Editors and Suits

Professional writers get edited and as much as we like freedom of expression and like getting our words and guts out there on paper; we sometimes need a little help. Lucky artists find a friendly voice, someone who says, “I don’t think this is what you meant” and graciously helps us find our words again. Not all of us are lucky, we don’t always have an editor who is that interested in “getting” us.

As the democratization of creativity increases, as anyone with a modem can put their work out there, I wonder if we will come to value, and even miss, the wisdom of an experienced second opinion. Once you hit the “Send” button you work is out there, do overs are hard to come by.

For Christmas I got the complete Beatles Chordbook, a collection of the sheet music of all of the Fab 4’s work, so I could play a few of their songs on my guitar. While it’s a given that Lennon and McCartney (and sometimes Harrison) were musical geniuses; what struck me, as I saw all their work in one place, was the amount of really forgettable Beatles songs. For every “Get Back” there were three along the lines of “Her Majesty”, “Honey Pie” and “Dig a Pony”.  When you create; you create because you have to, often it is other people who know what is commercially viable. Your job is to get it out, self filtering leads to blocks and cocaine addictions.

As newspapers go away, as record companies go away, who will do the filtering previously done by editors and executives? Say what you will about “Suits” and creativity, someone who can recognize talent and something the public wants to consume is a valuable person to have on the success track.

Seth Godin, in a recent blog post called, The Evolution of Every Medium, puts his finger on the problem when he describes the conflict between artists and suits.

1. Technicians who invented it, run it
2. Technicians with taste, leverage it
3. Artists take over from the technicians
4. MBAs take over from the artists
5. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality.

Somewhere along the way, the fear of getting sued, the drive for profits takes away ingenuity. Creative people, the people with the ideas are only on board for so long, then the business people take over, dollars rule. How necessary are the dollar people up front? Great ideas, great designs, great pop songs only become recognized when people find out about them, going viral is great, but does it make you any money? (The Pants on the Floor guy hired an attorney because he isn’t making any money on his American Idol/ YouTube song).

So, it always seems to come back to the Affluent Artist premiss, doesn’t it? Artists who don’t get a handle on the money stuff are going to be undiscovered or unsuccessful and clueless suits have no soul. Somewhere in the middle is where the Affluent Artist lives.