Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality.
His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks:
These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to the point where they could be selected for a TED speech. That’s the new paradigm. Don’t ask how you can accomplish world domination right away, but keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.
It’s the right sentiment but I think he picked the wrong analogy.
We can’t compare “F**k You” to the whole series of TED talks; we have to compare “F**k You” to one TED talk — and there have been a few instant sensations, if memory serves. I saw more links in my Twitter stream when Jamie Oliver’s talk came out then I’ve seen of Cee-Lo’s song so far.
In fact people make the same complaints about TED that Lefsetz makes about “F**k You.” Nassim Taleb comes to mind (most recently: “I am starting to get uncontrollably angry when I encounter TED-style phony humanitarians.”)
Photo by Scootie
And isn’t Cee-Lo Green’s career a model of this advice?
… keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.
He started releasing critically acclaimed music in 1995 with Goodie Mob (a group known to me for years mainly as ”that other group from Atlanta,” being close with OutKast). There was some attention and maybe some minor hits (“Closet Freak“?) but it took more than a decade for him to find the mainstream with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” in 2006 — the same year he released a greatest hits album!
Now I know Lefsetz probably knows all of this, and he doesn’t explicitly say Cee-Lo exemplifies shallowness, and I agree with his overall sentiment, so I’m not going after him. I’m trying to develop something here.
I think what we ought to take away from this is that we don’t have to be the same artist or the same creative person/group/organization all the time. We can accomplish different things with different projects: we can use some projects to cultivate enduring quality and then we can use others to, you know, pay the bills and get people’s attention so we can keep making quality stuff.
There’s nothing wrong with silliness and hype. Getting excited about things once in a while is good, even if the excitement doesn’t last.
It’s only a problem for people who can only generate hype.
But contrary to a lot of fears, I don’t think the Internet is going to make things worse. I don’t think it will diminish long-term quality. I don’t think it will increase the volume of “mere hype.” Counterintuitively, it’s the proliferation of mere hype that’s going to eventually kill it.
At some point (if we aren’t there already) it’s going to be too costly to keep up with constant turnover: it’s too chaotic; it’s fatiguing. Once we cross that threshold, people who know how to develop long-term value will be the ones getting and holding people’s attention. I think we already see this with emphasis being placed on reputations and relationships online, rather than merely focusing on the last thing someone did.
We ought to let ourselves love the last thing someone did without fixating on it — without sitting there waiting for more hype to fall in front of us. We can use the rare successes as opportunities actively get into what they did before and explore the stuff they like and so on…
And so now speaking of which — this f**king song is awesome:
