Experimenting until it clicks
During our drive to the Acorn Theater, Mike Gentry and I were chatting about the aspects that need to be in place for art to take off.
We both agreed the importance of the 10,000 hours of practice, but Mike added how there is another aspect, a “cool factor” that can’t be measured. “It’s a intangible thing, but you know it when it clicks,” he said.
Billy Corgan describes finding this hybrid of styles that meshed into the Siamese Dream sound in the 90s:
As a guitar player, I wanted to find something to frame what I was doing in…I took snippets of things of things, like the lyricism of Bob Dylan with the riffs of Black Sabbath and the atmosphere of Love and Rockets…” Corgan uses the magic word, “clicking” in his description of the evolution of the band: “It took about a year of experimentation, good gigs bad gigs, driving around the Midwest, until we saw this clicking point.”
It’s easy to dismiss “the clicking point” as the superficial hipster effect, what’s cool to be the flavor of the moment; but there’s a distinction between the actual moment when the art is getting to a uniqueness.
The clicking point. You know it when you hear it, see it, feel it. You have to put the 10,000 hours in to your craft, but you also have to be experimenting to find that special, elusive thing.
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