“Why can’t you just do community theater on the weekends and get a real job?”
It was 1996. I was 18 years old, had just graduated high school and was preparing to leave my hometown of Augusta, Georgia, for Los Angeles, where I had secured an acting gig in a traveling repertory theater. I heard the same statement about “real” jobs over and over, often from people I barely knew who believed they were offering me sage advice.
Bem Joiner, Co-Founder of Atlanta Influences Everything
Across the state in Atlanta, Bem Joiner could relate. He was another creative kid trying to find his way, but he had no clear path from high school to a legitimate, professional career in the creative industries. His passion was—and is—music. In an interview, he joked he knew he was not the “talent.” He aimed to work in A&R, the industry abbreviation for artists and repertoire. These representatives are vital for finding fresh new talent for record labels. His mother was willing to help him pursue his goals, but she did not know how.
“In the old Maynard Jackson era in Atlanta, you were taught to sit at people’s feet and learn, and I tried, but where do you go? Where do I tell my mother to drop me off?” he asked.
For Joiner, the Capital Records building in Los Angeles was where he would go if he lived in California. But in Georgia, there was no monolith to the love of music on the skyline. While he knew music was being made in the area, he saw it as insular, and he didn’t know how to open the door to the industry.
Joiner looked around his high school classroom and saw that he was one of many who needed a clear path to get from where they were to where they wanted to be. “There would be someone like me who said they wanted to be in A&R, and then another kid in the class who’s drawing sneakers. They’re not getting in trouble, but they’re not really doing their work. They’re just drawing Jordan’s in class. And they think that their Jordan’s look better than the ones that Nike’s got and they’re going to go design some Jordan’s when they grow up.”
He paid attention to those characters as he got older. “As adults from our public school system, as we started falling into life—the Jordan kid, the video game kid, the music kid, those seem to just fall off completely, and I would obviously start with myself and be like, I’m not going to fall. I’m going to stay down. I’m going to figure out how to do this.”
Author, speaker and advisor on education in the arts, Sir Ken Robinson observed some of the same things as Joiner. In his TED talk—”Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—he discusses how the educational system stigmatizes creativity. He contends that children are steered away from creative classes because the system was developed to meet the needs of industrialism, with the most useful subjects for work, such as math, placed at the top of a hierarchical system and those not, such as art, placed at the bottom.
“Many highly talented, intelligent people think they’re not because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued—or was actually stigmatized,” Robinson says. “We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence; we need a new conception of the richness of human capacity.”
Joiner and I graduated high school in the late 1990s, and Robinson’s observations were made in 2006. While time has passed, things look dismally similar for today’s creative children. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization dedicated to the arts, Georgia ranks dead last in arts funding. The state spends only $0.14 per capita on arts funding, Wisconsin spends $0.18 per capita, and Kansas, which rates 48, spends more than twice what Georgia spends, at $0.34 per capita.
For our parts, Joiner and I both chose to go it alone. I returned home after doing a year-and-a-half tour with the theater company, went to college, and gave up on creative pursuits for a time before returning to creativity and writing professionally. Joiner learned the ins and outs of the music business. He helped book artists for events in Atlanta and went on to co-found Atlanta Influences Everything, a brand and creative consultancy.
Our journeys were not easy, but they were worth taking. Creativity is a viable career option. The numbers bear it up; what needs to change are society’s attitudes toward it so that the creators of tomorrow receive the support they need today.
