TITLE: Nipsey Hussle and ASAP Rocky Mastered This Creative Pattern, but Most Artists Never Will
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcWNMK6VZr4

So, I'm watching Joe Buddton podcast and I see Mona with this hat on. Let me zoom in real quick. The hat says you can't teach taste. That's not true. I'm going to show you that you could teach taste and I'm going also show you a process that I use to refine my taste. Nobody thinks they need to get better at taste. A lot of people think their taste is already good. Most people think that way until you look at your art compared to the people you admire. Then you start making up reasons why their art is better than yours. >> Can you remember meeting people then that you realized later the significance of if you know what I mean? I mean uh >> No, because I think I realized then >> you did. >> Yeah. People told me and I was very impressed by by great people and interesting people as a as a kid. I was very interested in older people, unlike most young people were. >> We love to talk about originality, but we never talk about discernment. A big assumption we make as creatives is that we know what we like, but most of us don't. We recognize what we've seen before. We recognize something that's familiar. And a lot of times we recognize what the algorithm is trained to recognize. So a lot of times we'll say, "I know what I like." But we never investigated why we like it. Now, if you're just a fan, it doesn't matter why you like something. But if you're a creative, you have to know why. It's your job to know why you like something. It's the burden you take. You can't transfer something great to your art if you don't know why it's great. What you'll end up doing is just copying whatever is popular at the time. That's what people do when they don't know why something is great. They just copy it because they see everyone else likes it. People who follow trends, they react to the market. People who are anti-trans, they also react to the market. A timeless creator that knows himself doesn't react at all. It essentially has to appeal and just satisfy me first, >> you know? Not to make it so selfish because we all like to we all would like to think we make worldly music that appeals to the masses, but like it has to I have really good taste, you know? So, especially when it comes decor, fashion, lifestyle things like >> music, film, everything creatively, >> I like my my taste. It just the it's it's a range and it varies. >> But you're confident in it. >> I'm so confident in it, you know. It's just like >> some I make certain music. It's like in a quiet taste. If you want to be part of a creative community, please subscribe. If you want to support the channel, feel free to become a member. Preference and taste are completely different. Preference is what gives you comfort. Taste is about understanding. We weren't born with taste. We acquire taste, but it's not acquired by copying. Taste comes from within. It comes from self-awareness. If you're not in tune with yourself, you can't genuinely know what moves you. If you don't know what moves you, you'll react instead of observe. You'll chase instead of choose. >> And it's funny when like post rationalizing my career and my taste, like why do I like Helvetica? Why do I like um graphics that look like that? Or why do I like fashion that feels like that? The first phase in becoming a designer is sort of like selfanalyzing yourself. You know, it's sort of digging into like what are your primal emotions and why do you like the things that you like? And I think once you resolve that, there's also interjecting that with, you know, a premise that largely doesn't get talked about a lot in my thought process in design is that we all have mentor. Like no one invented anything. And I think that's where an artist or designer torment can come in. If you're constantly preoccupied with pretending like you're not influenced and pretending that you've synthesize something that never existed without any points of reference, then that becomes a more dangerous sort of space as you sort of like get to your core to go forward. So there should be a time for studying greatness and there's a time for creating. Those should be separate times. Hish does a very a life apart a very full life apart from your work whether it involves the theater or film or books or what music whatever it may be that is only going to inform your work and make make it more interesting and more full because I think everything that you absorb and see and learn about and and listen to you know reappears in in in another way. So, I I think a balance is incredibly important. >> If you haven't studied greatness and you just create, what happens a lot of times is you just start to layer noise on top of noise. You're making music with 50 different instruments going different directions and it's creative, but the taste level is not there. If you observe very closely and that's one of the most things and that doesn't need effort at all just to sit of an afternoon whenever you have time and leisure to look at it to look at a flower to look at yourself to look at all the movement of your thought and your feelings and your reactions just to observe without any choice which is the beginning of self- knowing. >> Observation without reaction is really hard. It's something you have to focus to do. Can you look without labeling something? Can you see without narrating? Can you observe without passing judgment? It's the beginning of taste. Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. Ralph Waldo Emerson. You're not born with taste. I'm only able to teach it because I've had the same issue. This is what I call the lookbook process. My process is simple. I pick a time in the day where I can empty my mind and not think about anything. Create a folder called taste. Scroll wherever you want to scroll. Pinterest, Instagram. Then I'll continue to scroll. And once I feel something, I'll stop, screen capture that photo, put it in a folder. And I will do that over and over again till I get like 20, 30, even 40 photos in a folder. After I get the photos in a folder, I quit the exercise all together. Wait 48 hours, come back to that folder, and figure out why you screen captured those items. What made me react to this photo? Once I figure out what made me react to it, I'll put it in a folder of other photos that made me react the same way for the same reason. I have a folder for juxiposition, a folder for posing, a folder for framing, a folder for leading lines, visual metaphors, a folder for color palette. Whenever I'm working on a project, I will go back to those folders. Those folders will not only give me ideas, but they'll show me what it's supposed to look like. You can do this with anything. It doesn't have to be photos. The reason you wait 2 days is because when you're scrolling and stopping, that is using a different part of the brain than the part of the brain that you categorize. So the first part of the process is emotional intelligence. You wait two days and then after the two days now you're using your more rational side of your brain. This is a photo that I picked from my process. I had the opportunity to create with a team of people a short kind of music video. I can't play the music because it's not finished, but I'm just showing you visually what it looks like. Hey y'all was some of the first chords I ever learned on guitar. So I think it's a gear that a lot of musicians fail to like they skip past it, but it's I think discovery is really really valuable. Like when I started producing for for Outcast, it was my like my first tracks were like elevators and like at like those were my very first tracks. And I think um the you're using this material this this discovery material that you can never pretend. You can never pretend the first time you see something. It's like the first time you have sex with a person. Like you can never >> There's a mental state you have to put yourself in in order to feel what moves you. I mean, no, no, it's not. It's it's a it's a very new thing and it's it's a certain power that you can never get back. So, why not use the newness of stuff and I'm I'm big on that. And I think it becomes it comes from me really being excited about something. And when you're excited about something, you can actually harness that excitement and represent it. It's almost like when you see a kid and they've seen like a motorcycle go down the street for the very first time, like that look in their face. The downside to having good taste is that you create high expectations. This is where you see people like ASAP Rocky, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Farel, Anna Winter, Martin Scorsesei, Kanye, Tom Ford. The audience expects refinement. They expect a certain level. >> You have Puff on some ad libs. >> Yeah. >> Why uh why was that important to you? You know, I think what Puff represent is like elevated taste like in terms of like hip-hop, like you know what I mean? From like fashion to music to like business, you know what I mean? Puff taste was always like premiere. And so, you know, I just was like, um, it'll be dope. But some artists on the opposite end, they build audiences by training them to have low expectations. This is what I call hustle culture. They can release projects much faster because they don't have to put the same amount of detail in the projects. It doesn't mean they aren't successful. They just picked a different route. This lets you know that taste isn't just personal. It's a strategy. Most creatives don't lack talent, they lack taste. and self-awareness. You can learn taste by learning yourself. Taste comes from within. You can't create what you can't see. Stop creating for a minute and look at the classics and figure out why they still exist. I can make you look, but I can't make you see. Seeing is a choice. If you want to be part of a creative community, please subscribe. Hit the notification bell. This is Brian from the King's Hand. be appointed hand of the king. [music] >> [music]