Brian Koppelman recently had a great conversation with Lenny Kaye, famous as the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group.
Kaye had a great little nugget to offer regarding an entire cultural scene functioning like an Agatha Christie-style detective story:
To me, it’s a process and you usually have about five years. And the first couple are where everybody doesn’t know what the hell is happening. CBGB’s is a gamble. Those bands, they don’t really know what they’re doing, how they’re playing… It’s like a detective novel: they’re figuring it out. When you get to the end of a detective novel and its solved… then it becomes punk.
Ultimately, creativity is a process of discovery. It’s only in hindsight that it becomes apparent how things were inevitable.
See also: “Be a detective, not a judge.”
joshua chamberlain 