Creative commercialism

As any self-respecting music aficionado will agree, you can tell a lot about a person by sifting through their CD collection. The trends, mindsets and hero’s of a person’s life can be easily categorized and catalogued into a musical journey.

If you were to browse through my music collection (now fully contained on iTunes, almost 9000 songs totaling 26th solid days of back-to-back memories) you could follow my journey.

From my teenage years in Oxford, where my tastes were alternative rock from local legends & coffee shop regulars Radiohead.
Through my bike shop years in Bristol, in which I was submerged to the hip and trip hop scene defined by Massive Attack, (who I once sold a bike to).
My first taste of the corporate life in London led to exploring Ska, House & hip hop from Phi Life Cypher, Nick Warren.

With the change in life pace that marked my move to the Alps, I became partial to something more acoustic, with more value contained in the vocals, and obviously a fairly substantial French influence, through Abd al Malik or Cyril Paulus.

More recently I’ve felt a shift back towards guitar led music, although often still with a tribal baseline, the funky new mix of live music and sampling such as Matisyahu, the Killers, or U.N.K.L.E

At each one of these musical interludes, I have, in turn, been influenced by other sounds, flavours or beats. Our friends share their discoveries with us

Despite the fact that we demand they still play the old classics when we see them live in concert (Radiohead’s Creep is the perfect example), we ask our musicians to constantly push their own creative boundaries and explore new soundscapes.

And as they discover, we do too, with each new twist inside a turn leading to personal self-discovery; by confronting what we thought they liked, you are required to question your own musical hunger.

In comparison, business tends to be a pretty dry affair: workflows, business functions, objectives and SOP’s dominate the agenda.

Defined boundaries, and over-regulated strategies never felt right to me. Certainly there’s always a need to fit into the predefined corporate culture, it’s perhaps even Hippocratic. So while I have been reasonably successful in my professional career, I’ve always had this sensation of being a round peg trying to fit into a square hole. Too often I’ve seen colleagues or customers lose sight of their real identity and their personal morals the moment that they slipped into work mode.

But what’s happening in the world right now fills me with some inspiration and hope to the future, as there definite air of change floating through marketplaces, business strategy and perhaps governance as well?

When we work, it should be a time when we’re required to question ourselves constantly, and drive ourselves to discover or explore. Therefore, by definition, we cannot remain in a safety zone, we cannot grow our businesses without sampling and mixing and scratching, and occasionally juggling the wrong beats.

In the first stages of my working life, I was not the person I am today. Now I have new horizons, 30 years under my belt, a child. I don’t dream of the same things, and although the dreams I had have changed, the aspirations of where I want to be creatively have not.

Creative, I’ve recently felt the need to collar that aspect of my personality too, as I’d never really considered myself as creative. I don’t paint or play music.
I don’t build beautiful mountain bike trails, nor shake my thing as Macbeth in the amateur drama club.

But I have come to appreciate my strengths as a corporate DJ. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve nurtured an ability to hear a sales pitch or strategy, and lock it away somewhere in my mind as a sample.

Then look at the crowd from the DJ booth, and try to read the room in order to pre-anticipate the next tune that can get all those hands back up in the air.

Grab two analogue copies of Business Practices, Volume 1, a classic from years gone by, Volume II a bootleg Black label of the future present, then cut, scratch, fade and innovate. Creative Commercialism.

DJ POne of Birdy Nam Nam says it best; Le truc, c’est qu’on travaille et se remet en question sans cesse, donc on ne peut pas appliqiquer la meme formule, faire un 2e album comme le premier, 5 ans apres.