All right, stop... - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin
Before he was shamelessly performing at Donald Trump events, a person in a bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume at his side, Vanilla Ice, also known as Robert Van Winkle, gifted us a song called “Ice, Ice Baby” that topped charts in the early 1990s.
I guess it’s been adopted as a bit of a pro-Trump anthem, cheering the white supremacist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons, but, in this column, it stands as the only song I could think of that uses the word collaborate (“All right, stop - collaborate and listen,” goes the first line of the song). I assure you this is not a column about Vanilla Ice.
It is - you guessed it - about collaboration.
On Sunday, the Golden Globes were handed out to the best in film and television. Very randomly, the award for Best Score was intentionally presented on a commercial break. It was the only award to be presented in this manner, leaving some of the world’s best composers feeling just a little put out.
Two-time Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer, who was nominated that night for his F1 score, slammed the decision, as expected, but then added an interesting bit about the work of a composer alongside a film’s director. In addition to comments on how hard composers work and all that they miss due to the long hours of the job, he said, “The composer has such an important role in making films. By the time we come to the music, the director has been through war. Our first job is to remind him why he did this film in the first place.”
So much of creativity - and the way we, as consumers, respond to it - romanticizes the idea of the solo artist toiling away, kept company only by his or her massive, towering genius. The lone painter, novelist, playwright or musician, pounding away for hours in a dark room in search of the breakthrough that may never come and, if it does, only the lone artist will be there to know it. That is until it’s triumphantly given to the world like the baby Jesus Christ (or Simba from The Lion King).
What Zimmer is talking about here is the power of collaboration and the artistic heights that can be reached when like-minded people of talent, vision and skill work together.
Sure, every person who creates needs some time on their own. As someone who reports, researches and writes for a living, I can assure you that this is true for me. However, the ability to work with others, bounce ideas off of them and, in some cases (rarely in my world, but certainly more common in other forms of creative conquests) even work together as one can be extremely helpful and open all types of doors.
Over and over we’ve seen musicians seek out one another to make interesting, new types of music they could never have conceived of on their own. Artists create communities full of their friends and fellow artists to expose them to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new ways of seeing the world, all under the guise of making better work together.
The idea of a film director, going back to Zimmer, falling out of love with his work, for lack of a better term, is real and that’s why, for us, we have such a robust editing process. If one person reads their story over and over again, sure, they might catch some things, but when a new set of eyes comes to the project, a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
It’s easy to expect this kind of wisdom from someone as accomplished and well-travelled as Zimmer, but it’s a good lesson for us all - to not shut out the world and be open to new ideas. You never know where they’ll take you.