How Being Vague Gives You Extraordinary Creative Powers

I was talking to a rapper friend recently. He’s a very popular artist, one of the most popular on the planet, if I’m just being honest.

I asked him about people picking apart his lyrics online, whether he felt any responsibility to explain himself.

“Not at all,” he said. “As an artist, that’s not something you should really get in the habit of doing. I don’t judge anyone who does it, but it’s not for me.”

I asked him why.

“That’s part of the mystique,” he said. “More importantly, if I could explain the thing I’m talking about, I wouldn’t be inclined to write a song about it. I’m not good at explaining or talking about things — that’s why I make music.”

I chuckled. What he said was funny and telling. Most musicians I know have trouble explaining their songs, let alone anything else. It’s just not something they’re good at. The ones who are, oddly enough, make terrible music. Maybe it’s because their music is too deliberate, too on the nose.

There is, I think, a collective move towards explaining things nowadays. Entire websites — “explainer” websites — are filled with articles where journalists explain things. With news, this has a lot of value.

But when it comes to creative work, I’m not so sure. Of course, it’s good for the fans. Picking things apart, trying to figure out what something means, that’s the beauty of being a fan.

Only the creator really knows what something does or doesn’t mean, what their intent was, and so on. And some things are so deliberate that they don’t need to be explained.

When a rapper says: “I fucked that bitch,” what he really means is, he fucked that bitch. There is no ‘unpacking’ that. It is very literal.

But seriously, that dividing line — this is what I mean vs. this is what you think I mean — is important, because when it ceases to exist, the work itself can be terribly affected.

Think of all the guesswork around Bob Dylan. How many books have been written based on what people “think” his lyrics mean. Hundreds. If Dylan just came out and completely explained himself, well, that might diminish him.