Please enjoy this week’s dramatic reading of Monday’s post: “Raise Your Voice: Steal Scraps from Expert Tables” 👇
Notes from the Captain
Inspired by, imitating, and flat-out ripping off. These are the stages—in no particular order—of evolving your own style. But to make it to that version of fully evolved artistic you, you’ve got to wade through a whole lot of funky swamp.
The story I tell at the start of this week’s episode is part “inspired by” and part “rip off” of an R.E.M. song. Or a line from a song. I still see it as theft, even if Michael Stipe’s handprint is barely visible on the awful poem/story I wrote from it. Does that give it a pass? The pass is that it has remained entombed in the notebook. That’s my Get Out of Jail Free card right there.
If there’s a point I’m trying to make in the video (I don’t really make it there), it’s this:
Be young. Copy and imitate and try on the creative cloaks and styles of others in an effort to find one that sort of fits you. Adjust, tweak, hem, redesign, trade-in, trade up, then start your own line.
Be 19. Once. But do grow into yourself and out of your parroting, copying, and thieving ways and into something that’s distinctly you.
Your own voice, talking your own talk.
When you figure that out, be that.
Got it? Good.
PS: Today’s video is a dog’s breakfast. Choppy and messy and all over the place and hopefully a little bit funny—and THAT was Teen Janeen in a nutshell. I love her!
Thangs mentioned in this episode…
👩✈️ The song dissection podcast I couldn’t remember the name of was:
Song Exploder
Below is an excerpt from the “Losing My Religion” episode on the TV version of the podcast. You can watch the whole thing on Netflix (R.E.M. episode in the first season).
Weirdly, this was not the episode I was thinking of. They did one in 2017 about the song “Try not to Breathe” from Automatic for the People. Scrambled memory alert! Here’s a link to that.
👩✈️ A couple of Robert Cormier books:
The Chocolate War (there’s a sequel too)
👩✈️ Catcher in the Rye
People love it. People hate it. Read it and make up your own mind. It sure sounds interesting to kids (when it’s pitched in a particular way).
That’s all for this issue. If nothing else, I hope you got a good laugh out of my embarrassing younger self. I shouldn’t be so hard on her—she got me where I am today.
Love what you love, and go easy on your own younger creative selves.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Behind the Streams: Raise Your Voice