The Creative Act by Rick Rubin – no prisoners taken

A biography lacking in personal anecdotes, makes up for it with a profound understanding of the creative process. Imogen Stokes recommends an essential read on art’s transformative power.

Imogen Stokes

Imogen Stokes is a musician and member of Voka Gentle. She is also part of P.S. a missional community of multidisciplinary artists supporting and encouraging each other to cultivate a biblical culture of worship and fellowship in the heart of industry.

Rick Rubin | The Creative Act: A Way of Being

From Johnny Cash to Kanye West, Rick Rubin has worked with some of the biggest names in music. Notably titled ‘the most important producer of the last 20 years’ by MTV, the famously bearded founder of Def Jam records has nine Grammy awards under his belt and is one of the most sought-after producers working today.

Written over the course of four years, a period that saw Rubin work with bands such as The Strokes and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Creative Act: A Way of Being might promise a memoir yet assumes the form of something more like a self-help guide. Rubin distils what he has learned throughout his illustrious 40-year career into a series of short chapters that read somewhat like meditations, contemplating the meaning of art in general; how to make it well and why it matters to keep trying. While its dearth of personal anecdotes may be disappointing to fans hoping to gain insight into some of the producer’s many exploits, this book requires little to no contextual knowledge of Rubin’s life and work to enjoy.

“There was a version of the book three years ago,” Rubin told The Bookseller magazine last October. “The content was similar but the feeling of it... it did not feel like a call to action. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t inspirational.” If inspiring artists to create meaningful art is Rubin’s primary aim, suffice to say The Creative Act: A Way of Being largely succeeds.

Happily, this book is not just for musicians; for any working artist in search of practical guidance, Rubin offers encouragements and hands-on suggestions for how to cultivate discipline, maintain creative perspective and successfully finish work. His tips are, in many cases, refreshingly rudimentary. Set up a daily schedule of practice and stick to it. Level up your taste in the medium you are working in. Allow yourself to be distracted sometimes. Such instructions immediately reminded me of Oblique Strategies, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s tarot-like deck of pithy creative prompts, conceived in 1975 as a work of art and designed to stimulate creativity. And the advice is sage. As an artist myself, I had barely gotten halfway through when my highlighter began to run out of ink.

Rubin’s thesis on art-making is full of self-aware contradiction. It is a serious matter, he says, but it’s also reliant on play. One should employ a rigorous schedule yet embrace rest and spontaneity. Practise your craft but be aware of the value in naivety;

‘often the most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them or from those who never learned them at all’,

and remember that both years of artistic toil and a five-minute flash of inspiration can both produce a valuable result.

[It] does an excellent job of meeting the creative in their tiredness while celebrating their bravery.

It is this ability to understand and speak to the tensions faced by an overwhelming majority of artists that is a real strength of this book and a testament to Rubin’s experience as a producer. The creative process is rarely straightforward; success can be difficult to define and inspiration elusive. However, he admits, in the pursuit of great art ‘there are no shortcuts.’ The Creative Act: A Way of Being does an excellent job of meeting the creative in their tiredness while celebrating their bravery. It exists, at the end of the day, to remind them why it’s important to make art at all. I can corroborate this with my own experience: as a reader I brought all the baggage of any working artist. I felt understood and reassured, both by Rubin’s reverence for art-making and by his admission that art is rarely straightforward, and that artists can be hard to understand. This, for Rubin, is by no means an indictment. It’s part of the journey, and an important one at that.

Rubin’s reverence for the power of art and the significance of the artist is without question. This can sometimes, though, verge on the eulogising of unhealthy behaviour— an issue, I can’t help but feel, is endemic to the music industry at large.

'The great artists in history… are protective of their art in a way that is not always co-operative. Their needs as a creator come first. Often at the expense of their personal lives and relationships',

writes Rubin, excusing selfishness as a ‘childlike spirit’ to be aspired to. Surely, while singular focus is key, this doesn’t need to override a generosity of spirit, does it? Van Gogh certainly didn’t think so, famously writing:

‘there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.’

There’s an evident undercurrent of divine inspiration woven throughout the book, too. Rubin acknowledges and explores the cosmic thread that runs through all things, the energy of which the artist both observes and channels through their work. The artist without this spiritual viewpoint, he posits, is at a crucial disadvantage. For Rubin, the spiritual world provides a crucial sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness rarely found within the confines of science. A dedication towards a deeper connection with and understanding of the ‘Source’ (the creative force of the universe) will inevitably merit a greater artistic encounter. Rubin therefore encourages artists to be disciplined in their spiritual practice in order to ‘build up the musculature of the psyche to more acutely tune in and receive from the divine’.

Rick Rubin with Neil Diamond, 2006. Photo by MusicLoverDiamond.

As a believer, of course I perceived Rubin’s ‘Source’ to be a metonym for the God of the Bible, and while occasionally Rubin’s universalism strays into abstraction— perhaps even cliché— there is genuine substance here; many of his spiritual encouragements overlap significantly with Christian teachings, for instance his appeal to artists to be ‘in’ currents of culture, not ‘of’ them, and the assertion that ‘it is better to follow the universe than those around you’. He admires the biblical attitudes of patience, discipline and child-likeness, and even quotes directly from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, ‘for everything there is a season... ’, when illustrating the rhythms of nature.

Although it might be viewed as a simple guide to creative rules and rhythms, at the heart of this book the challenge is set.

You are either living as an artist, or you’re not. You are either adopting this way of being, or you aren’t.

Rubin takes no prisoners. The Creative Act: A Way of Being is an essential read for anyone looking to explore the importance of art or to remind themselves why they shouldn’t give up. For Rubin, a facilitator and a collaborator, the transformational powers of art are undeniable and artists themselves are almost magical creatures who need understanding and care. This book is both about, and for them.

Review

Books

Culture

29 April 2024

6 min read

Are we being anxious about anxiety?

Haidt's diagnosis of a 'doomed' youth is off. Instead, we should learn from them.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A child sits atop a bunk bed holding a phone in front.

It’s common these days to hear about social anxiety, health anxiety, or climate anxiety – but I think I can see that a new pathology is beginning to emerge: anxiety anxiety. This is where parents, politicians, academics, or just members of society in general, start to get anxious about the fact that everybody is anxious. Diagnosis rates of clinical anxiety have shown a steep increase in the past decade, and numbers, we assume, don’t lie.

Of the many outcomes of ‘anxiety anxiety’, one is going to be people who (with the absolute best intentions) want to suggest solutions. One such person is Jonathan Haidt, with his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

From the spaceman on the cover to the opening vignette about sending our children to Mars, Haidt’s premise is clear: smartphones are the alien invaders of our society. These electronic parasites are feasting on the brain matter of our young people, directly causing what is now an epidemic of clinical anxiety and depression.

I’m quite ready to read a sensible analysis of the impact of smartphone culture on mental health, so I was disappointed to find that Haidt’s book falls so far short of that. From a scientific perspective, the argument is a barrage of statistics, arranged to the tune of ‘correlation equals causation’. Given Haidt’s seniority in his field, this approach is surprisingly unsubtle, something which has already been heavily criticised by peer review. Numbers, it seems, do lie – or at least they can be easily curated to prove your point.

But even if we accept Haidt’s point – which is that rates of smart-phone use (particularly social media) and rates of young people being diagnosed with anxiety disorders have increased over the same time period – what can be done? Haidt’s solution is to ban young people from owning smartphones at all until the age of 14, and from using social media until the age of 16, or even better 18. In this way, owning and managing one’s own device and its access becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. But note: whilst parents are urged to implement these unyielding boundaries for their children’s device-habits, Haidt does not ask grown-ups to make any changes to their own. Adults can continue with their current norms of smartphone use, ostensibly because their brains are fully developed, and they therefore have the maturity to handle their own risk to mental health.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate.

Of course, it does not suit Haidt’s argument to analyse why adult mental health is also seeing an increase in diagnosis of anxiety disorders. It may be true to say that rates are rising more quickly amongst young people, but there is still no consensus as to how much of that can be attributed to young people simply being better informed about mental health and more empowered to seek help than the generations before them. Noticeably, young people today have a language to talk about anxiety that simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and ironically enough, it is social media that has made that possible. Although suicide rates are on the rise, they are still quite significantly lower among young people than they are for those aged over 35, and it should be noted that a proven pathway to suicide prevention amongst young people is access to self-help via smartphone apps.

So whilst I am quite ready to believe that smartphone culture is one of many factors impacting the health and wellbeing of young people today, I think characterising smartphones as alien invaders, or as invasive parasites that have been selectively bred by Silicon Valley billionaires to infest the minds of our young people, seems to be a disingenuous response – and one that only serves to increase parental anxiety by implying that smartphones are sly, sentient beings, and out of our control.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate and a perfectly natural human desire to seek out entertainment and culture. True, technology and software are developed by billionaires, and marketing and algorithms can influence our choices – but at the end of the day, any developer will tell you that products only ever evolve in response to what the market demands. Adults: we have the money in our pockets; we are the market.

As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture.

In other words, we (the adults) selectively bred these ‘aliens’ ourselves – and rather than try (and no doubt fail) to lock up our experiment in a lab (or, as Haidt suggests, a lockable phone-pouch) we, the adults, have more than enough agency to continue that process of developing smartphones into devices that meet needs and provide entertainment in the way that they were always meant to do. In his defence, Haidt does refer to this approach briefly, but still only with a view to making the phones be for ‘us’ (the adults) and not ‘them’ (the young people) by removing content that appeals to a younger audience. To me feels like we are victim shaming the youth of today for the fact that they have inherited a problem created by their parents.

One day when Jesus was teaching a crowd of followers, he advised them “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?” His point was about hypocrisy – it is far easier to judge someone else’s behaviour than it is to take responsibility for our own. Where did any of us last read or hear terrifying information about the decline in young people’s mental health? Was it on our smartphones?

Here are a few things that Haidt’s selection of statistics doesn’t say about the youth of today. They are the most compassionate and empathetic generation that we have seen for decades (Konrath et. al., 2023). They are able to wait longer for rewards than their parent’s generation (Protzko, 2020), they are also less lazy, less narcissistic, more cooperative and more intelligent (Kriegel, 2016). In addition, whilst obvious damage is done by ‘filters’ on Instagram photos, making some young people strive for unattainable standards of beauty, it was the previous generation of smartphone users who began this trend, and it is the current generation of young people who can be credited with the #nofilter #nomakeup countertrends. This same generation is now fuelling the rise of insurgent social media sites such as Bereal, which emphasise the importance of authentic photos and meaningful connection with friends online.

Overall, perhaps instead of restricting and controlling our young people’s online lives, as Haidt would have us do, we ought to be talking to them? As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture and develop it towards solutions to the problems that we ourselves created.