for me, all art/creativity is just sort of baffling. for a while I did a lot of poetry/short story writing, but it was one and done writing, editing or pouring over whether I was fitting a meter/rhyming never crossed my mind. mentors told me to get serious about it and I could easily make a career out of it but...

even now that I've been around enough to KNOW how much effort goes into making a TV show, movie, song, album...whenever I'm experiencing it, I can't help but feel like everything is happening all at once in the same take. If I listen to, say, a Tool or Organized Konfusion song, despite all the evidence to the fact those guys had to spend a LOT of time perfecting what's eventually made it to my ears, my imagination says they just stepped in the studio, sat in front of their equipment and made x, y, and z happen in five minutes of spontaneous creativity. Even exceptionally nuanced stuff like The Wire that I've obsessed over for a decade now, when I'm actually watching the show I feel like every take is the final take, that it was all filmed in the sequence I'm currently experiencing it in and the writers cranked out the entire episode in a sixty minute flurry and what we're getting is their first group of ideas rather than constantly refined, perfected set.

because of that I've tried several instruments and never been able to stick to them (and by proxy never learn/care for theory), I can't get over the fact that I'm not a prodigy just because I imagine everybody else is. if I'm being honest I wish I could. but at the same time, I'm not sure how I'd feel if the reality of things suddenly clicked because then I might develop tastes or something. I have a friend that dabbles around but basically only listens to ten or twelve artists, and constantly asks me why there is no good music out there when those artists aren't releasing albums, or he doesn't connect with their new one like he did their older ones. and I'm like, man that must be really awful to actually know what you like.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." © Jay Bilas

http://www.last.fm/user/NodimaChee
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Nodima/run_that_shit__nodimas_hip_hop_handbook