A Heartbreaking Myth of Effortless Genius

Today’s story can be read in combination with the one we shared on Tuesday. Where that one asked, “Do I really have to care about AI music now?” this one takes aim at the bogus idea of effortless musical creation: “If you insist on talking about music like it’s vomited up, you have no way to object when that’s what it becomes.” Max’s argument runs from from Mozart to Billie Eilish, considering what it means to really make something, and why so many people don’t want to look like they’re trying.

“Look at this!” My piano student is stalling for time. He wants to show me a TikTok video on his phone. Initially I say no, but he assures me it’s a “music one,” and I have a feeling I’m not going to win this battle, so I reluctantly agree.

The clip features Charlie Puth, whose music you probably heard playing in a supermarket fifteen years ago. Despite his musical success, Puth is best known now for quasi-off-the-cuff social media videos, most of which start with him wondering “What if there was a song that went like…,” before humming impromptu ideas for beats and bass lines. Within thirty seconds, he’s built an entire song. No mistakes, no edits, almost without even trying.

“So cool,” my student says, before adding more quietly, “I could never do that.”

There’s a lot of stuff like this on the internet right now – content that shows music appearing out of nowhere, seemingly without effort. Jacob Collier (three and a half million followers on Instagram) makes a living by spontaneously turning audiences into choirs and laying down complicated jazz-funk tracks from his bedroom. Nice work if you can get it. In 2024, Billie Eilish (a hundred million monthly listeners on Spotify) went viral with an apparently candid clip of her and her brother writing ‘Birds of a Feather’ and ‘unintentionally’ recording the first sample of the song. The year before that, Eilish described writing the Barbie hit ‘What Was I Made For?’ like one might describe an out-of-body experience: “Those first chords happened,” she says, “and [some lyrics] came out and the song wrote itself.”

These performances are the logical endpoint of a kind of insidious cultural myth: that of the inverse relationship between art and work. This myth holds that music is at its best, its purest, its most awe-inspiring, when it comes naturally. Sans effort. Charlie Puth is a great musician because he doesn’t need to try; Jacob Collier is a genius because he acts on instinct alone; Billie Eilish is so good that she writes music almost by accident.

It’s an attractive idea, and clearly a lucrative one, too, if virality is any measure of financial success. But watching this unfold on my students’ phones in class, I can’t help but think this myth distorts the way music actually gets made, and even warps how we value things like art, labour and the creative process.