Via La

I bet most ambitious people want to be revolutionary. I don't mean in the Remember Remember the Fifth of November way, just revolutionary in their own field. I know I do. When I was still way big into being a professional musician I wanted to revolutionize music. When I was in college and first got into advertising I wanted to revolutionize advertising. And of course after that I wanted to revolutionize filmmaking. It's exciting to think that you could be responsible for an entirely new way of doing something, or even doing something entirely new.

I heard on the radio yesterday that Coleman Hawkins completely changed the meaning of the sax. I think that's a bit of an overstatement, but it certainly isn't wrong. He was more or less the driving force behind making the sax a jazz instrument. Then later he helped move jazz music into bebop.

It made me think how hard it would be to be a revolutionary in modern society. In terms of science everything is moving so quickly forward that you'd have to make a hell of a breakthrough to be considered revolutionary. In the arts and many other fields the free exchange of ideas is impeding revolutionaries from breaking through. As anyone begins to have revolutionary thoughts or progress the community gets involved and progresses it as a whole. So the revolutionary is just a small part of the actual revolution-which is appropriately more gradual, and might not be called a revolution at all, just progress. And even if you are fully responsible who's to say it will be accredited to you? The community will probably get credit regardless.

And even without free communication interrupting the artistic revolutions, can there be progress? Now without strict guidelines on what gets shown (free communication strikes again) artists have explored areas they simply wouldn't have been able to get noticed a few years back. In filmmaking I could tie the camera from my doodle and spin in circles until I made myself sick and I wouldn't be doing anything original. And I hate to say it, but musicians are quickly becoming useless. Pretty soon we'll have the technology for computers to write and perform just about everything but vocals. And even vocals won't be all that far away. I'm sure there will always be human musicians because you can't simulate real emotions, but I'm not sure how much longer they'll matter.


It seems like revolution is all but dead. Except for the violent kind, which, admittedly would probably be fun. So I suppose the chances of anyone from our generation being a revolutionary is pretty slim. But I'll keep striving for revolutionary and hope to land somewhere in between excellent and groundbreaking.