible for skills like language processing and social interaction, we have always been much better at sharing ideas than were our Neanderthal cousins. If they happened to chance upon an innovation, say a new way of making axe heads or skinning an animal, it would be retained within a given tribe or family group, whereas Homo sapiens would spread the word and allow others to build upon it, for the greater good of all.
As Rutger Bregman persuasively argued in his brilliant book Humankind, the qualities of altruism, generosity and sharing make up our default setting as human beings. The defensive, proprietorial attitude that comes with the notion of ownership is learned behaviour and not instinctive.
Human creativity cannot progress without us incorporating the endeavours of others into our own creations. The lawyer for Sheeran’s opponents argued that he was a ‘magpie’, as if a musi cian could be anything else. Nick Cave recently put it like this: ‘The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation – everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music – the great artistic experiment of our era.’ And the songwriter Jeff Tweedy elegantly encapsulated this notion in his recent book How to Write One Song: ‘Everyone who you could possibly steal from at this point in human evolution is a thief.’
To encourage creative borrowing or ‘theft’ is not the same as endorsing plagiarism. To plagiarize is to take something in its original form, add nothing, and claim it as your own. Whereas to steal is to take something and then make it your own; to take an idea and advance it, reimagine it, to add your own experience and truth to create something new. The greatest artists are the biggest thieves, it cannot be otherwise. Which, given our increasingly litigious culture, and the invention of new mechanics for ownership like NFT’s, presents us with a problem: how are we to indulge in the reinvention of existing ideas, such a fertile and fundamental part of the artistic process, when the potential threat of a date in the high court hangs heavy above our heads?
Well, I think it’s down to each of us as creatives to make sure we don’t fall into the trap of behaving like one of those kids at school who would curl a protective arm around their exercise books, determined that no one would get even the merest peek at their work. Wouldn’t it be better if we all adopted a McCartney mindset, where what’s mine can be yours, so long as you remake it anew? The Beatles version of I Wanna Be Your Man was, according to Paul, ‘more of a Bo Diddley shuffle’, whereas the Stones transformed it, making the song ‘raw and distorted, almost punk-like’.
If we’re open to sharing and open to collaboration, generous in our creativity, then we open ourselves and our work up to the excitement and reward of seeing where someone else can take it. Human creativity is not finite. The more we share, the more ideas there are, and the more ideas there are, the more we all benefit.
This article first appeared in Creative Review magazine.