In the 2010’s, after the music industry had been leveled by Napster, when print was going the way of the Dodo and social media still had a shiny halo around its head, a quixotic editor named Dan Stone founded a journal dedicated to the dying business of “Literature and Rock & Roll.” He named it Radio Silence.
In the words of Genesis, It was good. But it would end with a fall. As the Editor-in Chief acknowledged shortly after its inception, in 2013:
We understand the recklessness of creating a print magazine at a time when that industry is on the decline. But we’re trying to do something unique—to produce a carefully curated publication that is not only challenging and engaging, but also accessible to a non-literary audience. People may be drawn to this new issue because it includes a great conversation with Springsteen, but then hopefully they’ll end up discovering Robert Pinsky or Edith Wharton or Grace Paley.
I ended up discovering some thoughtful music critics, just as the publication was nearing the end of its three year run.
More than a magazine, Radio Silence was also a 501(c)3 nonprofit, donating books and musical instruments to arts education (also going the way of the African white rhino). It staged loft parties, events for musicians and writers, and maintained a website with daily news in music and lit, as well as podcasts, short films, and other media.
Coincidentally, or not, RS happened to share its initials with another rag, once dedicated to a similar cause, Rolling Stone. Both were products of the East Bay. But in print, Radio Silence was a 200-page, bi-annual journal of articles, essays, interviews and poetry, where readers were as likely to discover a profile of a legendary musician as they were to find an essay written by one of these recording artists.
Early contributors included artists like Bruce Springsteen, M. Ward, and Billy Bragg, novelists like Tobias Wolfe, Sherman Alexie, and Ray Bradbury, and poets like Robert Pinsky and Dana Gioia. There were even throwbacks to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I seem to recall one the first articles I read was by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, or someone similar.
But the piece I remember most was a three-part article by an L.A. Times culture critic named Scott Timberg. As a newspaper man, Timberg was doomed to the same fate as Radio Silence. Another critic and creative laid off during the transition from print to pixels.
I’d never heard of Timberg, but he changed my conception of art, the people who make it, and the cottage industries that nurture it. He was a gateway to other theorists on the subject of creativity, like the historians cited in his work—but he was accessible to a “non-literary audience,” as the editor of Radio Silence strove to be.
The article series was called “The Origins of the Creative Class.” In numerous ways, its themes have become my own. In honor of a great critic who succumbed to the death of print, which in a very real way became his own, I present some of the ideas in Scott Timberg’s articles. May the bits that follow, sprinkled with a few of my own, serve as breadcrumbs for others trying to make sense of this thing we call Art and Culture.
The Origins of the Creative Class
“The evolution of Homo sapiens in the past million years is not just a history of how we came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture audiences, from children’s games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.”
—Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (2009)
This is primitivism—a school of thought based on the notion that there is something to be gained by looking at human behavior in the raw, culture in its most basic forms, by turning to the beginning of the species and comparing it with modern parallels.
As we look back, “we see a number of patterns repeating themselves,” Timberg says, especially our craving for “the effects that art and music can have on us.” As an audience, we appreciate these effects. But—we also have a love/hate relationship with the people who create them. Society has always held, simultaneously, “both worshipful and deeply suspicious feelings toward the people who make art or who dwell in the realm of the aesthetic.” Michael Jackson. Roman Polanski. Woody Allen. Lenny Bruce. The press coverage of Britney Spears circa 2006…
How did we get here? When did human beings first start to paint, sing, sculpt figures, and tell tales? How did the people who do these things begin to constitute a class or subculture? How and when did an audience take shape, and what was the relationship between the artists who made this work and those who consumed it? What was the role of fellow-traveling non-artists who helped facilitate culture’s spread? And given what would become of the creative class, why on earth would anyone want to do this in the first place?
The beginnings of art are often traced back to the oldest cave paintings in France, Spain, and South Africa, the oldest by hunter-gatherers who lived 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. An illustrative example, they show the fundamentally “mimetic” or imitative nature of art, which was indistinguishable from primitive magic. The idea was to conjure the thing represented. Wishful, or “magical” thinking.
Before you write this off as primitive superstition, consider the efficacy of similar animal imitations—the hunting decoy, bird call, or so-called “imitation pattern” in fly fishing. The thin line between art and artifice.
The cave paintings…show a fresh turn for the species, as hunters retreated into the caves to create mimetic images of creatures they hoped to attract. The cave spaces may have been chosen for their acoustic properties, as well, serving as sites of singing and ritual dancing.
The mythographer Jospeh Campbell considered the cave our original echo chamber, as David Byrne of the Talking Heads notes in his personal history of the music business, How Music Works. Campbell suggested that the sound of the cave persists in the acoustic resonances of the Christian cathedral, where religious choral singing still has its most profound effect.
The English composer Cyril Scott, an eccentric who wrote his own history of music, from an occult perspective (shades of Jimmy Page and Aleister Crowley here), captured the effect this sacred reverb must have had on our ancestors.
Primitive man needed “an outlet for all those strange supplicatory emotions—and he ultimately found it in a rudimentary form of song. He discovered that when he sang, his petitions in some unaccountable way seemed to have been heard,” Scott said. He quotes the Akashic record: “Whereas Melody is the cry of Man to God, Harmony is the answer of God to Man.”
One can imagine a Paleolithic human, crying out in one of these caves, and hearing something like the voice of god, imitating him.
“Around the same time,” Timberg says, “someone in Slovenia picked up the femur of a cave bear, put four holes in it, and began to play, in fixed pitches, something like music.”
He refers to the Divje Babe flute, estimated to be around 50,000 to 60,000 yrs old—some 15,000 years older than the oldest surviving cave paintings.
Music is quite possibly the oldest art. That’s because,
For Neanderthals, communication and music may have been the same thing, until the two branched off in separate strains—one becoming language, the other surviving as gesture, body language, expression of emotion, the pre-linguistic tones passing between mother and child, and music itself. Because melody and rhythm were so tied up in our communication, for so many thousands of years, our minds have evolved to enjoy them.
Some languages, the so-called “tonal” languages such as Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Hmong, Chinese, Yoruba, and Cherokee, still derive meaning from variations in pitch, retaining this musicality.
As the philosopher of art Dennis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct (2009) “the universality of art resembles another persistent human proclivity, language.”
Language and the arts all had something in common: utility, and storytelling.
Over the last few years, an academic school known as the Literary Darwinists has grown up, inspired in part by Noam Chomsky’s work on universal human language and by Joseph Campbell’s chronicling of the “shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story” of human myth. “The riddle of fiction comes to this,” scholar Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human (2012). “Evolution is ruthlessly utilitarian. How has this seeming luxury of fiction not been eliminated from human life?….Why do people make and consume art when doing so has real costs in time and energy and no obvious biological payoffs?”
To begin with, it may have helped that the material production of art and storytelling seemed to coincide with the attainment of food and resources.
As evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley guessed in Nature via Nurture (2003), the emergence of tools—mostly derived from animal parts—and language reinforced each other. It led to the cognitive “great leap forward” some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe, and earlier in Africa, that resulted when “painting, body-adornment, trading over long distances, artifacts of clay and bone, and elaborate new stone designs all seemed to appear at once.”
In music, as in painting, the early materials of art seem to have come from animals. In audio as in visual art, the “magic” was probably imitative of animals, and produced with pieces of them, such as the Divje Babe bone flute. One early instrument known as “the Lion’s Roar” produced loud growling sounds, by using a length of gut string threaded through a reverberating animal skin, stretched across a drum of bone or gourd. As one music historian, Ted Gioia, notes, the instruments in the horn section of the Royal Philharmonic originated with animal horns. The strings of the violin bow, strung with horsehair, were originally derived from hunting bows.
As with painting, these early musical instruments may have been designed to attract, or repel, the essence of wild animals.
In the case of cave paintings, such as the famous illustrations found in Lascaux, France, the representation of animals was clearly related to human desire, most likely the desire to attract game. Others think the seasonal timing of the animal’s migration may have coincided with their rutting season, that the pictures illustrate a desire for fertility, to ensure the propagation of the food source.
It’s also been suggested that these artists, who often worked by filling their mouths with paint and spewing it onto the walls of the cave, were spitting another type of game. Groups of far-flung hunter-gatherers, who traveled in small familial units to hunt more effectively, periodically gathered in this time and space (the caves), in order to reproduce outside their bloodline. A human rutting season may have coincided with the animal one.
There’s a third suggestion, that the caves of Lascaux were also the site of ritual drug ingestion. While this theory isn’t taken as seriously as it once was (during the 1960s and 70s, of course), the sacred ingestion of hallucinogenics almost certainly took place elsewhere, in a similar setting, outside of Lascaux. We can begin to see the origins of the modern cliche, that holy trinity of pop music—“sex, drugs, and rock & roll,” around 38,000 BC.
As Timberg notes, there are “many connections between art-making, especially music, and sex.”
Literary Darwinism, concerned with the evolution of similar myths across time and cultures, follows the lead of Charles Darwin himself,
who saw mankind’s urge for music-making as similar to birdsong or the peacock’s tail—an instrument for sexual selection: Those gifted in aesthetic pursuits land the smarter, more attractive, or physically stronger mates. In The Descent of Man (1871), he wrote, “It appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.”
While Darwin argued that early hominids with an aesthetic streak were smarter, more attractive, or physically stronger than their competitors, art historian Arnold Hauser has a different take—at least when we come to the point where a special class of artist-magicians begins to distinguish themselves from the rest of society.
In The Social History of Art (1951), Hauser wrote, “the elaborate and refined technique of Paleolithic painting argues that these works were done not by dilettanti but by trained specialists who had spent a considerable part of their life learning and practicing their art and who formed a professional class of their own.”
While artists may have stood out from the rest of society, it was probably because they came from “the ranks of those unfit for war or foray,” suggesting they couldn’t do much else. Far from being physically stronger or more attractive, they were somehow afflicted.
Disability was a mark of distinction—from the legendary blindness of the Greek bard Homer, who sang his poems and shared his affliction with countless Delta bluesmen (Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc…), to the rampant consumption and syphilis chic of Romantic poets, to midcentury punks and rockers strung out on heroin. (For similar reasons, today there is a whole subculture dedicated to nurturing a range of psychosomatic illnesses online, but that’s a subject for a later post.)
Through affliction, the primitive artist-magician was relieved of the need to hunt—a labor exemption. Anticipating, Timberg says, “the formation of a priestly class whose responsibilities were different from the average tribesman.” “The artist-magician,” Hauser said, “seems to have been the first representative of specialization and the division of labor.”
The beginning of a society, whose group identity was based on their difference from the weirdo.
These figures have always been a little suspect, a little different. Historically, their novelty has usually been part survival mechanism, part career-move, half-affliction and half-affectation.
It’s no wonder pretentious frontmen like Jim Morrison or Iggy Pop styled themselves as “shamans,” or latter-day artist-magicians. In the latter case, the performer went so far as participating in a Voodoo ceremony, while on holiday in Haiti—even on vacation, he was playing the part. Jumping into the action, and doing something like his stage performance, which must have looked like spirit possession to onlookers. Pop was promptly ejected from the proceedings, either because his antics were deemed disrespectful or, as I suspect, because the chief of ceremonies realized the singer was horning in on his act.
Hauser’s “artist-magician” was the equivalent of what we now know as the shaman—a combination artist, medic, magistrate, and magician.
There is evidence in the prehistoric record that artists, musicians, and others in today’s creative class derived in part from shamans—mysterious figures who served, in hunter-gatherer societies, as a combination of priest, bard, poet, bandleader, and perhaps bartender…
And healer.
Much later in the historical record, there is a bizarre account of one man being thrust into this role unwittingly, among the tribes of North America. When the accountant of a Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, found himself shipwrecked and abandoned by his employer in what is now modern-day Texas, he was taken for a spiritual medicine man, and attracted a large following of indigenous Americans, who trailed him for four years as they walked from the American Southwest to Mexico City, where de Vaca was eventually rescued.
Why all the fuss over a castaway accountant? He was different—a white Spaniard accompanied by a former African slave—and didn’t succumb to the viral pathogens the Spaniards brought with them to the New World, unlike the native population that sought his magic cures. Today he is known, rather tongue-in-cheek, as the “first surgeon” of Texas.
Though he wasn’t an artist—he was an accountant—he was inspired by his experiences to become a writer, in order to chronicle his ordeal afterwards.
In The Account of Cabeza de Vaca, he became one of the only Europeans to write in defense of the “Indians” against Spanish mistreatment (the only other Spanish apologist for native Americans at the time was, in a similar vein, a Catholic priest).
During his sojourn, the natives identified Cabeza de Vaca with their trickster deity, a messenger between worlds. And that’s what he became, again, through his written account describing indigenous Americans to the king of Spain.
I’m jumping ahead of the script, but de Vaca’s is a fascinating account of a fifteenth-century European thrust into the role of early-modern “shaman.” Timberg continues:
Revered for their ability to ascend to a dream world, shamans served as the mediators between the visible and earthly lives of their tribesmen and the enigmatic world of the spirits. As with black American gospel or Bach’s choral work, music was seen as the best way to reach ancestors or the gods. The shaman did the same thing a myth did, symbolically—he took people to a higher level of existence—and sometimes into an ecstatic or trance state.
These figures faded out with the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agricultural societies in the West (the occasional New Age pretender, or Spanish conquistador notwithstanding), but they still persist in the nomadic peoples of Mongolia and the Siberian steppes—though Vladimir Putin and others would like to stamp them out for their ability to stir up trouble.
The religious scholar Mircea Eliade wrote about them in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy (1951): “Among many Siberian and Inner Asian tribes, the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior,” which begins to sound like the self-mutilation of Sid Vicious or Iggy Pop, or that time Ozzy Osborn bit the head off a bat. The Tungus shaman of Eastern Siberia exiles himself to the mountains, Eliade wrote, “and remains there for a week or more, feeding on wild animals, which he tears to pieces with his teeth. He returns to the village filthy, bloodstained, his clothes torn and his hair disordered, and it is only after ten or more days have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words.”
Eliade wrote the book on Shamanism in 1951, and though I can’t prove it, odds are good that a well-read, aspiring “shaman” like Jim Morrison, interested in spiritual psychologies like William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, may have also read Eliade’s work sometime before 1967 and inherited some performance tips, which were soon emulated by his disciple, Iggy Pop.
This may seem far afield from contemporary musicians or poets—or maybe it doesn’t—but shamans had a crucial role in keeping their societies psychologically whole, as well as in passing on much of the literature that’s survived from pre-literate peoples. Lyric poetry, for instance—so called because it was typically performed on a lyre—derives from the heightened language of the shaman, separate[d] from everyday speech by rhyme, meter, and music. The music historian Ted Gioia, who sees the shaman as a crucial ancestor to today’s artist, suspects that the ancient Greek prophet [and archetypal musician] Orpheus (who has inspired everyone from Newton and Rilke to Neil Gaiman and Nick cave), was a shaman and that his lyre-playing marked the transition from drums and percussion to strings and wind instruments—melody and harmony over rhythm. Orpheus’ mythical descent into Hades to recover his wife Eurydice, Gioia argues in Healing Songs (2006), demonstrates not only the shamanic tradition—talking to the dead—but a literary device, the “going down” that we see in Dante, Goethe, Milton, and beyond.
As for the gradual transition from “artist-magicians” or shamans to “Literature and Rock & Roll,” it took millennia. Especially when it came to written literature. The earliest instances of writing, around 3500 BC, were more in the style of Cabeza de Vaca’s day job—accounting. Writing was first used in Egypt and Mesopotamia to keep track of grain stores, property lines, and slaves.
But it marks the beginning of another side to the historical origins of the artist,
—the side that requires learning, reflection, and literacy—whose roots are less romantic. It wasn’t until the development of agriculture and, later, our settling down into cities that a “creative class,” as we understand the term today, came about….Agricultural surpluses made specialization possible, and some of the key patterns of human life—which would last through the twenty-first century—took shape.
With the alphabet (alpha, beta, and so on), which was brought to Greece by Phoenician sailors from Hebrews in the Levant, new cultural possibilities opened up.
While the original pictographic writing systems of China, Egypt, and the early Greek system known as Linear B, required the memorization of thousands of symbols accessible only to a special caste of scribes and scholars, the Phoenician alphabet was simple enough that nearly anyone who could afford an education might learn it. While the older, more complicated forms of inscription were good for bookkeeping, the Phoenician system marked the turn toward heightened language—literature. But the themes are the same as those we discover in the caves of Lascaux:
Some of the earliest examples we have of the Greek alphabet are odes to dance, drink, and being “seized in lust by golden Aphrodite.” As Tom Cahill writes in his book Sailing the Wine Dark Sea (2003), “Unlike earlier writing systems, forged to count wealth, to ensure control, to invoke the patronage of a deity, the ancient Greek alphabet announces a civilization of leisure. To hell with your ponderous obsessions; let’s have some wine, women, and song.”
The increase in resources and leisure—as well as ceremonies built around the agricultural cycle—meant that musicians and storytellers had a firm place in their societies and a mass audience. These figures were important to society at large, not just to a small coterie of art lovers. Much like priests or therapists—and the shamans whose role they inherited—artists and storytellers provided the kind of symbolic coherence necessary for a working society. They provided myths and legends by which citizens of all levels understood their daily lives and their positions in a changing universe—a world that had very little science to explain why the sun went across the sky, why an animal might attack the tribe at night, why a harvest could struggle one year and surge the next.
As in hunter-gatherer societies, music and culture grew out of magic or spiritual rituals. With the development of agriculture, the rituals now became preoccupied with the harvest and vegetable fertility, as opposed to animal plentitude. The whole of society took part in these rituals, which became the basis for various “reborn” deities who symbolized the annual return of spring vegetation. From Dionysus—the god of the vineyard, who became the patron deity of Greek theater—to his Roman equivalent Bacchus, to the ritual of a latter-day surrogate, also involving wine, in the Christian eucharist. And perhaps other, more recent symbols of fertility, who returned to life after death in the twentieth century…
Early poetry was built from a tissue of “magic formulae, oracular sayings, prayers, and charms, songs of war and work,” what Arnold Hauser calls “the ritual poetry of the masses.” This was not the product of literary individualism, but anonymous work aimed at everyone. Like the ritual stones laid down by Celts 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, or sculpted tree-trunks set around Greek temples, this was the “primitive community art” of a more-or-less classless society that had little sense of private experience. But as civilization developed, the artist or musician slowly began to differentiate himself from the mainstream of the culture, to profound effect.
On the road to individualism, the classical artist, like his prototypes, had to be a little different, and remain “beloved but suspect.”
“Origins of the Creative Class: Part 2” takes us from ancient and classical Greece, from Homer and fluting prostitutes, to the edge of the Dark Ages. Courtesy of Scott Timberg and Radio Silence.