Imagine: How Creativity Works (23 page)

David Byrne is a rock ’n’ roll legend. For sixteen years, he was the lead singer of the Talking Heads, the new wave band that invented the new wave. (In 2002, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) But Byrne isn’t just a singer of the classic pop songs “Burning Down the House,” “Heaven,” and “Once in a Lifetime”; he’s also an avant-garde composer, visual artist, and bicycle activist. In 1981, he pioneered the use of sampling with Brian Eno in their album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. (The layered, cacophonous sound of the album would later infl uence the development of hip-hop.) Recently, Byrne wrote a disco opera about Imelda Marcos, designed bike racks for New York City, and retrofitted an old ferry terminal so that the metal pipes could be played like a church organ. “I don’t worry very much about how all of my projects go together,” Byrne says. “I don’t think about how this fits with that or what came before. I just get an idea and then I follow it.”

Where do all of Byrne’s ideas come from? His answer is simple: the city. It is the muse that inspires his music, the noisy source of his art. It’s why Byrne bicycles to work from Hell’s Kitchen and keeps the windows of his office wide open. He first discovered the creative potential of the city after dropping out of the Rhode Island School of Design to start a punk band. Byrne moved to Manhattan to be close to every other punk band, the place where groups like Television and Blondie were redefining the aesthetics of rock. And so the Talking Heads — this scraggly group of design students — began playing small clubs in the East Village. (One of their first gigs was opening for the Ramones at CBGB.) “We started with really small audiences, maybe twenty people,” Byrne says. “We’d only make money when they’d buy beer.” Because the clubs were mostly empty, Byrne and the band were able to hone their craft, experimenting with their sound. “Nobody comes out of their basement playing perfect,” Byrne says. “Most of the time, you don’t even know what you want to play. And that’s why it was so important for us to have these places that were a little forgiving.”

After a late show, Byrne would often bike around the neighborhood to unwind. Sometimes he’d venture over to a stretch of Latin dance clubs by the East River. “I was the only white guy there, but I would just hang out, enjoying these intense rhythms,” he says. “It was all new to me.” Around the same time, Byrne was introduced to the music of Fela Kuti. He quickly became obsessed. (“The grooves were so intense, trance inducing almost,” Byrne remembers. “I couldn’t help but want to steal that sound.”) And then there was the art scene. When Byrne wasn’t hanging around ethnic clubs, he was staring at a Jasper Johns painting in a SoHo gallery or admiring one of Andy Warhol’s soup-can prints. (Warhol was an early fan of the Talking Heads.) This urban amalgam — the mixture of ethnic sounds and new ideas percolating in the downtown streets — profoundly shaped Byrne’s early rock ’n’ roll compositions. He describes the process as mostly involuntary: “If you look and listen in a city, then your mind gets expanded automatically,” Byrne says. “You can say ‘I know that’s possible because I saw somebody else do this.’ And then you take that and maybe without even knowing it you start to put it in your own music.”

This is what makes the Talking Heads such an important band: they were one of the first groups to fuse these diverse infl uences, to make music that blended melodies and ideas from all over the world. (A list of singers and bands influenced by the Talking Heads includes everyone from Peter Gabriel to Paul Simon to Vampire Weekend.)It was punk music distorted by the polyglot sounds of New York City, the beat of the disco as interpreted by the postmodern-art scene. The end result was a new way of thinking about what sounds could exist together. “The city definitely made it possible,” Byrne says. “A lot of what’s in the music is stuff that I first heard because it was playing down the street . . . Those are the accidents that have always been so important for me. And they just happen naturally in the right place.”

For Byrne, the metropolis is like a sonic blender; every street is a mix tape. Cities expand the imagination by exposing us to unexpected things, to funky Latin beats and jangly Nigerian bass lines and abstract works of art. And then, when we’re in the studio, we can’t help but weave these ideas into our own work, so that punk rock is melded with pop paintings, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and symbolist choreography. This is why Byrne describes cities as a kind of “energy source,” and why he always bikes with a dictaphone in his pocket. “You never know when an idea is going to come to you,” he says. “Cities are not just about all the cultural stuff. That’s nice, but that’s not it. In a vibrant city, you can get just as much from going to the barbershop, or walking down a crowded street, as you can from going to a museum. It’s about paying attention and listening to everything that’s happening. It’s about letting all that stuff in, so the city can change you.”

1.

Why do cities exist? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The modern metropolis, after all, can be an unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous place. It’s full of rush-hour traffic and panhandlers, overpriced apartments and feisty cockroaches. The air is dirty, there is litter in the streets, and the public schools are falling apart. In other words, urban life isn’t easy. We cram ourselves together, but all the cramming comes with a cost.

Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century British economist, was the first to focus on the cost. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population — the work would later infl uence Charles Darwin — Malthus argued that a surfeit of people inevitably led to a shortage of things. This led Malthus to conclude that cities were doomed and that their steady expansion — London grew from 1 million people in 1800 to 6.7 million a century later — would lead to a future of “extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics . . . and gi-gantic inevitable famine.” Human density was always undone by earthly scarcity.

But Malthus was mostly wrong; London today is not full of starving citizens. While the pessimistic economist assumed that cities were a doomed social experiment, his forecast was exactly backward. Instead of dying out, cities have boomed; urban growth is the great theme of modern life, a migratory trend that’s unfolding all across the world, from the factory boomtowns of southern China to the sprawling favelas of Rio de Janeiro. In fact, for the first time in history, the majority of human beings live in urban areas. (The numbers are far higher in developed countries; the United States, for instance, is 81 percent urbanized.) In the next century, more people will move to cities than have moved to cities in all of human history.

What explains the rapid urbanization of the world? What was Malthus’s mistake? In an influential 1988 paper, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas concluded that the continued vitality of cities was a fundamental paradox. According to “the usual list of economic forces,” Lucas wrote, “the city should fl y apart . . . The theory of production contains nothing to hold a city together.” Although economists could quantify the burdens of urban life — those pricey condos and violent crimes — they struggled to understand the advantages. It remained a mystery why all these strangers were squishing themselves together.

While Lucas didn’t have any good answers — the economic equations, he said, were entirely useless — he did endorse the speculations of Jane Jacobs, an urban activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs first got interested in cities as a way of defending Greenwich Village, her neighborhood. At the time, these small-scale enclaves were under constant attack as city planners sought to “modernize” the civic landscape, bulldozing old buildings and erecting “super-blocks” filled with residential high-rises and elevated highways. It was To-morrowland today; just as technology had revolutionized the private spaces of the home with the introduction of gizmos such as the dishwasher and television, so science would transform our public spaces. Urban blight would soon be a thing of the past.

But Jacobs wasn’t convinced. She begins The Death and Life by describing the failure of the first wave of urban renewal:

Look what we have built with the first several billions [in rede-velopment spending]: Low-income centers that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace . . . Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others . . . Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Express-ways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

The debacle of modern urban planning led Jacobs to explore the virtues of old-fashioned neighborhoods. She began by stepping out her front door and analyzing a stretch of Hudson Street in the Village. Jacobs compared the crowded sidewalk to a spontaneous “ballet,” filled with people from different walks of life. There were school kids on the stoops, and gossiping homemakers, and “business lunchers” on their way back to the office. There was Mr. Lacey the locksmith chatting with Mr. Slube at the cigar store, and the Irish longshoremen drinking beer next to the poets at the White Horse Tavern. While urban planners had long derided such neighborhoods for their inefficiencies — that’s why Robert Moses, the master builder of New York, wanted to build an eight-lane elevated highway through SoHo and the Village — Jacobs argued that these casual exchanges were essential. She saw the city not as a mass of buildings but as a vessel of empty spaces in which people interacted with other people. The city wasn’t a skyline — it was a dance.

Furthermore, these sidewalk conversations came with real benefits. According to Jacobs, the virtue of Hudson Street was that it encouraged the “mingling of diversity,” allowing city dwellers to easily exchange information.
(She also liked their aged architecture. As Jacobs famously remarked, “New ideas require old buildings.” What she meant is that more recent buildings — the planned developments of suburbia, for instance — tend to be too expensive for risky, arty, and small-scale businesses. “Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antiques dealers seldom do.” In other words, it’s not an accident that CBGB and all those other punk clubs sprang up in the oldest part of Manhattan.)
 Although cities might suffer from a shortage of physical resources, Jacobs emphasized their surplus of human capital, which produced valuable innovations like new wave music.

And this is why the Village was so vital. The neighborhood might look like an anachronism — it was designed for horse carts, not cars — but Jacobs insisted that its layout remained the urban ideal. The Village had short city blocks, which were easier for pedestrians to navigate. It had lots of old buildings — Jacobs’s street was mostly nineteenth-century tenements and town-houses — with relatively cheap rents, and cheap rents encouraged a diversity of residents. Most important, the streets were mixed use, filled with apartments and retail shops and restaurants, which meant that different kinds of people were on the street for different reasons at different times of the day. The end result was a constant churn of ideas as strangers learned from one another. Jacobs coined a telling phrase for what happens in these densely populated spaces: “knowledge spillovers.”

What’s interesting is that the sheer disorder of the metropolis maximizes the amount of spillover. Because cities force us to mingle with people of different “social distances” — we have dinner parties with friends, but we also talk to strangers on the street — we end up being exposed to a much wider range of worldviews. While it’s tempting to discount these urban interactions — what could possibly emerge from a random sidewalk chat? — they actually come with impressive payoffs. Look, for instance, at a study led by Adam Jaffe, an economist at Brandeis University. He analyzed the paper trail of patent citations, which is the list of previous inventions cited in every patent application.

Jaffe found that innovation was largely a local process; citations were nearly ten times as likely to come from the same metropoli-tan area as a control patent. This suggests that inventors are inspired by other inventors in their neighborhoods, even when the research involves entirely unrelated subjects. And this logic doesn’t apply just to patents. David Byrne, after all, wasn’t infl uenced by the Latin rhythms of some distant musician. Instead, Byrne was seduced by his local dance clubs blasting those songs he could hear from the sidewalk. It is the sheer density of the city — the proximity of all those overlapping minds — that makes it such an inexhaustible source of creativity. (Interestingly, cities and brains seem to have converged on the same solution to the problem of connectedness. The neuroscientist Mark Changizi has demonstrated that urban areas and the human cortex rely on extremely similar structural patterns to maximize the fl ow of information and traffic through the system. In other words, a neural highway acts just like its concrete counterpart: “When scaling up in size and function, both cities and brains seem to follow similar empirical laws,” Changizi said. “They have to efficiently maintain a high level of connectedness in order to work properly.”)