http://lukifer.net/index.php/site/index/ en lukifer@lukifer.net Copyright 2009 2009-12-06T19:59:55+00:00 /blog/2009/12/shutting_off_the_prediction_engine /blog/2009/12/shutting_off_the_prediction_engine#When:19:59:55Z It’s taken me a while to start actually writing on this blog. Anyone with a creative or imaginative bent understands the experience of being paralyzed by one’s own visions of grandeur: by picturing a perfectly crafted, finely honed work of art, anything which you actually slap together in the real world seems flat and lifeless by comparison. The longer I obsessed over how perfect my writing needed to be, the less confident I grew, and the more I avoided the simple act of sitting down and starting to type. At the 2003 TED Conference, engineer-turned-neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins presented a simple and elegant model of how the brain works. In a nutshell, the brain is constantly making lots and lots of little predictions. These millions of educated guesses tend to be disturbingly accurate, and when put together, they operate silently and efficiently as the engine of day-to-day cognition. If I say “duck duck…”, you know instantly that it’s more likely to be followed by “goose” than “hamster”. But this prediction engine has a dark side. Once a given prediction takes hold, it tends to perpetuate itself. An idea as simple as “I suck at math” will cause someone to shut out new information about mathematics, because, “I don’t get it! Like I said, I suck at math!” By not building up the skill, the belief self-validates, and before long, it is deeply entrenched as a core component of identity. As the saying goes: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re correct.” When it comes to the creative process, we tend to judge our own abilities by comparing ourselves with what we feel we should be able to do: By contrasting your real-life output with that of other “talented” people, unless you have a bizarrely preternatural knack for a certain skill, you’re probably going to be disappointed, if not so depressed that you never want to attempt anything beyond mediocre corporate drone-hood for the rest of your life. On the other hand, you can approach the whole process from the other direction: by holding a mild, even unflattering, expectation, it will be no big deal if you don’t get it right the first time, and you can feel proud that you did something at all. Better yet, you’ll regularly surprise yourself by exceeding your own expectations, and find yourself growing talents you didn’t know you had (because, well, you originally didn’t). No matter how terrible the quality of what you produce, it is always going to be superior to the alternative: an empty page, and a fantasy that someday you’ll finally have that flash of genius which enables you to get it right. Sometimes, to break out of a self-imposed rut, you have to shut off the prediction engine completely, and simply go where your feet take you. That’s what I intend to do with this blog from now on. 2009-12-06T19:59:55+00:00 /blog/2009/07/in_defense_of_nerdcore /blog/2009/07/in_defense_of_nerdcore#When:19:58:15Z I have to respectfully disagree with MC Lars on the death of nerdcore. I can understand why, as an artist, it sucks to be typecast and lumped into a genre. But art has never belonged solely to the artists; it is a shared medium, an interactive process between artist and fans, as well as the culture that encompasses both. And “nerdcore” is more than just a kitschy musical sub-genre: it is a cultural phenomenon no less significant than hip-hop or jazz. It’s easy to forget sometimes where we came from. The world has gotten surprisingly nerd-friendly, to the point where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner included a self-identified nerd cracking nerdy jokes to our nerd President, and Intel unironically runs ads depicting engineers as rock stars. But that’s not the world most of us grew up in. Most of us experienced a culture where if you were too different, too intelligent, too independent from social convention, you would be ostracized, if not outright persecuted. Like the gay rights movement{fn}I realize I tread on thin ice by comparing geek persecution to the oppression of gays or other minorities. But while it may not compare in scale, that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. Whether persecution is subtle and mild, or cruel and inhuman, a second-class citizen is still a second-class citizen.{/fn} before it, nerdcore is about taking what was once a pejorative term, and owning it, turning a source of shame into a source of pride. I have to admit, when I first heard nerdy rappers like MC Chris and Paul Barman, I got lost in the humor. The contrast between the image and bravado of mainstream hip-hop and dorky subject matter felt mostly tongue-in-cheek, and I enjoyed it partially as pure novelty. But the more I immersed myself in the growing genre, the more I felt the earnestness of a generation that lacked a voice, the very phenomenon that birthed hip-hop in the first place. The music is still funny sometimes, but it’s just as often a heartfelt expression of who we are as nerds, of being unafraid of both our identity and our power. Lars is right about one thing: no artist should ever feel constrained by a genre label. It’s unfair for talented rappers to be chained to the nerdcore wagon simply because they are white and nerdy. At the end of the day, good music is good music. Lars’ own music (I’m a huge fan) is self-described quite accurately as post-punk laptop rap, and every artist should be able to define their own music however they wish. But like rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop before it, I believe nerdcore is capable of casting a wide net, from the original old-schoolers like MC Frontalot and YTCracker, to just plain brilliant hip-hoppers like Optimus Rhyme and Jesse Dangerously, and even “kids rapping over Nintendo samples about Star Wars and how they couldn’t get laid”. Can you name a single cultural trend that doesn’t breed a swath of mediocrity? The very fact that hacks and imitators are attracted to nerdcore says that it has tapped into something powerful, something meaningful to a lot of people. I know it has for me. 2009-07-09T19:58:15+00:00