Keep the Bones

On creative inheritance

Nothing in this house is built from nowhere.

That is not a confession. It is a description of how anything gets made, and this document is about what to do with the fact.

The first example below is a record, because inheritance is easiest to hear in music. The rule is not about music. It applies to everything this house makes.

How an album got made

Sanzu Sake Bar: Kaiju Happy Hour began with Wonderful World, written by Lou Adler, Herb Alpert and Sam Cooke, and known to almost everyone as a Sam Cooke song. A man lists the subjects he does not know, and the listing is how he says he loves her. Same shape, different contents: the list became kaiju.

That could have been the whole of it. Instead the next question was where the song had first been heard, and the answer was Animal House. The film’s reputation is whatever it is now. The soundtrack is superb, and the soundtrack is what got in.

So the album became a full answer rather than a borrowed mood: thirteen songs, the cover art homaged, and the source named wherever anyone might look. Nobody has to guess where it came from.

And the flesh is unrecognizable while the bones stay audible. A 1960s Japanese jazz lounge at the river of the dead, thirteen vocalists from eight countries, monsters coming in for a drink. None of that is Animal House. The shape of it is entirely Animal House.

Everything below is a longer way of saying that.

Two ways to get it wrong

The first is to copy. Play it faithfully, get the horn line right. There is nothing dishonest in it and some of it is glorious, but the original exists and is better and always will be. The best available outcome is a good likeness, so why spend a year on one?

The second is to take a mood off an old thing, make something unrelated, and call it inspired by. That is worse. It borrows the standing without doing the work.

Both fail the same way. Neither is in conversation with what it came from. One repeats it, the other drops its name and walks off.

Keep the bones, change the flesh

A bone is what a thing is for. It is the job the piece was doing, and it is durable. The flesh is everything else: who it happens to, what it costs them, and what happens if they lose.

Take a racing theme from a children’s cartoon. Its job is a race, and specifically a race that is fun, where nobody is really going to die. In Slipstream the race is deadly and the stakes are real, so the music had to turn menacing. It is still unmistakably a race. Now somebody is going over the edge of the corniche, and you can feel the cheerfulness of the original still in there with something colder underneath it.

The rule is not only for music. Mystmoor began as a Dartmoor of its own: a moor, a beast on it, and someone who insists on reasoning about the beast. Those bones belong to Conan Doyle, and to every Hammer film that put a known monster on the screen and let the audience arrive already knowing what it was. The flesh changed completely. The moor sits in a low-magic fantasy world, the classic monsters are reimagined rather than reproduced, and the oldest kind of dungeon-crawling goes in beside them.

An audience that recognizes the shape is not a problem to be solved. It is the reason the new version can surprise them.

Flesh becomes bone

Bones and flesh are not two kinds of thing. They are two positions in a chain, and the same work occupies both depending on where you stand. The song this document opened with was flesh in 1959, when Cooke was handed a finished piece by Adler and Alpert and turned it toward schooling. It is a bone now. Whatever this house makes will be a bone for somebody in time, and that is the point rather than a risk.

Which is also why the flesh is not only ours. A direction goes to a vocalist and she has to work out how to make it live, and the working out is hers. An illustrator sends back something nobody asked for and it changes the piece. A layout designer decides how a page is read. The bone holds through all of it, and that is exactly what makes the freedom safe to give: a collaborator is not guessing at a target, they are putting flesh on a skeleton everyone can see.

Those people are the nearest link in the chain, so they are named for it, in full, as a matter of practice rather than courtesy. How that works is set out in the Pact of the Pack. A collaborator left uncredited is a link broken on purpose, by a house that says it believes in chains.

None of this is peculiar to the arts. Psychoanalysis gave rise to cognitive behavioural therapy when Aaron Beck departed from the training he had, and cognitive behavioural therapy gave rise to dialectical behaviour therapy when Marsha Linehan found it was not holding for the patients in front of her and added acceptance and dialectics to it. Each named its parent openly. Each is unmistakably descended. None of them is a copy, and the field is stronger for keeping the lineage visible rather than letting each generation present itself as a beginning.

And there is a rule for where the trail stops, because it has to stop somewhere. We name the source we actually found, and we say that is where we found it. Wonderful World is where the trail stopped for an album about kaiju in a bar, and Adler and Alpert took their bones from somewhere too, and so did whoever they took from. We do not argue about what stands behind the source we named. Stopping is honest as long as it is declared: this is where we got it is a true sentence, and this is where it comes from usually is not.

A film nobody defends still has bones

A picture with five percent on the review sites still has bones, and the bones are frequently sound. What failed was the flesh: the budget, the script, the ninety minutes you had to sit through to reach the good idea.

Move those bones into a medium where the audience does the work themselves and the same idea holds. A tabletop game does not need its ancestor to have been well executed. It needs a premise strong enough to play inside, and a bad film will hand one over cheaply.

Which makes the crediting harder and more honest. Naming a masterpiece as an influence costs nothing and flatters everybody. Naming the film nobody defends is the real version, because it says where the thing was actually found rather than laundering it through a respectable-sounding ancestor. Take the five percent that is good, use it, and say where it came from.

Say where you got it, at length

Credit in this house is not a line in small type at the back. It runs to whole books, because the useful thing is not that a source exists. It is why that source and not another.

The Mythological Deck is a deck of canine gods, and its companion book, The Gods Must Be Canine!, explains the mythology and the reasoning behind each choice. The title does the same job it describes: the bones are a film title from 1980, the flesh is dogs and mythology, and the joke only lands because it names its source in the act of being funny.

Beast of Gévaudan comes off real records and real legend, out of the French countryside of the 1760s, and it credits them. The music that shipped with it was already made about the same events by a composer in France, used with permission and with his name on it. Assignment: DANGER! goes to some length to name what each piece is answering, adventure by adventure and track by track.

This is a habit carried in from academic work and kept on purpose. Cite the source, explain the choice, thank the people you admire, and leave the reader somewhere to go next.

Credit the writer, not the famous name

The person who made a thing famous is frequently not the person who made it. The debt is owed to whoever wrote it.

This takes real digging and we have had several wrong to begin with. The song this document opened with is its own example. Wonderful World was written by Lou Adler, Herb Alpert and Sam Cooke. Adler and Alpert composed it, Cooke revised the lyrics toward schooling, and the three of them published it under a single invented name: Barbara Campbell, the maiden name of Cooke’s wife. Anyone crediting only the performer is leaving the people who actually wrote the song out of the story.

We do this with the research I can actually conduct, which is real and not unlimited. Where a credit here is wrong, it is wrong by error rather than by design, and it gets corrected when better information arrives. Tell me, and it will be. A corrected credit is the practice working rather than the practice failing. The thing this house will not do is leave a source out.

One thing the naming does not claim. An homage says this is one of the older wells this work returns to. It never says this work is that thing. The first is a debt acknowledged and the second is a borrowed reputation, and the difference is the whole of it.

If something is in there, and I know it is in there, then not saying so is a small theft. Conceal an ancestor and you are asking someone to believe you made something you did not make. A reader feels that kind of lie long before they could name it. Naming the source is not modesty and it is not a legal manoeuvre: it is what makes an answer readable as an answer. A song that says where it came from is having a conversation and the listener is invited into it. The same song with its source hidden is a song that sounds oddly familiar, and now the listener spends three minutes trying to place it instead of listening to it.

Ask anyway

Weird Al Yankovic has asked permission for his whole recording career, which is now well past forty years. He does not have to and he has said so plainly. He asks, and he pays the writers, because he would rather be on good terms with the people whose work he is standing on.

That is not caution. It is a position about how you want to stand in relation to the people who came before you.

The oldest way of working

None of this is new. Nobody around the fire is hearing about Odysseus for the first time. The teller’s whole art is what they do with something the room already has.

The folk songs work this way. The blues works this way. Every ballad that crossed an ocean and picked up a new town’s name on the far side works this way.

Originality in the sense of something made from nothing is a recent idea and a poor description of how anything gets made. The older idea is better and kinder. Take a thing the room already loves, and do something with it the room has not seen done.

Keep the bones. Change the flesh. Say whose bones they were.

Where this document ends

This is the argument and nothing else. Where the naming actually goes in a finished thing, influence carried in the structure and the debt paid in the back matter, is The Bench. What this house was built out of is found with The Founder. How a work is matched to the hand that should make it is Taste, Not Style. The same position turned on the making itself, not only what a thing stands on but how it was made and by which hands, is The Whetstone.

The Pact of the Pack is how the people who put flesh on the work alongside us are engaged, paid and named. That is the nearest link in the chain, and it is the one that is still living.