ABSTRACT
The Romantic ideal, typified by the conventional view of the quasi-neurotic artist, sees creative activity as primarily self-expressive and supposedly independent from any perceptible constraint.1 As Peter Wicke has argued, this view has legitimized the individualism that is at the heart of the artist’s world; a world perpetuated in many of the myths that surround the recording studio. The Dionysian tales of artists working under the inspiration of whatever muse is popular at the time are legendary. These perspectives, however, have:
These understandings of artistic activity, and the field of creativity in which it is subsumed, appear to be cemented into place in the music industry. They are so strongly held that to challenge them risks ridicule at worst and disbelief at best. In short these ideas are now common sense. They are reflected in the way artists are sold to audiences, the way audiences think about what happens when records are made and they make regular appearances in articles and conversations about the studio and its practices. However, as Margaret Boden asserts in her book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, these ideas, ‘are believed by many to be literally true. But they are rarely critically examined. They are not theories, so much as myths: imaginative constructions, whose function is to … endorse the practices of the community that celebrates them.’3
