In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
I always loved that first verse from the gospel according to John. It was different. Because it was different, it was memorable.
Since there was nothing before The Word, it was a creative endeavour for it to turn from “The Word” to becoming God. Nothing to compare it with before meant it set the standard. Well, I’m not a supporter of the Genesis story, as much of it, in my view, does not make sense. But, like DJ Khalid, I like what God did — he created. Unlike the creators of today, he had no competition. Small wonder that everything he created was good.
Today, creativity is hunted while paradoxically encouraged. At school, teachers encourage children to be creative while enforcing rules and regulations that nip it in the bud. After a while, everyone knows who the teacher favours. Before you speak, you have to raise your hand. You need to ask for permission before heading to the washrooms. Or the toilet, as we used to call it. Honestly, the first time I heard someone call it washrooms, I was in class seven (7th grade), and we were caught by the teacher on duty, who locked us up inside the ladies’ “washrooms” as punishment. That’s a story for another day.
Creativity is generally encouraged, but in reality, it is forcefully shunned. At work, unless you’re a startup, creativity will be discouraged. There’s a formula or a guide. Follow it, and nobody will blame you; don’t, and everyone will be on your neck when it goes south. It reminds me of how many doctors lean on guidelines, when they are only lines that guide. When a claim is laid by the next of kin, the lawyers always resort to guidelines. But for someone to study for years to become a doctor means they are not stupid. They can make a decision outside the guidelines that they can rationally defend. However, because it concerns life, creativity is shunned. Yet, our very basis of rising to the top of the food chain and more than doubling our lifespan, through improving our healthcare and its systems, was and is pegged on our creativity.
In short, there’s a silent tax that cuts at every creative endeavour. I call it the creative tax.
The creative tax is way worse than you can imagine
The moment I started earning my money, I learned about various forms of taxation. The usual is the expected one from any responsible citizen.
A question we were often asked in primary school was what features amounted to being a law-abiding citizen. My first answer was always someone who paid their taxes. As Bien sang, I’m living in my prophecy.
That cumulative figure can have you choking on your phlegm during your pocket-dry days. And when you squint outside your window to see where all that money goes, you hardly wonder why the tax rates are that crazy high. Most goes to pay debt. Allegedly. Some is siphoned into individual pockets, ALA the scandals my country is known for. This type of tax can be documented. It can be recorded and shared with the public. Numbers, apparently, are not supposed to lie.
But you know the kind of tax that will never make it to the front page? The individual kind. The popular one is the black tax. Slashing some of your earnings to send back home. If you had a supportive family, I’m okay with that…up to a point. But if you didn’t, it’s arguable which position you want to take.
The other individual tax is the creative tax. God didn’t have such a tax when he created our universe, as the Genesis story goes. There was no competition. No marketing needed. You see, the creative tax takes several pieces from the pie you thought you would have all by yourself. I became cognizant of this reality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Along Mombasa road, just as you make the first roundabout leading to the heart of Nairobi’s CBD, a monumental house of worship stands on the right, close to a petrol station. You can’t miss it. Pastor Ng’ang’a performs his theatrical sermons inside it. Next to it is the Nairobi Railway Museum.
I used to frequent the place during my campus days. The field at the back housed several repurposed train wagons that were the home of an artistic group called the BSQ. These guys were creative. Every time I visited the space, I would get new and fresh pieces. Sometimes they made me wonder what would have happened if I had taken my drawing seriously.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Without foot traffic, with everyone stretching their pensions, with the layovers, and with many losing their loved ones, the place closed down. That’s my theory. For you to get space, you need to pay the rent. Numbers help. The more the artists, the easier the cost sharing. But if cost-sharing is also a problem, that should signal the kind of struggles artists endure. I call it the creative tax.
It’s a tax because there is never a guarantee that you will find your audience. Side hustles will struggle to finance your passion, but you can never know when your big hit will come through — if it comes through. That’s at the primary level. What’s more, you cannot tabulate the losses numerically, because the pain is emotional. Emotions cannot be quantified.
In medicine, we try to use the pain scale. On a scale of 1–10, we ask our patients how they rate their pain. If artists were asked this question, some may decline to answer. The scale might be a tad too simplistic to accurately capture their heavy hearts.
There’s also a secondary level. That’s when you see your fellow artist hit the jackpot. It follows a scaling law; that is, a logarithmic law that works in orders of magnitude. For the first 10, one will make it. For the next 100, around 10. For a thousand, roughly 100. However, artists who embrace their creativity hardly know 1000 people. They like to keep small circles. So we can work with 100. It means 10 people leave the block, and 90 remain.
While they may celebrate that one of them got a breakthrough, this feeling is not guaranteed to last long. Reality pulls you back to the dirt, where you wallow. And when it rains, it pours. Dirt turns to mud. Breakthroughs seem too distant to achieve within one’s lifetime, because you cannot be allowed to embrace your adventurous spirit past a certain age. Responsibilities catch up with you. That’s when the secondary tax hits you the most, again, at an emotional level.
Sometimes, it might even be conventionally accepted by your peers that you are good, but expenses don’t give two craps about that. “One day I will make it big,” erodes slowly and painfully into, “Will I ever make it big?” And eventually those around you can suck the drive and energy to the point where you kill your dream.
And there’s a tertiary level. This is a strange sphere because it operates across all age groups. However, the ones who most resist it are children. A child will not know what boundaries not to cross. They will just cross it. They therefore reap the most from avoiding the creative tax. And the world is okay with it. They will poo when they feel like it and pee anywhere and everywhere. They will learn to manipulate their mothers and bite their nipples to see if they will get a beating the second and the next time.
Babies are so creatively unruly that they have convinced us that whenever they kick their mothers in utero, the mother is at ease. Quickening is the technical term. Whenever they don’t, everyone worries. How’s that for a creative homerun?
But as we grow and enroll in school, the creative tax bracket worsens. It seems to increase with every decade. The more schools enroll students, the more they condition them to lose their creativity. The smart ones are the biggest targets. They are taught that they will win by following orders and tucking their noses deep into books. It works for a while, until it doesn’t. Eventually, they grow to become highly sought-after employable people who are easily replaceable because schools continue to manufacture those who will replace you the instant you’re fired. Schools make the smart students fragile.
Those not too smart begin to learn early enough that they will not always win. So they are free to be creative. Antifragile. And that’s what frees them. They can explore and find ways of getting away with some mischief, learning early in life that rules only apply to those who wish them to apply to them. They may have their run and the advantage of this brief stint, but getting into a world that requires documentation might cut short their experimentation phase.
The geniuses we look for in our present generation are absent, as many have argued, because of the stultifying systems against creativity. Aristocratic tutoring gave enough room for tutors to be creative with their solutions. This type of tutoring could bear the burden of being creative. The creative tax could be sorted from the family wealth. Current school systems don’t have the breathing space afforded by generational wealth.
Enforcing rules in school continues in workplaces. If you follow the rules, even if everything goes wrong, you’re okay. If you try to step away, using foresight and a little bit of innovation, you get punished. This punishment, again, cuts deep at an emotional level. Sometimes it can be captured with numbers, but not wholly. You could get fired. It means that next month you may not have your salary. You could then get sued. That’s more than your salary, which may no longer be present, requires of you. Physicians and surgeons can relate.
And as the world grows more stagnant in its practices, the creative tax becomes more evident. In Hollywood, new ideas are frowned upon. In the last year alone, how many Marvel sequels have you seen? What about DC movies? And James Cameron’s Avatar? Sequels and spinoffs of the successful movies are taken and stretched because creativity is shunned. It’s a heavy tax for you to create.
Musicians are also trapped in the same rut. Record deals don’t sign as many artists as they used to. They are also being bought by other companies. These companies, then, rather than cultivate new talent, are buying the copyrights to the old hits. It’s an easy solution to make money — anyone who wants to use the song has to pay. Creativity appears risky. The tax continues to swing its axe with mightier force.
It’s why I will sing praises about Taylor Swift, who cumulatively gave her crew $197 million in bonuses, and continue to be dismayed by Sean Combs, who, after combing through a bundle of dollar notes, as detailed in The Reckoning, gave Craig Mack only one.
Writers are no longer getting the marketing they would have from big publishing companies. These legacy houses prefer seeking celebrities who have already created their own audiences. It’s an easy sell for them to convince these celebrities to write memoirs or autobiographies, knowing the audience is ready to get anything they launch. The budding J. K. Rowlings and the Grace Ogots remain in the rough, confused for dirt. Why? Because apparently, creativity is risky.
When you’re big enough and your pockets are deep, you can avoid tax. That’s what the big shots are doing. They avoid the creative tax by choking it.
That’s how you know the creative tax is real. Papercut real. Even those entities with money to fund nations are scared of creativity.
But you know what? Creativity cannot be boxed. Different platforms are coming up that give power back to the creator. I don’t like using the word “creative,” as it lumps up everyone who has their particular niche into a single box of slop, so that their creativity is given yet another name, “content” (another word I dislike). I mean, look at how Tyler, the Creator, is very creative with his work. The mere contemplation of switching it to “Tyler the Creative” dims his capabilities.
Unconsciously, by labeling your work into a single word, content, they also reduce your creativity. I once created a free email course, teaching people how to start writing online, and my first email was what they should never call themselves. I made the case that they should never call themselves freelancers. That only puts you in the same category as millions of other freelancers. They can take a different title. A word whisperer, for instance. There’s an air of mystique about it. I would want to know how this person whispers to words, and they become animated in front of a screen. I like to say that I am a painter, but I like to paint my pictures in words. So, I write. But if everyone is lumped up into a single word, creative, and all they make is identified by another single word, content, then our creators take on more taxes.
I like the word creator because someone would, by default, ask what it is you create. One can then dive into the details, or better yet, show it, because greatness will always be understated. Always. You just have to show it. And that’s why creative people will hardly be boxed. Yes, they will get taxed, but it wouldn’t be called creativity if one does not find a way around hurdles. You have to find a way out. Out of the 100, it may hurt the remaining 90 who don’t make it, but the 10 are seeds for those who continue to pursue their greatest desires; those who chase their dreams.
Substack, for instance, gives its writers freedom to publish however and whenever they feel like. Same for Medium. YouTube is different from the streaming platforms, because I can upload a video right now, but I cannot do the same on Netflix or Showmax. Artists will build a following on Patreon and get fans who believe in their work. Creativity finds a way.
What I’m trying to say is…
I often give the example of schools that enforce rules but have lessons celebrating the very figures who never followed rules. It took balls (and vulvas) to make these creative leaps. Occasionally, they had to face heavy retribution. Some even committed suicide. Alan Turing and Ludwig Boltzmann come to mind. The creator tax can be heavy on the creator.
And yet, life is exciting with a little creativity.
Now that the tax is tightening its noose, when society stalls into a point of stasis, creative ways to shake things up will be like a breath of fresh air. One song comes to mind — So Be It by The Clipse. Their album, Let God Sort Them Out, is so embracing of the very idea of creative freedom. It’s like letting creativity rule, and God will do the rest by sorting them out.
Various songs in the album echo in the background, “This is culturally inappropriate.” They hit the bullseye. In the present world, where creativity is choked, it is indeed culturally inappropriate to let your creative juices flow.
The creator in me is itching to shout: “So be it.”
Well, so be it.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube