On credentialism

Among the newsletters I subscribe to is a particularly erudite weekly offering from a guy named Brian Klaas. He’s a historian, and each week’s newsletter is a glimpse at a particular historical happening, told through a storyteller’s lens.

This week Brian wrote about how an amateur scientist in the 1700s solved the seemingly intractable problem at the time of being able to accurately measure longitude while on the ocean. The person in question, John Harrison, lacked formal education, but was a master woodworker with an affinity for clockmaking, and his innovations in maritime timekeeping changed the course of history in multiple significant ways, launching both the British naval empire and the Industrial Revolution.

This paragraph came toward the end of the essay:

Scientific snobbery — and excluding people from innovation based on credentialism — could have kept Harrison’s ideas from emerging, delaying crucial progress. It’s a cautionary tale for the modern world, in which our degrees are often wrongly imagined as an accurate shorthand for our intellectual worth.

And of course I immediately related this thought to my career in DIY music. Because, oh my god: how much snobbery and credentialism and general gatekeeping is there in music recording? So much. It can be so hard to get a toehold working in music production without the benefits of having climbed through the studio system — which, let’s be real, is an opportunity that’s not available to most people, because the pay is terrible and the hours are long and it can be impossible to make it work when you have to support yourself.

But your ideas are important! Your curiosities about music, regardless of your musical background, could be the missing piece in someone’s puzzle. Your intuitive ideas about how to put songs together, unspoiled by any attempts to educate them out of you, could launch the next sonic trend. It’s often stuff that seems really out there at the time that changes the course of popular music.

And on the production side, the weirdnesses in how those of us who are self-taught approach our work could be the exact qualities that make our work appealing to another artist looking for someone to help them execute their idiosyncratic vision. And aren’t idiosyncratic visions the best visions, anyway?

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough, or ready enough, or educated enough, or pedigreed enough, to make art. Including you. — jamie