On the record

I was rummaging through my record collection at the weekend, and it inevitably got me thinking about album artwork.

For me, part of the romance of records is simply a question of size – 12 square inches have always trumped the compactness of the compact disc. And from Factory Records and the work of Peter Saville to the team at Stylorouge at the height of Britpop, I've forever been fascinated with this pivotal point at which music meets design.

In the 60s, Warhol led the way with his multimedia aesthetic and the help of the band he was managing at the time, The Velvet Underground. And by the time 1969 rolled around, it made perfect sense to Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones to ask Warhol to design their next album sleeve.

And so he did. In fact, here's the letter he wrote Warhol to brief him on the project.

Do whatever you want.

Please write back saying how much money you would like.

Take little notice of the nervous requests to "Hurry up".

Not exactly your typical brief, but then Jagger wasn't looking for your typical response.

And here's the result, complete with working zipper for that added touch of sexual tension (not that you can quite tell from the visual, sorry).

If it's true that you do your best work for your best clients (have a read of this post for more on that matter), then I'd certainly say everyone could do with a Jagger or two at some point in their career.

It's never as easy as Abc

Last week, I was watching a documentary about the history of music. Inevitably, Nirvana were featured at one point in the story, much of it rehashed reports on the lead-up to Kurt Cobain's tragic death.

But one thing I had never heard before – that was mentioned only incidentally – was the fact that the band always jammed for the first half-hour of any rehearsal, only then setting their minds to specific songs or half-written tunes.

Likewise, designers will take weeks to work their way through dozens of concepts and half-baked ideas before settling on the one that cracks the brief.

And how many times do you hear of artists painting over their work, only for these hidden canvases to be discovered years later and revealed as forgotten masterpieces?

I realise that none of this sounds like a big deal. But believe me, it is.

Because when the amateur writer starts to write, they often expect great things from the moment the pen hits the page. And I mean, great things.

As writers, we can tend to put undue pressure on ourselves to create epic stories worthy of equally epic praise with every stroke of the pen or tap on the keyboard. However, if you take even the most fleeting glance at any other creative pursuit, there is always the basic belief that success does not come straightaway.

What's more, the pressure is doubled by the fact that everyone can read and write. From an early age, we're taught how to recognise and create the letterforms required to communicate through the written word. That said – and as you'll have read in this previous post – we don't spend nearly as much time promoting the creative arts as we do our technical skills.

And so it is that the examples I gave at the start of this post show the way for any aspiring amateur writer.

Firstly, a musician might jam or improvise. So why shouldn't we do the same as writers?

Then there's the act of rehearsing. Things don't always flow straight onto the page, and it takes time and practice to get the words to read and feel right.

And finally, writing is first and foremost about writing. And writing. And writing. Which is different to re-writing. And nothing at all like editing. Three different activities with three different mindsets that ought to be kept entirely separate.

Ultimately, the distinction between the technique and the art of writing is an important one.

We can all do the one, but we should never take the other for granted.

Anarchy on the Internet (or, God save the blog)

I often wonder if corporate blogs will ever be anything more for me than a curious contradiction in terms.

What I mean is that the infinite potential of the Internet, and in particular social media, seems at odds with the finite parameters that corporations like to put in place to protect their commercial interests. Downloading music is a good example of this – although the sensitivity of artist copyright makes this a far more complicated issue in reality.

That said, the broader evolution of music and its impact on culture is a useful benchmark to explain my point in full.

Specifically, the rise of punk.

Until relatively recently, if you wanted to play music in some sort of musical ensemble, you had to be a professional, trained musician. Music school was the only credible path to the stage, and any exceptions made for more of a novelty act than a noteworthy performance.

But then in the 1970s, punk happened. No longer did the old rules apply. In fact, no longer did any rules apply.

All of a sudden, anyone could play guitar. In many cases, the fewer chords you knew, the better. Bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and countless others grasped the opportunity with enough energy to catapult themselves beyond the status quo and its restrictive social more – and whether or not you could actually play your instruments had no real bearing on the final outcome.

In the 1980s, local scenes like the infamous Manchester scene erupted in the wake of punk, followed in the 1990s by grunge with its roots in Seattle on America’s northwest coast. More recently, the Arctic Monkeys are a band who, like many others before them, started by first having to teach themselves how to play the instruments that they’d managed to acquire.

And even though punk may have started on the stage, its impact soon spilled onto the streets, and the effects on our society and culture are still felt today. Over time, it may have changed shape as the world around us has also changed, but its basic tenets and DIY aesthetics survive.

Nowhere is it more alive and well than on the Internet.

In the same way that punk meant that anyone could play guitar, the Internet has created a new wave of thinkers and writers, a world where anyone can be an author, journalist or social agitator of some description or other.

Who needs record companies when you have MySpace? Likewise, who needs publishers when you have blogs? That isn't to say those institutions are dead in the water, it's just that they can no longer rely solely upon maintaining the bottleneck that has kept them in business up to this point. New ideas are now being shared more freely than ever, and they now need to look for new angles.

The Internet is the champion of the individual, the home of the one-man band. There are no corporate patrons to please, no commercial agendas to follow. Where punk broke down musical barriers, the Internet has bulldozed constraints on how we communicate – and both have worked in ways that rail against our reliance on the so-called big end of town.

Anything is possible on the Internet. And as history shows, giving the masses free rein is not always good news for your average corporation.

God save the blog.

The dizzy heights of failure (and other stories)

When it comes to social commentary, I have often found music much more insightful than the latest trend report. The Clash, Dylan, The Jam, Nirvana. Poetry, not PowerPoint.

Whatever your personal preferences, Britpop, for example, neatly summed up the attitude of a generation in the UK. So much so that it's only fitting the last word should have gone to Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. His first solo release delivered a great one-liner on the state of the nation post Labour's resurgence under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"The cream cannot help but always rise up to the top. Well, I say: Shit floats."

And, to be perfectly blunt, I think the same is true of many management teams.

David Maister, the renowned professional services thinker, has always said that at any one time, 10% of your workforce are underperforming and should be managed out of the business. Whenever people hear this view (or is it a statistic?), most automatically assume that means 10% of the rank and file, but that would be a gross oversight given the impact of the decisions made by an organisation's top echelon. And, as Jarvis so graphically explained, the cream isn't necessarily the only thing that rises to the top.

The economic crisis has caused a raft of issues. Few more worrying for your top executive than the unwanted exposure brought on by the fact that many of the so-called cream have received hefty bonuses, seemingly as a reward for failure.

Careers have been killed, but at the same time I have also seen countless underperformers actually promoted through failure. No doubt promoted into a position from where they could presumably do less harm, but hardly the right signal for those surging through the ranks on the wave of success. Jarvis would feel vindicated.

It would be easy to see where this is all heading, if it weren't for the fact that failure is often viewed as a good thing.

In short, if you're not failing, you're simply not trying hard enough. And according to many, this recent failure of our economic systems was inevitable. They say it was the recession that had to happen. We had to fail in order to reset the balance.

So it seems our fate was more in the hands of the gods and fickle fortune than the chief executives and their chairmen. It wasn't their fault, just plain old bad luck.

Not quite.

If we were to take Jarvis at face value, things simply rise and fall. But that isn't quite true, actually they go around in cycles. Which conveniently brings me back to the point where I started. The Britpop revolution of the 1990s (Blur, Oasis, Pulp) took many of its cues from the British Invasion of the 1960s (The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks). Similar trends, similar times. And it won't be long before the 1960s come to life again in another age.

The same can be said for our current economic situation, only none of our financial leaders saw it coming with the same vision or insight as those record executives. History will say that we failed, so let's hope we change our tune in time for the encore. If not, then Kevin Rudd – the cream of Canberra – will be back shouting from the very top of the steaming pile about "the usual political shitstorm". Jarvis would be proud.