Tuesday 12 September 2017

And yet you cannot find the new words if you do not shatter the old words – Carl Jung

During the summer I did a number of seminars about songwriting at festivals using techniques such as cutup which was pioneered by William S Burroughs. This is the technique that David Bowie made famous in a documentary in the 1970’s which described how he wrote songs. There are lots of possibilities with this technique; the idea is to allow a creative approach which is accidental and synchronistic in order to come up with ideas. Apart from the now famous act of cutting up magazines into phrases and you can do crazy things like create new words out of old, playing around with the meaning of words.

One technique takes famous phrases and then by twisting those around making them mean something else. Sometimes to create something new or have a new approach in the way that you invent ideas or run your business requires you to break your existing ideas to do something different maybe by doing the reverse of what you are currently doing.

So instead of teaching one-to-one you should teach in groups, instead of teaching from your own house you should travel to other people. Sometimes doing something completely different for a time may open up other possibilities for you.

Doing something habitually is not necessary always going to lead to a good place, so much of our behavior including the choice of words is a habit which needs to be shaken up for change to happen.

There has been a lot of research into language and how it frames thinking, is it possible that thinking in one language can make you comprehend certain things that another language will not? It is interesting that Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Sigmund Freud were all German (or Austrian) whereas the existentialists tended to be French was it possible that for deep analytical thinking you had to be German or certainly speak the German language because that deep analytical thinking is difficult in French? Maybe French tend towards a more poetic lyrical thought process which is fine for existentialists.

Frank Zappa made an interesting point that rock music was more suited to Germanic based language than Latin-based language and I would agree with him on that. So use language wisely because it could be the road to success in any venture from the marketing of an idea to the lyrical design of a song and it only takes one song to make your fortune.

And if you cannot find the words invent them.



Vic



www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a rock band with the tricks of the trade