@niki – being afraid is your biggest roadblock…I hope I can help give you perpsective.
First of all, Rock and Roll music has been around since the mid 1950s (longer than that really, but the start of the “rock era” was technically 1955, even though you had some songs that were really rock and roll far before then, and that doesn’t even count the blues). So, you’re looking at a universe of 54 years. And in that 54 years, rock music has produced a few thousand acts who have had hit singles and albums, tens of thousands who have made a go of it, despite lack of chart success, and likely millions of folks who have tried their hand at songwriting. And for all those efforts, we have produced one Beatles, one Queen and one Led Zeppelin, 3 artist who would appear on just about anyone’s top 10 of all time (out of the millions who have written songs).
So, what you’re saying to youself is, “if I’m not as good as them, I’m not good enough.” Well, that kind of drive can bring you far in business, but in art, it’s self defeating. Now, if you want to be a pop star and sell a lot of records, that’s actually not even necessarily a “talent”, that’s more of a “skill”...crafing pop songs is something that CAN be taught, and in fact, before the Beatles came along, that’s how most popular music was made, folks sat in studios all day crafting pop songs that sounded good, but don’t say much. Today, any idiot with a Mac can do that, and in fact with sampling, you don’t even need to know how to play an instrument to craft a top ten single.
That’s not to say that no pop has any quality to it, certainly there are pop stars who are both talented and skilled, and certainly there are rock stars who are both talented and skilled, but with pop (which in and of itself is short for “popular”, the emphasis is on skilled, and with rock the emphasis is on talented). And consider that while you can train yourself to be more skilled, you can only wish to be more talented.
The hard, no holds barred part of what I have to say comes now…you either are talented or you are not, and if you are, there is a VERY INFINITESSIMALLY SMALL chance that you are as talented as any of these artists, who arguably represent the best of the best of 50+ years of innovation and artistry.
Imagine for a moment a world where every talented person stopped themselves from writing music if they didn’t think they were as good as the Beatles. Admittedly, not everyone in the world likes the Beatles believe it or not, but if you were to ask 1000 artists at random to name their top 3 influences, I would be willing to bet you that over 700 of them would list the Beatles in their top 3. Of the 300 that were left, if you were to take each of their 3 top influences (another 900 artists), I’m willing to bet that over 800 of those people would have the Beatles in their top 3, and you’d probably have over 950 people from the original list who were indirectly influenced by the Beatles. And I guarantee you that almost every one of those 100 left would have been influenced, and you’d end up with every single one of those 1,000 artists having been influenced by the Beatles by no more than 2 degrees of separation. I’d bet everything I own on those numbers, even though I pulled them out of my ass.
So it’s literally lunacy to compare yourself to the best of the best. And really, it’s a fundamental flaw in the approach to songwriting. Because if you really are an “artist”, what SHOULD matter to you is that you come up with something that as a stand alone piece you are proud to have created. THAT is the ONLY way to make good art. Art that is made in the pursuit of being as good as something else is ALWAYS inferior, because the artist is no longer working to satisfy their personal muse.
This is why when bands have their day in the sun, then go through a bunch of crap and 10, 20 years later put out a new album, that new album NEVER measures up to the original work. Because in the early days, that band was undoubtedly making music they wanted to make, to satisfy their muses. Years later, they are trying to re-capture what they once had, they are not working for their own creative satisfaction, but for the satisfaction of measuring up, and therefore the music is not as heartfelt or true to who they are, which makes it less believable and less powerful.
Consider again the Beatles as they are an execellent jumping off point for this discussion. Why were they so popular? Why is their influence so widely felt? And why did the music they made as solo artists never manage to measure up to what they once had? It’s very simple really…when they started out, they were 4 guys who wanted to make rock and roll music on their own terms. So they wrote their own songs and did not look to the studios to give them hits to record. And though they were young, lacking in life experience, and had no frame of reference to really say anything of more importance than I wanna hold your hand, or she loves you, yeah yeah yeah, they felt what they wrote, and they had that brilliant pop sensibility. In a way, in their early days, they were much like Michael Jackson 20 years later…very skilled at what they did, enough so they were essentially pop stars, but they were somehow transcendent of the “pop” genre, because they also had artistic talent.
But enter the late 60s, the summer of love…the Beatles became essentially a different band. Even their greatest hits albums were broken up into 1962–1966 and 1967–1970…and the reason for that is that in late 66, they really started to express themselves creatively. Some might say it was the summer of love, the whole music scene became more political and bigger than any one band, but yet, the Beatles were never really a hippie, summer of love kind of band…they didn’t really start singing about putting flowers in their hair and trying to love one another right now. Now others will say that’s because of the spiritual Eastern influences and their experimentations with LSD, but to that I say, these things simply opened their minds to being more free about how they felt they could express themselves.
But the one thing that really mattered more than anything in my opinion is when they met Bob Dylan. Dylan was and is a poet, and he can turn a word like no one else. And Dylan told them (at a time in both history and their own personal maturation when they were receptive to hearing it), that he LOVED their music, but that they didn’t really SAY anything. That’s when they started to speak through their music…to make what was already perfect pop with genius shining through to the surface, and turn it into full fledged artistic expression through pitch perfect rock and roll. No one but this group of 4 guys has ever had both the talent and the luck to achieve anything of this nature since. And when they broke up, Lennon remained a great artist, he said what he wanted to say through his music, but he was not a pop star any longer. McCartney was a natural born pop star, but he had NOTHING to say…he wrote (and still writes) sappy love songs, that’s his forte, but he alone is not a great “artist”. Harrison and Starr were both talented and each had acquired some pop finess, but neither measured up to the genius of Lennon/McCartney, and as such, each had high and low points. But individually, even the Beatles themselves could NEVER be as good as the Beatles were collectively.
And that’s what you’re trying to do when you naysay your own work, is to say to yourself that it’s not worthy if it’s not as good as the best thing ever to come out of musical expression. Think of how silly that sounds. But keep in mind that their path to being so great was to say what they wanted to say, in the way they felt comfortable saying it. And everyone who has ever been really good (in terms of quality, regardless of whether they were popular or not) since them has done the same thing…they’ve been themselves.
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