Virtue in the News: Music, Fashion, Self-Transcendence

Self-transcendence is in the air, even when selling designer clothes. In a New York Times article in early March that mixes a meditation on the self-transcendent qualities of music with elements of a fashion spread, “Three Iconic Musicians on Artistic Creation—and Its Importance Now: Beck, Kendrick Lamar and Tom Waits Articulate the Creative Impulse,”

 

Wyatt Mason discusses how Leonard Cohen, Beck, Kendrick Lamar, and Tom Waits view creativity as connecting to something larger than the individual self. Mason recalls a striking moment in an interview with Cohen before his death, when a Japanese reporter asked Cohen about the line “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my Lord,” from his recent release “You Want It Darker.” “I don’t really know the genesis, the origin,” Cohen began. “That ‘hineni,’ that declaration of readiness no matter what the outcome, that’s a part of everyone’s soul. We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are willing to serve. So, this is just a part of my nature, and I think everybody else’s nature, to offer oneself at the critical moment when the emergency becomes articulate. It’s only when the emergency becomes articulate that we can locate that willingness to serve.”

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ON THE COVER Kendrick Lamar, Beck Hansen and Tom Waits are featured in T’s March 5 Men’s Style issue. Credit: Photographs by Craig McDean. Styled by Jason Rider.

Mason writes:  “Hineni — הנני : ‘Here I am’ — is said by Moses, Abraham, and Isaiah when God appears to ask something of each of them. It’s a declaration not of location but of disposition, of willingness.” He views Cohen’s explanation as a beautiful tribute to the creative power of self-transcendence: “At critical moments, from our depths, out of an impulse not for glory, not for wealth, not for fame, not for power, but out of an appetite to serve — serve something larger than ourselves, however one might define it — the emergency inside us finally speaks.”

 

The article appears in the Style Magazine section, and Mason’s subjects are artfully photographed wearing Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Ermenegildo Zegna, Vince, AG, Joseph, Falke, Novesta, Sandro, Lanvin, Tod, Saint Laurent, Sunspel. Tom Waits wore his own clothes. Singer Kendrick Lamar speaks to Mason about feeling his audience connecting with music about being trapped by gang culture, and how one man explained to him: “‘I connect through your music not because I know about the gang culture; it’s the sense of wanting to be set free.’ Simple as that. He said, ‘That’s the message that you get across in this album. You’re dealing with that, but I’m dealing with drug abuse; you’re talking about the gang culture and you want to escape that and I want to escape my own self-afflictions and addictions. That’s where the connection comes from.’”

 

Mason quotes Beck speaking about a similar sense that songs can reveal transcendent connections that exist and have long existed between all of us: “I’ve wondered sometimes — since there isn’t really much record of music past the last few thousand years — if there is some deep memory of music, melodies in there that maybe somehow re-emerge or relate to something that we know already. There must be forgotten melodies.”

 

Tom Waits talks to Mason about the expression “We went out to the meadow,” as a way of illustrating the feeling musicians have when they have a self-transcendent experience making music. “‘It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling. Usually someone will say it, but they’re probably reluctant to say it — you might be afraid that only you went out to the meadow last night. But it’s one of those things where you go as a group. It’s not like: ‘Last night was a really great show for me and it sucked for you.’ No. We all went out to the meadow. There’s something magical about it. And you can never plan on it.’”

 

Mason concludes with a meditation on his own sense of music connecting us through self-transcendence: “Although the expression wasn’t known to me, of course the feeling was, at least as a listener: that elemental feeling, a door swinging open in the self.”

 

Click here for the full article.