Apart from opposable thumbs and self-awareness, scientists are generally in agreement that one of the biggest traits that separate homo sapiens from all other animal life is the ability to tell stories, and by extension, build common realities. For good and bad that’s how we got organized religion since man’s reach for meaning tends to boil down to some variant of the story of an unseen, all-knowing otherworldly force being responsible for creating us and the earth we walk on.
The existence of money is one of the more complex and newer stories we’ve invented. We invented it so that it would be easier to transact goods and services using adjustable units of agreed value rather than trading half a ton of a commodity like salt for a new dwelling.
In our everyday lives, we’re surrounded by stories – though myths might be an even better word in some instances – that we’ve constructed to make sense of complicated situations and people we’ll never meet in real life. It’s why a sitting president is either chosen by God or works as Satan’s right hand, depending on the day or your political affiliation, when the reality is probably a degree or two off from dead center and the executive in chief is as given to moments of brilliance or stupidity as you or I.
The same way that in moments of frustration, we ascribe a pothole on our neighborhood street, not to a streak of freeze-thaw weather fluctuations or overloaded trucks causing the road to buckle. Instead, the blame falls on the fat cats at city hall stuffing their own wallets with money that should have been spent on road maintenance projects. Evildoers make better characters in a story than the slow-drip reality of time and circumstance doing their thing.
A different spin on this comes in the world of music and movies, and the way we deify the artists who make some of our favorite pieces of pop culture. It’s so romantic to think that singers like David Bowie or Iggy Pop spat out classics like “Suffragette City” or “Loose” in one rushed moment of artistic genius when no less a force than God himself reached down and delivered a chosen moment that we were lucky to have had caught on tape.
When we listen to the actual process in the form of the studio tapes for Iggy and The Stooges’ “Fun House” and realize that there were more than two dozen takes of “Loose” – all of which sound, more or less, the same as the final studio version – it strips away the magic but makes that kind of achievement seem more attainable. Iggy wasn’t chosen by divine right. He just worked hard, wrote a ton, and screamed his guts out over and over until everything was the way he wanted it. With a little luck, we’ve all got a “Loose,” “Lust For Life” or “Passenger” living inside of us.
Then again, there’s also a value in leaving our heroes shrouded in that magic.
I have a friend who spent a couple of decades as a music journalist. When his favorite band reunited in the U.K. for their first show in 16 years, he made the trip over for a once-in-a-lifetime show. Having written for Rolling Stone, I asked him if he called in any rock writer favors so he could meet the band he’d traveled so far to see.
He said he didn’t, in large part because the band in question didn’t have the best reputation for being shining examples of friendliness and humility. Meeting them and having a bad experience with it would’ve popped the balloon and ended the trip on a down note, spoiling a story that had been building for almost two decades.
At that point you couldn’t blame him for wanting to preserve the mythology and elevate the experience in every way possible. He’d been to hundreds of concerts at that point and certainly knew that the people he was watching, along with 75,000 other screaming fans, were ordinary, imperfect people just like you and me. But the story he’d built and managed to keep intact made it into so much more.