Do we need individiual genius?

wrote my first posting ("collective idiocy") when bored at work and feeling naughty and anti-thinking. Maybe I shd be bored at work more often, because the more this topic gets thrown around, the more "collective idiocy" looks actually like the answer, to me. Obviously it's what L.Bangs was trying to get at in his Count Five piece + what Dave Marsh invented the work "punk" for in ref. ? and the Mysterians. Meaning: nothing wrong with intelligence per se, it's just not the factor which truly juices an interrelationship: every human on the planet is the same idiot when they're in love, clever or not in their dayjobs, good with words, bad at business or vice versa - and good bands are always polyamorous love-of-the-young mental-physical gang- bangs, affairs most often heading for the brick wall, as x, y, z and ringo get older, wiser and jealouser.

Since - can we agree on this? - few writers of rock biogs have yet been henry james, the one thing we generally don't get, in discussion of what made who how why, is the oomph of the drummer, say, on the bassplayer, when they're talking porno at the back of the tour bus (or whatever it was kept the Velvets sane). There's talk of music and sometimes of money; of "influences" and "tendencies"; but not the, um, dialectics of intimacy, except obliquely

weirdly enough - and you have to cut through bodyfat yards of self- regard to get to it - one person who isn't totally unJamesian on this topic, when discussing the recording of music (or anyway the recording of LPs by James) is Eno in My Life with a Swollen Head, or whatever it's called. Course he was a vital ineffable what-he-do-then? cog in one of the great bands-as-curdling-multipart-marriages: Roxy Music

'raw spice' was good also: ie what does Sporty do? She's the peace- maker. Who's the "genius of the group"? The "genius of the group" is the intense love-hate competitiveness between Geri and Scary. Who's the main comedienne? Posh: no brainbox, sure, but physically a deliberate charmer-amuser

(my theory as to why they didn't want this doc shown - which baby admittedly said not true on the priory - is that they considered it unhelpful that it be so obvious that they were in effect in control from so much earlier than it was helpful to them to have us assume same: and the managing menfolk were ALWAYS useful clods, for anwering phones and hiring hotels, and being required to act the svengali, albeit inadvertently, whenever the spicers themselves required to cloak their serious awesomeness in silly triviality)

Bands are threatened by strong (actual heterosexual) marriages. Bands get worse - how much worse cf Genesis c1990 - as their constituent parts grow into and make intelligent reasoned compromise with the lunacy of their early mad-for-it plight. I've hated the Jam longer than some ILM-ers have been alive, but I can hardly deny the rightness of their trio-ness up till at least 'Going Underground': and - tho I'd rather fricasee my tongue than have to spend time with them - I've always felt a pang thinking of the dumb animal hurt Rick and Bruce presumably still feel when Weller divorced them (for Mick Talbot!)

Tom: WTF did you hear that Posh was the "brains" of the group? If that's the brains, I'm very, very worried ;)

Anyway, to answer the question, I am someone who needs an individual genius. See: My intense dislike of McCartney, Gary, Nicky Wire, the entirety of Joy Division besides Ian Curtis, Sullivan (well, not really on that one but I'm sure it could happen), so on and so forth. I can't explain it though, just that I am acutely aware that I do it. I just like having a bad guy. It certainly doesn't HURT that these people all made awful music after their collaborations with the "geniuses" ended, though - so maybe it's something founded in fact. The results post split are so varying from the original work, that people are going to be pulled to one or the other.

Ramblings.

"Polyamorous": I couldn't agree more. As often as not 'genius' seems to arise as much from group dynamics as from some individual's vision. I am struggling to think of a great pop group (come to think of it, group in any musical genre) which is no more than the sum of its parts.

I often feel that identifying a single individual in a band as the genius is the lazy option, a displacement of trying to work out how a piece of music affects me onto something unknowable (it's pretty obvious that genius and madness are, for these purposes, the same thing). And if we're going to gaze at unknowables, then collective creativity / genius / madness is much more interesting to me than an individual's.

Apart from all that, I remain more interested in my reaction to a piece of art than in how or why the piece of art came about. The genius is in the listener, in how the listener listens. That must be true at least some of the time.

Despite all the clever things that have been said thus far: yes, we do.

As far as I know, most great melodies are not written by committee, though many vital and admirable democratic judgements at local council level may very frequently be.

But I think the point is - well, my point is - we need individuals to create the music but does that help us talk about it or enjoy it more?

The word genius once meant a special sort of talent: "she has a genius for woodwork". I would agree that we need that kind of genius, although it's not very interesting.

Now it's a term applied by critics to their artistic super-heroes, which exists in mutual justification with an agreed canon of classics. Others might feel they need it, I don't.

OK, I'm sure that you two are on good points here. No, I don't think that calling someone a genius gets us very far 'critically' (hard to see how it could). My response was merely to the 'question' itself (as, possibly, or possibly not, was the much-praised response 'no, we need collective idiocy'): that is, I do want there to be talented songwriters with gifts that no-one else quite has, and that are all different, and who work on and think about their talent and how to use it, and maybe at some point hand over what they've done to someone else to do further interesting things with it, which nonetheless don't negate the 'genius' who happened to start the thing off. I don't want an account of pop music which cannot accommodate this frequent and, from my point of view, vital pattern.

Mind you, it was only "much-praised" because I myself put up a second, very long posting praising it muchly (story of my life, if you don't blow your own blah blah blah). Or was that what you were remarking on?

Um, no - I was remarking on the fact that some very clever folks that I met in a railway carriage thought that your phrase about 'collective idiocy' was very good and apposite. I somewhat agree with them, I expect; but I also think [what I said above], which I may be wrong in thinking is an increasingly 'unfashionable' (perhaps that means 'supposedly discredited') way of discussing pop music.