We can’t all be geniuses

The word is overused. Most of us are minor talents.

I know I’ve already mentioned Ann Powers’s book, Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, but it’s on my mind again this week: specifically, her attempt to unpick the use of the word “genius”. She has some really interesting things to say, and I’m not going to paraphrase them here, but this particular quote made me smile: “It’s an accolade Mitchell’s friends love to attach to her, especially the men; they usually say it with an oversized air of wonderment.”

It made me smile because I had just finished another music book, Will Hodgkinson’s Street-Level Superstar, about Lawrence. Not DH Lawrence, but Lawrence from the band Felt, who were my label mates on Cherry Red in the early Eighties. Lawrence has had other bands since, but has never become commercially successful, and in the last 15 years, an entire industry has grown up around the idea of him as a thwarted genius.

A quick glance at the streaming figures for his various projects will show that his music isn’t popular – in fact, it has become less popular the longer he has gone on – but the argument in his favour is that he’s misunderstood: it’s not the music that’s at fault, but the audience. For someone so supposedly “neglected”, Lawrence doesn’t half get a lot of attention.

In 2011 a film was made, Lawrence of Belgravia, and the Guardian wrote about “the greatest pop star Britain never had”. In 2018 five albums of Felt’s back catalogue were re-released, and the Spectator published “The Legend of Lawrence” in which Michael Hann wrote, “He is perhaps a genius, perhaps a savant.”

Now Will Hodgkinson’s book is out and the Spectator proclaims Lawrence “the greatest British pop singer who never made a hit single”, while the Observer notes that, “If Lawrence considers himself a genius, Hodgkinson willingly concurs. But he is also fascinated by what it is that makes an artist an artist, particularly an overlooked one.”

“We should all be so lucky to be so overlooked!” I shout in response. And not because I don’t like Lawrence – I was a huge fan of Felt, and I’m interested enough in him to have seen the film and read the book. But something in me rebels against this use of the word “genius”.

I’m going to take a deep breath before I say this and possibly incur the wrath of journalists and fans, but it seems to me that Lawrence is a minor talent, who has been fortunate to have gained so much media attention. And before you start throwing things at me, I want to speak up in defence of the minor talent. Most of us, after all, are minor talents. I include myself in that. In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be a genius in order to be heard.

Maybe the overuse of the word reveals an anxiety on the part of critics. Ann Powers wryly notes that it was the men who were at such pains to pin the label on Mitchell, so perhaps it’s a determination to be an arbiter of taste that makes them say, “If I like this artist, they must be a genius otherwise why would I like them?” I think we should be more sparing with the word, or it won’t mean anything.

I find myself wondering what it does mean. I’ve just watched the film One Hand Clapping in which Paul McCartney and Wings perform songs from the Band on the Run era, and I came out believing very strongly in Paul McCartney as a genius.

I felt I had seen the music flowing through him, almost as though he doesn’t know where it’s coming from; that sense that he is a channel as much as a creator; that he is somehow without a filter. He can seem goofy and uncool when he’s talking, but perhaps it is that very openness, that unselfconsciousness, which allows the music through. Perhaps that is genius.

We all live in the shadow – and the light – of those kinds of artists. Most of us are really not geniuses. And personally, I’m fine with that.

[See also: The pumpkin is not just for Halloween]