The Red Bulletin June 2020 (US)

67
Musician, 71, GBR.
Eno is the man who launched Roxy Music,
inspired David Bowie, reinvented Coldplay
and pioneered ambient music.
Brian
Eno
68
Singer, 29, USA.
After chart-topping success at an early age,
JoJo fell out with her record label and was
barred from releasing music for 10 years.
JoJo
SHAMIL TANNA, SOME WONDERFUL OLD THINGS/ALAMY, WARNER MUSIC FLORIAN OBKIRCHER
“Repetition allows your
brain to be inventive”
In 1975, music visionary Brian Eno and artist Peter
Schmidt published Oblique Strategies—a box of 113
cards that aimed to help artists break creative block.
The likes of David Bowie, R.E.M. and Coldplay have used
Oblique Strategies to explore new avenues of creativity.
One of the cards reads “Repetition is a form of change,”
and explains how to find inspiration when life feels like
a loop; how to focus when life seems stagnant.
“Repetition allows your brain to become inventive. It
allows you to become a composer,” Eno says.
“There’s a 1959 essay by [cybernetician] Warren
McCulloch titled What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s
Brain. What was discovered is that the frog’s eye stays
totally still. Stare at something and gradually what
you’re looking at will disappear, because the rods and
cones in your eye saturate and you no longer see the
thing. That’s how a frog’s eye works. The frog sits
there, saturates, and then, when a fly passes, that’s
the only thing it sees. When you get absorbed in a loop,
you focus on details you wouldn’t otherwise notice.
So if life feels like a loop, don’t despair. Repetition
is a useful exercise. It is what people who do mantras
discovered many thousands of years before I did!”
In the late ’70s,
David Bowie used
Oblique Strategies to
create his legendary
“Berlin Trilogy” of albums,
including Heroes.
Joanna “JoJo” Levesque’s 2004
debut, “ Leave (Get Out),” hit No. 1
on Billboard’s Mainstream Top 40
chart when she was only 13.
“Life is a marathon”
“For 10 years, I didn’t own my own
voice. It was horrible. How do you get
through those times? There’s no easy
way. You’ll have good and bad days,
but it’s important to have a support
system that will see you through it,
even when you’re not seeing a next
chapter. I would focus on what I could
control and take one step at a time,
remembering life is a marathon. It’s
like on the treadmill: You run your ass
off for three minutes, slow down for
the next two. In those two minutes, you
recover and prepare yourself so you
can face the next sprint fully charged.”
JoJo’s new album, Good to Know, is out now on her own record
label, Clover Music; iamjojoofficial.com
THE RED BULLETIN 77