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.

Of course, none of this is entirely new. Music has been coloured by the language of mysticism for millennia: Pythagoras believed musical harmony revealed the mathematical order of the universe. This idea influenced centuries of Roman and Christian thought, then took on new dimensions in the eighteenth century, when composers stopped working for churches and courts and transitioned to something more like a freelance model. Since then, the music industry has run on two things: money and mystique.

With the rise of the composer-as-brand, musicians were suddenly presented to the public not just as competent craftspeople but as geniuses with supernatural abilities. Like they were on a hotline with God, taking down notes about the secret truth of the universe. Their music was not the product of labour, but of some other nebulous process. A creative impulse both ill-defined and uncontrollable, but undeniably cool.

In a frequently cited 1789 letter, Mozart describes the process like this:

“Whence and how [my ideas] come I know not: nor can I force them… my subject enlarges itself… and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind; so that I can survey it like a fine picture, or a beautiful statue, at a glance.”

Similar claims of divine revelation are made at various points throughout history by Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and countless others. More recently, record producer Rick Rubin went viral by claiming to “know nothing about music,” arguing his success as a producer came purely from “the confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.” At the time, Rubin was on the interview trail to promote his new book, The Creative Act, in which he claims that creating music is simply a question of sitting back and waiting for the Muses to show up.

“When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control,” he writes. “We can’t force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite it in and await it actively.” Art, in Rubin’s opinion, lies precisely in the absence of labour. It’s what happens when we stop trying.

The obvious question, of course, is whether any of this mystical inspiration actually happens the way these artists claim. To which the answer is clearly: well, not quite. That Mozart letter from 1789 turned out to be written by a magazine editor pretending to be the composer, a case of journalistic invention masquerading as historical fact. And although most people think of Beethoven as a kind of madly possessed genius, we know his creative process was far from spontaneous, because we have the receipts to prove it: over eight thousand painstaking pages’ worth of notebooks, in fact.

It’s clear that, for many of these great composers, music composition was often recursive; fine ideas gave rise to better ideas through trial and error. Emphasis on the trial.

As for Rubin, it’s hard to say whether a producer with over forty years’ experience could realistically have “no technical musical ability” or whether he too might be selling a certain story about effortless creativity. A story that has always been historically popular. He might be onto something there – his book has sold nearly a million copies.

So why do we love this story? Why does the myth that art and work have nothing to do with each other hold such allure? It’s not a new question. In the 1980s, social critic Christopher Lasch explored this topic in detail, arguing that modernity was to blame. (When is it not?) According to Lasch, the Industrial Revolution stripped creativity from the working world, leaving workers unable to derive satisfaction from their labour. This separated art from work in people’s minds – creating a weird inverse relationship where work was not artful and art was not hard work. When instinct and spontaneity aren’t valued in our work, we tend to give them value in the world of art instead.

But here’s where things get complicated. Spontaneous creative inspiration is undeniably a real thing. Rare, perhaps, but real. Sometimes it does feel like ideas, as Rubin writes, “exist in the aether and ripen on schedule, ready to find expression in the physical world.” Just listen to how Billie Eilish describes writing ‘What Was I Made For?’, or Taylor Swift’s anecdote about penning ‘Tim McGraw’ in fifteen minutes. Mozart allegedly wrote the overture to Don Giovanni the night before the opera’s premiere. Paul McCartney – you get the picture. Although these stories could probably be taken with liberal pinches of salt, it really doesn’t matter whether they’re true so much as what’s at stake when we tell them. Placing art and work as opposites doesn’t just say that good art is sometimes effortless; it says that effortlessness is something that makes art good.

If you insist on talking about music like it’s vomited up, you have no way to object when that’s what it becomes. This has real-world stakes for both artists and audiences. In the culture war simmering over ‘AI slop’, one side is dominated by tech bros who seem to be legitimately moved by tacky pastiche regurgitated by neural networks, while the other is populated by sceptics who make good-faith-but-ultimately-vague arguments about the ‘loss of human connection’ in art. These arguments are sincere but never quite convincing, because they rely on a clean distinction between ‘humanity’ and ‘technology’ that breaks down if you think about it for more than two minutes.

Like so many contemporary debates, this wants to be a discussion about labour – specifically, the relationship between art and work, about what it is and what it could be, about who creates value and who reaps the rewards – but our myths about effortless creativity prevent us from articulating it that way. And until something changes, we’re stuck. You can’t create a distinction between ‘real art’ and ‘slop’ if our creative output was already slop: an uncontrolled, involuntary outpouring, emanating from somewhere nobody quite understands.

This myth is what makes it hard for me to convince a nine-year-old to practise his scales, because what’s the point? He’ll never be able to do what Charlie Puth does, which is to say: nothing, but with beautiful results. The discourse hides the real labour involved in the creative process, and even turns us against that labour. Which is funny, because most of the music and art we enjoy wouldn’t exist without toil, sweat, mistakes and time: the work that makes the work of art.

This is important, because the way we talk about how beauty is created shapes how beauty is perceived, which shapes how it will be created again. I tell my piano student that effortlessness is cool, but in the end a song is a song, and I don’t care if it takes him a minute or a day or a year to write it. All I know is that, if it sounds like Charlie Puth, I’ll know I’ve failed.

Maybe it’s time for new myths. In the next lesson, I’ll show him something else: a TikTok video of an artist building a one-and-a-half-tonne sarcophagus to hold a single bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a process that took over a month and a half and the contents of which won’t be opened for ten thousand years, well after anyone will be there to record it. You can make whatever you want, really, that’s the beauty of this whole thing. But you’re going to have to put in as much work as it takes.

The Story is a magazine about storytelling. Written for those curious about the narratives that shape our world, it deconstructs texts big and small to see how they work, placing everyone from authors to spin doctors under the microscope to reveal their craft while wrestling with the big issues facing the media and literary worlds today.

Max Blansjaar is a 22-year-old musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His essays have appeared in publications including Dirt, Sound Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology. He lives in Oxford, UK.

Anna Hindmarch is a London-based illustrator, painter and florist.