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I’ve always told my students that it’s very difficult to be original these days. So many brilliant minds have come before us and majority of them had innovated hundreds of years before we were even born. Hello, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo, Beethoven? What irks me, though, is that many of today’s “creators” have become so dependent on technology — technology that took centuries’ worth of creative geniuses to build — that analytical/inventive thinking has been reduced to a bare minimum. We are now witnessing the dawn of what I call the “Cut and Paste Generation”.

Case in point, our music. I miss the days when melodious poetry filled the air waves. Whatever happened to: “Return to a land called Paraiso, a place where a dying river ends”? Now my ears are hurting from all the remakes, and worse, absolute rip-offs. Example:

Toni Gonzaga is a very talented artist. She has powerful vocals. Why the heck do they need to make her sound like an electrocuted chipmunk? Don’t we only do this for “artists” that look good but can’t sing? She looks good and she CAN sing. So what is this?? But that’s not all that’s disturbing. Take a look at an older video done by Korean girl group 2EN1:

I can’t believe we have the gal to rip concepts off the Koreans when we have so many talented musicians and video directors in this country. (Bless Sandara Park of 2EN1 for bringing Tagalog songs over into her home country, even if those Tagalong songs are not my cup of tea.) And it isn’t only the Koreans we’ve stolen from in Toni Gonzaga’s video. The refrain sounds too much like Rihanna‘s Disturbia.

The O in OPM (Original Pilipino Music) is gone. That’s why they’re calling it P-Pop now. Ew.

Oh, but I don’t think it’s only our people that do this. I’ve seen internationals steal content from blogs, websites, etc. and teachers all over the globe complain about rampant plagiarism. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Remember Nick Simmons, who’s now being accused of tracing his artwork off of Bleach? Related article here.

The older generation are much more analytical. Our forefathers can boast of animators who were physicists (like Ed Catmull), painters who were also carpenters, artists who were scientists (Leonardo Da Vinci among them), singers that were composers (Michael Jackson is one in hundred thousands), designers that were also developers. Generally, these were creative people who had to be resourceful because the tools of their time were primitive. Each generation’s pool of geniuses builds up on the last, that’s why our technology has become so advanced.

What is left for the younger generations to do then?  It’s sad but it seems many will end up as drones because many are incapable of analytical thinking. They will be merely machine operators, while the few remaining thinkers do the directing.

This now poses the question: Are the inventions of past geniuses to blame for the lack of originality of our present generation? I shudder to think so. I suppose the least we can do now, if our elders have already thought about everything, is to at least ATTEMPT to be original.