TITLE: Once You See This, All Art Becomes the Same
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGq0T7RTA9k

What if I told y'all that all art is the same? Is the same. Is the same. Is the same. >> But what did you do before you were a singer? I made clothes, uh men's clothes. >> [music] >> And uh for 3 years I went to an art college and did fashion. Got a college called St. Martins [music] in London. And then uh for a year I made actually sold clothes. And that's when I started singing. So I had to make a choice between doing the two cuz I didn't have enough time to run both things. >> [music] >> A lot of times people conflate being a creative or being an artist with an actual industry. Well, I'm a painter first. And I kind of apply painting principles to music. I mean, I think my production skills are visual and not from the staff. Um you don't need to read in the studio cuz you can go direct to tape. You know, when I play with literate musicians who can transcribe my changes to play to them and they're surprisingly unorthodox. They'll go to write it out. And it looks like it's an augmented diminished, you know, inverted do do do and they're very long a lot and they go, "Oh, this is deceptive." Painting is your first language. Painting is my >> Your mother tongue. My mother tongue. So let's say, yeah. And music is a learned language. Industry is just this made-up place where they're able to monetize creativity and monetize art. Your creativity is not limited to an industry. The walls in these industries are built for commerce. Even when you think about other disciplines and other arts, they're not so much other worlds, they're neighborhoods in the same city. >> [music] >> So instead of looking at it like I'm a drummer, you should look at it like I understand rhythm. [music] That's the reframing part. If you say I understand rhythm, it doesn't trap you into one industry. So you can take that and you can transfer it to any industry you want because rhythm is something that's in every single art. >> But the idea is the conversation uh uh uh catches fire amongst the characters. And then they take it and run with it. And then I'm almost like a court reporter jotting it all down. And uh and then usually whatever comes out is what comes out. Now, inside of that, there is a a there is a rhythm to it. There is a musicality to it. There is a um a bit of rhyme that happens uh uh between some of the words and some of the phrases. And so, you know, it's not poetry, but it's not completely divorced from poetry. [music] >> The language might change a little bit depending on the art, but it's all rhythm. Photography has rhythm. [music] Comedy has rhythm. Fashion has a rhythm. All art has a rhythm. In some art forms, they'll call it pace. Timing and cadence, all those are bunched together. When I look at this picture, there's a real sense of >> You want to sing? Luckily not. But lots of motion, lots of um rhythm. And there's a lot of depth. I mean, I this we we have it cuz way deep. All art constantly aspires towards [music] the condition of music. And that quote is from 1877 by Walter Pater. [music] People talk about Jamie Foxx all the time as being talented. But I believe they recognize his talents because he's in many domains. I felt like Jamie is probably the most talented person in Hollywood, period. I would agree. >> I'm making that statement. He can do it all. He can sing sing Yeah. >> He can dance, he can throw a football, he can act, he can mimic. Beautiful. I just want you to know you're my favorite girl. Empire. Empire came in. What's going on? What you mean? What's going on? What you saying, man? I'll see you changing, man. Man, I'm coming down there to do your show, Jamie, you know what I mean? Well, Jamie down now in South Carolina, some of my best friends are of color. He can do it. He can play the piano. He's a classically trained pianist, right? And it's like, you know, when you went to school and you know you had a friend that might have been should have been in the gifted program, but he wanted to be a thug. If you look at him long enough, you'll see the nuances. You'll see the tools. So it's not that he's the most talented in the way that they're thinking talented as if he has the most talents. It's really that he's in the most domains. Even in interviews as a storyteller, you'll notice the way he tells the story is musical. The camera's high, but not as high as the heavens, just above the trees and it's snaking through New York. Somewhere in New York and it's cold and people are unable to work. This is one camera and you hear focus mitts being hit in the distance and it's just capturing it's capturing regular day blue collar people, you know what I'm saying? The hood. It's just regular, you know, people on their way somewhere and then we get up to this boxing gym. We see the doors and the camera stops and you hear the doors open magically. Camera snakes in and we see in the distance a hulking figure holding focus mitts and a little kid hitting the mitts and you hear the kid asking the hulking figure, "My dad said you were amazing. My dad said you was one of the best. You was boss. You was this, you was that." And you hear the person's voice, "Don't worry about what your dad said, just throw the right. Make sure you keep your left though, get your head knocked off." And as the camera gets closer, you see that it's now Mike Tyson. "No, but my dad said I'mma tell you one time, don't don't say anything about your dad. Don't care That was back in the day. Just throw the left and when you shoot the right, shoot it with some shoot it with authority. Shoot like you mean it." Boom. And he throws the right and he hits Mike and Mike acts like he's falling in super slow motion. Ah. And when he hits the ground, ding ding ding, he's back at the last fight he got knocked out. And he And he Yeah, he's there. And as you see him the last fight, he's on the ground and he rests back on the ropes and he sees everybody talking Everybody saying, "Get up, Mike." Some people saying you're a bum. Some people saying all the things that people were saying cuz we were split at that time. And he rests back on the ropes, spits his mouthpiece out and it goes calm. And you just hear and he's saying, "I'm done with all of this." And all of a sudden, just as we relax into that moment, the ref comes up. One, two. Yeah. And we flash back to the young Mike Tyson. He comes from being a musician, playing the piano. He has a certain cadence to him. You see it in all of the arts. They're the same tools. And so that's And the way you do an impersonation is usually about it's it's it's musical. Like um say Kermit the Frog, right? So Kermit the Frog is Here. So it's sort of like the way you do your Here. Here. Here. Here. You know what I'm saying? It's it's finding Here. Here. Here. Here. Right? So Here. Here. Here. Here. So the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog. Here. Here. Here. Here. >> [laughter] >> Kermit the Frog here. Here with the Sesame Street. So that's And then once you get the voice tone, it's how you make it's how you manipulate your your your mouth to get the sound. Cuz you know it's >> Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. So it's it's sort of constricting. And then And then And then it's And then it's asking the character to come sit with you. Here. Kermit the Frog here. Here with the three little pigs. So, you know, it's But the kid is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. a little bit. Here. Because, you know, man. >> [laughter] >> So now Kermit the Frog is is one way, but if you just twist your voice or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr. Here. Kermit the Frog here. Because, man, you know, it's the same voice. You know. It's it's it's it's musical in every art form. >> [music] >> Once you start realizing that a lot of this language [music] is just a different language for a different discipline, you see the connection. And then the amazing thing is then you start combining the arts. I don't know. George Lucas plays with Star Wars toys. Mm. >> He wrote invented the characters, wrote the story, created the world, makes it. So for me, Dinner Chase is a film for me. It's a story. Yeah. And I'm telling it and then I think I just like I wanted to the next film. And I get my greatest joy from seeing people wear it. People who cross disciplines understands this. I heard this story from Quentin Tarantino where they were asking him about dialogue and how he writes dialogue. So he has a model for dialogue. And one of the people he uses to write dialogue is Richard Pryor. He just takes the cadence of it and he uses that in his mind to write the dialogue. Some of y'all say, "Well, why don't you sell some of your boots? SOME OF YOUR BIG FAMOUS HOTEL." HUH? THAT'S WHAT YOU SAY? GET RID OF SOME OF THAT EXPENSIVE WARDROBE. And that's easy for you TO SAY CUZ YOU HAVE NONE OF THESE THINGS. >> [cheering] [applause] >> That's how you transfer something from one art discipline to the next. >> [music] >> If you're trying to create emotion, you have tension and release. Even painting, even comedy, music can be the same way. I had great teachers um when I went to school. I went to a very small school in Rockville, Maryland called Omega Recording Studios. Mhm. And they taught everything about music. So, the very first thing that they said is just the way that you breathe, the way that life is is cyclical. Everything in life is cyclical, right? Music is cyclical. We have to go somewhere. There's there's there's tension and then there's release. All great melody has tension, release, tension, release. That's the That's the whole thing about us as human beings. You breathe in and you breathe out. >> Even writing novels, even film. What amazes me is you take that That's what breaks the tension in your movies cuz you have these really intense moments broken by a great conversation about a Big Mac. >> yeah, well, they're not just gangster guys talking a bunch of gangster Yeah, yeah, sure. Louie, bring him in the back. >> If you go into a room and you see that there's a guy in there and there's a gun on the table by his desk, cuts. You then go into another scene where somebody is walking into the house. A woman walks into the house and then she goes into the room and you know that she has a gun in the room. But when she walks into the room, the gun is not on the table anymore. You're already tense because you're thinking, all right, this dude has a gun. The fact the gun is no longer on the table means he moved it. Is it on him? Is it under the pillow? [music] Is it under the It's somewhere and she's now in the room and you do not know what's going to happen. Now, the thing is, if the gun never goes off in that scenario and she manages to leave, you've created a lot of tension. And then he brings the gun out and then he has a local or he says something or whatever and you realize why he didn't use it. The point is, the gun itself, there is some resolution to that. Tension and release. You introduce a conflict, you resolve a conflict. It's one of those tools that's in every art. When you listen to someone like Jim Carrey and how he speaks and you listen to him communicate his thoughts and then you look at his paintings, [music] you'll notice a similarity in the way he communicates verbally and the way he communicates through his art. And it's the same way in his [music] acting. This over-the-top boldness to him. You see that in his paintings, also. [music] It's not so much It's not just how he feels at that moment, but it's how he expresses how he feels when it's not verbal. Like how the character is so much bigger than the actor because of his movements, because of his expression. They come up to me in the street and, you know, their parents says, "You know who that is? That's the Grinch." And I go, "I must find a way to stop Christmas from coming." You know, and uh and their parents go, "Oh, I thought it was makeup." >> [laughter] >> But you also look at scale and his ideas. Yeah, I know. I I I don't believe in icons. Uh I don't believe in personalities. I believe that peace lies beyond personality, beyond invention and disguise, beyond the red S that you wear on your chest that makes bullets bounce off. I believe that it's deeper than that. I believe we're a field of energy dancing for itself. And he talks about how he sees humanity, then you understand that scale is a weapon for him. The consequence [music] to not being able to maneuver art in this way is that you can get blocked easy. You can get writer's block. You can go through that process of running out of ideas [music] or feeling overwhelmed. Well, I had a I had a way of working through musical problems by [music] painting them out at one time and that seems to have disappeared over the over the years, but uh You've lost that ability? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for one reason or another, it that seems to [music] have changed now. To where you can't think, where you have a a singer or rapper who had a record deal and it didn't work out and for the rest of their life they're chained [music] they're chasing that same industry. They don't know how to reframe. If you try to make money from being a creative, you'll always run into this same issue. Stop defining yourself by an industry. Operate in many disciplines. Learn what you naturally understand and what part it plays in the art and then transfer it to another art. Play in many different domains. I can make you look, but I can't make you see. Seeing is a choice. This is Brian from The King's Hand. If you like my content, be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell. If you want to support the channel, um please become a member. The appointed hand of the king.