Listening without prejudice. John Peel.
A little scrap has been going on, in the Film and Music letter's column, over John Peel. Michael Berkeley's praise for Peel in the newspaper aggravated one reader so much he wrote in to say: "I'm amazed at Michael Berkeley's virtual canonisation of John Peel: his death 'touched the nation so profoundly', did it? Well, so did Princess Diana's, and with as little cause. Peel was only a DJ, all he did was play other people's pop music for goodness sake, and, as far as I know, he never created a single thing of value."
On an evolutionary scale, you may think pop is an ape hurling its own crap around, but that doesn't mean Peel didn't create. I think he just created something with materials that some don't care for. The act of programming and presenting a music show is creative, and the fact that Peel was playing the work of others doesn't detract from that. You don't create new music of your own if you perform in a symphony orchestra. You are recreating the work of someone else, from manuscript, according to the interpretation of yet another person, a conductor. But that doesn't mean the players haven't used creativity.
Advertising agencies have a specific job title for 'creatives', which suggests you can shepherd creativity and keep it neatly penned: blue-sky thinkers over here, blue-collar robots over there. It's as if there is a set of skills that only certain people have that makes them creative, rather than tools of decision-making and reflection that lots of people possess, and use in a variety of ways, even if the results don't end up in the Tate, on a stage or in a book.
One thing Peel did create, in many of the people I knew that liked his show, was a way of listening without prejudice to music that wasn't an obvious part of their culture. I think that was of value, because all those bands, composers and artists out there - all those 'creative' types - need an understanding audience.
