Cultural Absorption

In an old issue of the Comic Buyer's Guide, writer Peter David laid out (I think it was) 100 tips on how to be a writer, about 40 of which were simply - "Read." The point being, the best way to develop as a writer is to absorb the product of other writers.

Creators all start out as kind of a demented type of fan you know?  Someone who at once loves a certain type of culture yet also feels he or she can add something of their own flavor to the overall cultural lexicon.  And over time, through years of trial and error (and practice of the craft) and presumably huge amounts of cultural absorption, someday we may get our wishes and add our piece to the huge puzzle.

I aim to take in as much culture as possible, letting it bounce around the empty space in my head for a while, then hopefully synthesizing it with everything else in there to have something (hopefully) new and groovy come out of it. After that, you bring other people into the mix (in my case, both the other guys in Big Pimp Jones and the Kodoja artists) that's when shit can take off exponentially.  You really never know how you're going to end up processing and synthesizing everything, you just appreciate the journey and see where it takes you.

Here's just one example - on a whim in spring 2008 I took an Akira Kurosawa film class to get an appreciation for his deeper body of work (I had only seen one of his films at the time), plus I had a lot of spare time on my hands. When I heard the opening music of the film 'Yojimbo' - that part about one minute in where the tempo slows down, I thought to myself 'damn, this shit is HIP-HOP right here!'As excited as I was about the films, I was really excited about the music. A couple days, a couple dollars and a couple visits from the postman later the band was versed in Kurosawa film music, which triggered songwriting - specifically we created a sort of concept-album-Samurai-epic-meets-hip-hop record.  After working on a few tracks things kind of stalled a little bit on that front and we agreed we'd revisit it whenever. 

Flash forward to November 2010 and I'm practicing my guitar lines for a Big Pimp Jones studio session the next day. I had re-watched some Godzilla films a few weeks prior I was like 'wait a minute... if we keep the orchestration we've been working on, take away the hip-hop lyrics AND add live drums AND add funky guitar, we've got a funked-out Kaiju soundtrack!' By thinking of it as a hip-hop record we had obscured the type of record it truly intended to be. I called up the other guys in the band and we were all hype, so hype that the thought of making THIS record almost overshadowed the session we were working on the next day!

After that, the record (Terror Mountain Showdown) came together quickly.  Once it was complete (and we realized we didn't want to associate it with any existing kaiju characters, especially kaiju characters owned by companies that file tons of lawsuits), we were like damn, why stop here? Let's make our own monster and just tell a new story! The road toward Kodoja the comic was laid out. What started with a dope-ass orchestral break in a Kurosawa movie turned into music then morphed into even more than that. Everything has a possible role, and you're never sure what that role is going to be.