Underground

Emerge from your lair and show us your work.

Oct 25, 2021

Hey.

What are you doing down there? I can clearly see the lump of you outlined just beneath the surface. Buried in the crust. Safe. Warm. Lying in wait. As it stands now, you’re a real trip-and-fall menace, a legit what lies beneath hazard, sooo….

What are you waiting for?

Rain, you say? Let me get this straight. You are bubbling away down there in your underground lair, twiddling your delicate thumbs and making your private “for your eyes only art”, because you’re waiting for…a weather report? Some kind of prognosticatory groundhog that signals the approach of powerful rains, rains that will arrive on a waft of barometric bluster, hell-bent on pummeling your earthen ceiling and monsoon-ing your ass out of there? Am I over-simplifying it? Oh, there’s more? Only when the moment’s right. Only when the moment’s perfect will the rains soak through to activate the pure mischief of you, permeating your shell of fear to activate the sprouts and force your tendrils of magnificence out into the world.

What garbage.

This is not a “Just Add Water” kinda deal. You are not an MRE and you don’t need to be rationed. You don’t want rain—you want to expand and contract and lightning-bolt it out of there. I will be your thunder! Feel me as my sonic shockwave makes your cupboards rumble and your cutlery clang. Fling wide the hatch of your creative den and show yourself! “This is me! See me now! Take this, idiots! POW!”

No?

I really thought that would work.

[sigh]

What will it take to release you from your sediment before you fossilize? What will it take to convince you that the monsoon of permission is a fallacy and that you don’t need to wait for some imagined nod from a creative rain God to reveal your true self? You just need a shovel. You just need a shovel and the momentum of yes and now and let’s just try this. There is no map available on your journey to “Ta-dah!” and you probably won’t be able to see where you’re going most of the time, but if moles, voles, and assholes can do it, so can you.

Exhume yourself, oh buried dreamer! I have put my ear to the earth and listened to the murmur of your doubt and it is time for you to dig. I hear your creative soup bubbling on the stove. I feel the fear soundtrack of you, rumbling from below. I sense the hesitation and yes, you are weird, but no, you are not weird, and hush I say! I am wearing my biggest boots and stomping the earth above you to put the thud of life into your heart. Break free! Burst forth! Arise!

There is no signal coming. No right time. No rain. Split the world open and emerge as a seedling stretching your work to the light. Show me your leaves and stalk and flowers. Who cares if you’re not a rose? Honestly, it’s better to be a weed. You need to creep up through all the cracks in all the pavements and be relentless in your creative assaults. Rise, rise, and rise again!

Don’t bury your ideas, your words, your art, your music, your notebooks filled with half-baked thoughts in a ‘when the levee breaks’ vault. You don’t know when the rains will come. That atmospheric river could be dammed upstream by some asshole influencer making videos about corks. There is no perfect emergence strategy1 and right now, you are wasting precious time in the womb of your earthly cocoon. Time is not infinite and the clock is always ticking. Don’t let it run out with your work getting all musty and mothballed in the dark.

How much polish can your masterpiece possibly take before you lose consciousness from the fumes? How long are you going to hold onto that thing? Your fingers are leaving an unsightly mark. Perfection is for fairy tales and rejection is for professionals so take those fingers, pry open that fissure above, and birth yourself from this earth egg. Do it now. Show us who you are. There’s work to be done, someone else is stealing all the glory, and trust me, they aren’t half as good as you2.

Listen up, dirt-bound shy shies, for this is your blast warning. Don’t wait too long. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t tempt the prospect of a decades-long drought. Come out, come out, wherever you are. From the depths of your doubt, from the caverns of your uncertainty and fear, dig up and out and reach for your personal pocket of air. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to this or feel weird or awkward or not prepared. It doesn’t matter if your movements are stilted, or you sound like a strangled trumpet at the start, or you emerge looking like a three-eyed dinosaur shrimp.

To you, I say, “Hello.”

To you, I say, “Lemme see your etchings!3”

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

This week’s amends…

What’s the balance between the challenges and the satisfaction for each of you between process and, shall we say, product—let’s say finish perhaps—whenever you decide that moment has come? Do you enjoy one more, are you satisfied with the result, would you like to keep going indefinitely?
Thom:
I hate the beginning of the process ‘cause it’s truly terrifying. In every sense—there’s musical, artistic … everything about it. […] It’s hard for me because as the songwriter the words are such a massive thing—a structural thing—and I’ve never ever found them easy to do. I’ve never found that process easy to do. So I use everything around it to try and help me with that, you know? Once the words form then everything tends to come to it…gravitate towards that.
But finding that thing is like wandering around in a dark maze until you hear that sound, ‘til you hear that… the little voice goes “Use… it’s this”, you know? And then when that happens, the light pours in and you have this amazing moment […] and then it’s like [frustrated] “ahhh, now I’ve got to finish it”. […]
When it’s finally finished it absolutely doesn’t feel like yours anymore and that works on every level […] it becomes transparent. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, it doesn’t exist. You can listen to it, but it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t speak to you anymore. You can’t hear anything. It becomes blank.
And then, if you’re me, you’re on a tour bus somewhere and you get off the tour bus and there’s some kid standing there with the record cover and he’s sort of talking about what it means to him, and then you relive it. Someone gives it back to you that way, you know? Or on stage, you know… or you do a mad thing for two years where you go through 20 years worth of work and drive yourself insane going through sketchbooks and looking at the paintings and it’s speaking to you that way.
But there’s this negative space that happens when you’ve finished where you’re like there’s just total silence and nothing means anything.
- Excerpt from Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke in conversation with Gareth Evans as part of the exhibition How to Disappear Completely: Stanley Donwood x Thom Yorke at Christie’s 9-15 October 2021

This was my favorite part of the whole conversation. The idea of the full circle, of once it’s created it doesn’t belong to you, or the interpretation of this thing you made can come back to you a different way and you can experience it through someone else’s eyes. This bit is at the 30-minute mark, but the whole thing is great. I say that as a fan, obviously, but how Stanley is influenced by the music as it’s being made is neat.