My creative lesson of week 13 — We are holding the keys now
29 March, 2020
Our brief for this week’s challenge was to take inspiration from a line in a song. The words that inspired my song are: “God got the key and you can’t get in” from “Didn’t It Rain?” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I love these types of challenges where you have to translate the feeling and meaning of one creative medium into another.
It is of course a nearly impossible task. You have to respect the artist’s intent but must re-interpret it in your own way. You are strong-armed into being creative by the different medium. In this week’ challenge we had to turn lyrics into a photograph.
Go from aural to visual.
— — Sidebar
Aural means with sounds, or something that we hear. As in, ‘The new earphones place the listener in an awesome aural space.’
Cool word. Right?
— —
A few weeks before the “Line from a song” challenge, I randomly discovered Sister Rosetta’s music. I was just doin’ some surfn’ when I came across an article written by an African American female writer. She wrote that everyone knows of the early rock-and-roll musicians such as Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley but no one ever talks about the influence of Sister Rosetta
And I was like, “Who is Sister Rosetta?”
Of course we all know Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash’s music. Their beats paved the way to the metal that I loved as a teenager. Who knew that these old rock and rollers followed a down a road that an African American female gospel singer opened up?
We live in the information age now but it doesn’t always look like that.
Before the internet, it was the gate-keepers, the pencil pushers, the PATRIARCHY’s fault if any information was not passed along. They were the ones who decided whose stories were told. Or glossed over people’s contributions or just totally ignored them.
Now it is our own fault.
There is nobody telling us how, what, when, where, why to listen to. Or read about. Of course there is waaaaay too much stuff to take in. We are actually living in the age of unlimited information
We have been forced to become our own gatekeepers.
This is not a bad thing. One has to protect your time and attention carefully. You should however not seal up your world too tight. There must be some cracks that allow weird and wonderful stuff to seep in. Such as the wonderful music of the grandmother of rock and roll.
The age of unlimited information between your two thumbs and a smartphone has underlined, highlighted and marked in CAPS the disconnect between us. We like to keep in our comfort zones and make sure to not cross over the lines.
It was only by sheer extreme chance that I stumbled across the article that mentioned Rosetta Tharpe. (I usually hang out in the writer/developer/photography worlds).
Sister Rosetta became famous as a gospel singer and considered religious people as her crowd. Her music had such a wonderful new beat to it though, that she was invited to play in nightclubs.
Some people in the gospel community started to shun Rosetta because she sang gospel songs next to half-naked showgirls. Another strike against Rosette was that her instrument of choice was the guitar. Guitars were thought of as ‘masculine’ instruments those days.
She kept on playing her music though and today Rosetta Sharpe is known as the grandmother of rock and roll. Her “guitar style blended melody-driven urban blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating swing that was a precursor of rock and roll.”
She not only created a whole new type of music but was also brave enough to blend two very opposing audiences. (And she could riff a guitar like nobody else has done before her!)
So maybe we can unlock our own carefully guarded gates. Why not step a few steps out of our default zones and explore and mix up new batches as we move along?
Make visuals out of aurals, look for artists you have never heard, surf into unknown web territory and unlock some gates
The keys are in our own hands and the gatekeepers are gone.
If you want to be challenged to learn new things, shake up your comfort zone and unlock creativity gates you didn’t realize were locked, come and join us at 52frames.com!
