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TED TALK: AUTHENTIC CREATIVITY VS. KARAOKE CULTURE.
MALCOLM MCLAREN
”authenticity is, i suppose, something that is real. that can only be achieven through a struggle. that adores, romanticizes and actually makes that messy process a romantic and noble pursuit.
in a karaoke world is a world in which life is proxy. you are free from any real responsibility beyond that moment of performance. everything and everyone is for sale. something that tony blair made very popular in the UK. i recall tony blair to brand the UK as cool brittania. how stupid we all think we were to listen to such trollips. the man was an absolute baffoon.
as far as i’m concerned you really have to look hard today, to find something authentic. something authentic is usually not for sale.
so what do most creative people do? they try to authenticate a karaoke culture. but to do that you have to be some kind of magician. and those people are very rare today.
i was taught at a young age through education of the london streets and TV, that i lived in a culture of deception. that england was a nation of liars born in school.
in secondary school i did like some teachers. i recall my history teacher, who once jumped on stage in the assembly room and played a rock and roll song on the piano. it was called ‘goodness gracious, the ball is on fire’. i was sitting on the front row and his head was shaking so hard that i thought it would fall off his shoulders and land in my lap. it was the first time i felt something like… desire. finally, after leaving school at 16 being consistently late 300 days a year, i was glad to leave but not glad to have a job. my mother, a dreadful snob, wanted me to become a trainee wine taster. it was something she could tell at one of her cocktail parties.
i wanted to get out and smoked a whole package of french cigarettes, called ‘je táime’. they told my mother and threw me out, and against her wishes i attended art school. on my first day i found myself surrounded by boys in short trousers and thought they had put me in the junior section, but no! these twelve year old boys were chosen from different schools for having a certain talent. they were given an opportunity to develop this talent and become, one could say, geniuses.
a goaty beardy professor struck a cord of what our role was. of what we came to be and why we came to be in this art school. it was clear, as he said: ”if you think that any of of you are going to be succesful; there is the door.
because: you are bloody not. not any one of you.
And we’d hardly been there for half an our and tried to not catch this attention.
what it is you are going to do is that you are going to learn you are going to fail. failing is not so bad, helps you get up in the morning and pull that pillow of your head, roll up your sleeves. this is a messy job, being an artist.”
and then he walked out.
and after a year, half of us had fallen off a cliff. he came back with the same agression and said: ”well i think some of you have learned about failure. and we didn’t know quite what he meant. and then he said: but don’t think you can just bloody fail. you have to learn how to be a magnificant, brilliant, flamboyant failure! rather than any kind of denying success.” that phrase haunted me for five years.
and then i finally came to understand it. it was about being fearless. fearless of failing. because that was the only way you would ever find anything out for yourself that counted. it was the struggle of doing that. a journey without end. because upon arrival, if you ever do arrive you will be dead. and for me it became clear that that was the only way to make any kind of progress. any possibility of changing the culture and indeed, maybe just for the moment, changing life itself.
