What is originality?

I've been listening to Alicia Keyes new album. I've always heard the influence of Prince in her music, someone she does credit as inspiration. On that one song, "If I Ain't Got You," it sounded like she was channeling Prince in every cadence of that song. It sounds more like a Prince than Prince's new music. This is not to acknowledge what a formidable talent she is, when compared to her contemporaries, namely, Brittany Spears.

This new album has one song "No One", which sounds like an amalgamation of Annie Lennox and Prince. It was while listening to this song that the question of originality came to my mind. Any artist will read, listen to, paint like, an artist that came before them. This former artist provides inspiration and also guidance in shaping the new artist. Lord knows, in the world of literature and writing, most of the writers today will talk about Raymond Carver's influence on their work. Which really means we're crediting Ernest Hemingway since Hemingway came before Carver, and undoubtedly, influenced Carver's work. We've now learned Gordon Lish, the famed editor, is really the one who shaped Carver's spare style. Again, we can argue Lish was influenced by Hemingway.

This passing on of traditions creates a strange simulacrum of each art form, thereby forcing artists to find their originality in form, not necessarily content. This certainly happened in literature with the advent of Meta Fiction, the form most associated with the Post-Modern era, although some of us will argue we're still in the Modern era. In music, the idea of changing form happens rarely. Rap is, perhaps, the newest form that has now become entrenched in our culture, spawning its own simulacrum in gansta rap and an artist like Kid Rock.

For a writer, we understand no new stories are truly available, in the true Aristotelian model. The only thing we offer is voice and perspective. The same could be argued about songs. How many different ways could we write a song about the loss of love? Or sadness? Or death? How many metaphors are available for us to convey these very human experiences of any life? How many melodies are there that hasn't been heard? Some musicologists would argue that all of music dates to a few great composers, each of these melodies we hear as original just a new version of something that had been created before. But yet, each song, those that merit more than one listen, has something that offers a different shading to these common experiences. Each writer's voice is unique to that writer, their own experiences, insights, creating a new rainbow on to these shared human experiences we are all subject to experience at some point or another. And perhaps that is what drives each of us, those narcissistic enough to think ourselves worthy of telling stories or writing songs that others might find as comforting.

So, I listened to Alicia Keyes new album over and over, as I'm prone to do when something strikes me. Lord knows, my poor neighbors probably hate Alison Krauss by this point. And I took comfort in the familiarity of the melody of her songs, knowing she was drawing from artists worth drawing from.