Review: Creative Quest

Creative Quest by Ahmir Questlove Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this one for a lot of different reasons, ones that don’t cohere, but that I think reflect some of the messiness, serendipity, and inspiration of this intriguing work.

1) It was on sale. That may sound silly. I can certainly afford to buy full-priced books – even the audio books I consume at a clip of 4-5 a month these days – but I find it overwhelming to look at the tens of thousands of options in the full bookstore. Instead, it’s easier to look at the ones Audible puts on sale for just a day. I pass on most, but one in ten or sometimes twenty will grab me. This one did.

2) I’ve thought a lot about creativity and its sources myself. I have an essay about plagiarism that, filtered through some practical concerns, became a class I designed (with help) for incoming Honors students called Ideamaking. I have another essay about the distinctions between creation, invention, and discovery. Until I started thinking about this book, I hadn’t realized how consistently I’d been asking the same sort of questions Questlove is.

3) I don’t know Questlove all that well. For that matter, I don’t know hip-hop as well as I’d like. From what I understand, he’s an articulate figure within the genre. He’s someone sufficiently on the cutting edge to matter, yet he’s also got a capacity to talk to “squares” like me or Jimmy Fallon, guys too old to have absorbed hip-hop in our adolescence. His voice holds up here, and I enjoyed my time with him, but there are spots where things get a bit repetitive. I liked it, but I think it might have been stronger at about one-fifth shorter. Some of the references came too quickly for me, but I’m trying to catch up now that I’m finished. I have a D’Angelo song playing right now. It may still not quite do it for me, but I am hearing it in a different way. I am imagining how I might really enjoy it, and that has to count as a real win for this book.

4) I discovered only after starting this that Questlove’s co-author is Ben Greenman. Ben was a classmate of mine at Northwestern. He didn’t rise to the level of friend, but we had at least a couple classes together and spoke a handful of times. He was himself a strangely creative person. I remember him most dramatically in a class where we were both a little bored. I compensated by forcing myself to be over-interested, to take absurdly complete notes and raise my hand often to try to find ways to engage with the material. Ben said nothing. Instead, he’d stare at the professor as he wrote – somehow not looking at his notepad – strange free association stories and essays. I never got to read any of them (he wouldn’t share) but I asked him about them a few times. I probably even tried a couple times to read over his shoulder if I happened to be sitting next to him.

5) Questlove talks a lot here about the nature of collaboration, so it’s intriguing to read this for signs of my old acquaintance’s contributions. I can’t tease out too many of them – there’s the occasional literary reference that seems to have his fingerprints on it – but Questlove acknowledges Ben a handful of times. I imagine Ben is proud of his contributions to this (I certainly would be) and it’s interesting to think of how certain works of art that grow out of collaboration, even when they have one person’s name on them, have multiple influences. This is, in part, Ben’s book. Maybe there are even an atom or two of it that grew out of the conversations I had with him after class or in one of Evanston’s bars – not my ideas, but ideas Ben sharpened when he explained them to me and the rest of our class. You don’t have to be the knife that carves the wood; sometimes you contribute by being the whetstone.

6) And then there’s the fact that Questlove (and Ben) have some thoughtful things to say about how to understand and possibly stoke creativity. I liked his breaking down the notion of cognitive disinhibition, the sense that we can’t be afraid of new ideas even though we set up all sorts of barriers against them. (My father wrote about a different version of the same thing in a short essay called “Circumventing the Self-Censor.”) I also liked the way he emphasized the notion of “seeds.” In a way that brings those two things together, he says, “It’s not about letting everything in; it’s more about not keeping things out.” The line between the two is thin, but it seems the sort of notion that, in its necessary vagueness, becomes a useful meditation for the would-be creative.

7) And, in a final thought, I really liked his discussion of “negative theology” as a metaphor for the unwritten (or uncomposed) work. That is, in some Jewish theology, we can’t know G-d directly so we work to know what G-d is not: not localized, not time-bound, not singular in essence. We should not worship our own art – I’ll add that as paraphrase and caution – but we can begin to recognize it before it comes into existence if we decide what we don’t want it to be. I like that idea enough that I think I will use it as part of the next brainstorming activity I do in class.

8) So this book is all those thoughts and more. It’s not my usual audio fare, but I mostly enjoyed it. It’s a strange book with an appeal to only a certain sort. If you’ve read this much, though, chances are you’re one of those sorts.


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