I love the idea of wabi sabi and finding beauty in imperfection. In part, it’s because of my origin story. See, I come from rock ‘n roll, where perfection isn’t the point. You don’t want Steely Dan, you want three chords and the truth. You don’t want the technical perfection of Steve Vai, you want the primal fuzz of Jimmy Page. In rock, the rough edges are the raison d’etre. That notion increasingly feels like it’s getting lost in our world of AI, Photoshop, and Pro Tools, where perfection is just a click away.

Below, some examples of “errors” that turned out to be “perfect” in their own way:

1) Mixing “Whole Lotta Love”

Engineer Eddie Kramer on mixing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” with Jimmy Page:

"You hear Robert go, 'Woman!' And I'm putting a little bit of reverb on and I'm hearing another voice," Kramer recalls. "There's only eight tracks, by the way...So track 8 was the main track and track 7 was another take...I couldn't get rid of it."

After being unable to listen to the track without the bleed-through, Kramer decided to try and see if he could make the mistake sound intentional. His method? Add a ton of reverb.

He then reached for the Echo Send knob on his console and saw Jimmy's hand reaching for it as well.

"We were both laughing because we were both going to do exactly the same thing, and we just soaked it in reverb."

The result: an all-time classic track. The point of this story, according to Kramer: “Leave the bloody hair on.”

The message is leave the damn mistakes in. We're in the Pro Tools world where you take every sneeze and every breath away from all the good stuff. Leave the bloody hair on.…Sometimes you turn a mistake into something really positive. That’s what life is all about.

2) The Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson singing “Wild Honey”

Warren Zanes, guitarist and author, on the Beach Boys “Wild Honey”:

Carl Wilson’s performance on [“Wild Honey”] is not a typical Beach Boys lead vocal. You can hear him reaching for notes, at times barely getting there. There’s vocal strain, unmistakable pitch imperfections. But the Beach Boys, a celebrated vocal group, let that performance stand.

For me, it’s the imperfections that make that recording great. I was a teenager when I first heard it. It gave me the feeling I got from, say, Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” or the punk rock of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation.” Raw, not too well-behaved, stuff that sounded the way I felt. Flawed but fully alive. And surely the flaws were where I saw myself reflected. They were recorded at a time when technology was not yet capable of making the kinds of fixes that can be made easily today…

When the capacity to achieve something closer to perfection — or to edit out a blemish or to select a single image from hundreds — is widely available, most people choose to make the fix. It’s Photoshop’s world; we just moved into it without thinking. Who doesn’t want to sound or look better?

But when music gets cleaned up too much, listeners lose opportunities to connect their imperfections with those in the music, the human traces that might otherwise reach the ear and burrow into the heart. Fewer are the opportunities to hear oneself in the music, to follow the threads that tie the listener to it. The effect is the same when the pumped-up realities we encounter on social media leave people who are feeling their own unfiltered humanness at a distance, isolated.

3) Stevie Wonder’s slopply drumming.

Musician Robert Glasper on how Stevie Wonder played drums with “a certain slop.”

Stevie has a certain slop on drums. That’s what we call it. It’s the Stevie slop. He made it OK that he’s sloppy. He has a sloppy funk. It’s not tight funk, it’s not neat, it’s not perfect, but it feels amazing. “Superstition” wouldn’t be the same without that particular drumbeat and that style of how he’s playing it.

4) The recklesness of U2’s Achtung Baby.

Daniel Lanois was the main “sonics” producer on Achtung Baby.

When I started work on Achtung Baby, U2 were interested in creating a more hard-hitting, live-sounding record. I myself had also grown rather tired of polishing details on records and pursuing the kind of perfection that has become commonplace in much rock music today. So what I did was push the performance aspect very hard, often to the point of recklessness. I think that musical recklessness goes a long way on records. You don’t hear enough of it.

5) How’d “Scratch” Perry get that sound? Urine, blood and whisky.

Lee “Scratch” Perry had a unique approach to “blessing” the studio:

He would often “bless” his recording equipment with mystical invocations, blow ganja smoke onto his tapes while recording, bury unprotected tapes in the soil outside of his studio, and surround himself with burning candles and incense, whose wax and dust remnants were allowed to infest his electronic recording equipment. He would also spray tapes with a variety of fluids, including urine, blood and whisky, ostensibly to enhance their spiritual properties. Later commentators have drawn a direct relationship between the decay of Perry’s facility and the unique sounds he was able to create from his studio equipment.

It’s not just music either. Here are some examples of getting it right by getting it wrong from other media…

6) “There’s an easy grace to the animal.”

“How much should I hide?” Author Heather Havrilesky’s answer:

When you experiment with LESS hiding, less mundane words, less banal compliance, and more vulnerable improvisation out in the open, following your instincts and trusting your gut, you sometimes find that there’s an easy grace to the animal that emerges there that doesn’t match the awkward, vigilant disguise you wear through the world every day…When you trust your instincts, these sides of you show themselves and they feel right, because you aren’t afraid of your power or ashamed of your clumsiness, your vulnerability, and your big heart.

7) Spirit lines in Navajo weavings.

On deliberate imperfection:

If you look closely along the borders of many Navajo weavings, you can see a single line of a contrasting color extending out from the center to the textile's edge. This line is called ch'ihónít'i, which is translated into English as "spirit line" or "spirit pathway." In Navajo beliefs, thoughts, desires, and prayers are tangible objects that can have lasting effects on the material world. While weaving, the artist entwines part of her being into her cloth along with the woolen yarns that create the textile's pattern. The ch'ihónít'i allows this trapped part of the weaver's spirit to exit, safely separating her from her weaving and from any harmful thoughts that may come into contact with it as it is used, sold, or exhibited in a museum.

8) Complicate your scenes.

What 'Goodfellas' Can Teach Us About Screenwriting.

Driving a dead guy into the woods to bury him isn’t a very interesting scene. Driving a “dead guy” who all of a sudden starts banging on the inside of the trunk (Oh no, he’s still alive), is. And it leads to one of the most memorable moments in Goodfellas, when Tommy starts bashing the still-moving bloody mattress cover over and over again. Try not to allow your scenes to move along too smoothly. Always complicate them somehow. It usually results in something more interesting.

That one is intriguing because it’s about forcing your characters to face mistakes in order to make their story more intriguing.

9) The value of not having a plan.

Time for me to pimp my own project that teeters between on/off the rails: Substance. In it, I perform four different sets, each one a week apart, on four different substances: weed, booze, shrooms, and sober. I wrote this about it:

This project taught me the value of not having a plan. You don’t always need to know the way. You can let it reveal itself to you as you go along. You can let things get a little bit wild instead of trying to put everything in a cage of perfection. Sometimes, not knowing the way is the way. 

And that desire I have to control things, I’m realizing it comes from a place of fear. Because people don’t really want you to be perfect. They want you to be human. And sure, that means you might spill every once in a while. But at least you took the risk. It doesn’t have to be perfectly polished and it doesn’t need to be completely wild either.

Sometimes it just needs to be wabi sabi, imperfect and filled with cracks, but in a way that shows reality. That’s the kinda imperfection that’s well, kinda perfect.

Takeaway

The mistakes are what make it you. How you got it wrong is your fingerprint. Also, they change how your work is perceived by an audience. After all, we’re all trying to convert mistakes into something positive. Everyone can relate. So when something is raw and flawed, we see ourselves in it. Flaws prove we’re humans, not robots – and that can tie a listener/viewer/reader to a creation in a way perfection can’t. So leave the bloody hair on.

Related:

Wabi Sabi is rock 'n roll 👘🤘

Matt Ruby · June 15, 2022

📰 This is the Rubesletter from Matt Ruby (comedian, writer, and the creator of Vooza). Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly. We need our sitcoms laugh tracked and talk shows beefed up with “Applause” signs. We use writing apps like Hemingway to murder any extraneous syllables.

Read full story

A few of the examples above came via Austin Kleon. Related post from Kleon: The art of imperfection.

For more, check out this podcast where I discuss wabi sabi:

Ep 12 // Wabi Sabi and the poetry of imperfection… Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby 20:05

Quickies

🌽 We are living in the golden age of provocateurs who are outraged that anyone is provoked.

🌽 It's weird that OCD is a disorder that makes you want everything to be in order.

🌽 “Do you want to watch the Weather Channel?” Nah, I don’t like horror.

🌽 Rage is halfway round the world before compassion has its boots on. Just goes to show: Compassion is lazy. And that's why I say: Screw you, compassion!

🌽 Just imagine. We could be having an election that's Mayor Pete vs. Mark Cuban. Wouldn't that be refreshing? A non-criminal, non-senile, non-wacko affair. Just middle-of-the-road vagueness and fake promises like the good ol' days. MABA: Make America BORING again.

🌽 Re: Biden’s “crimes,” having a disappointing son who does drugs doesn't make you a criminal. If it did, my dad would be in jail.

🌽 Here’s Dan Savage opening one of his advice column replies with a lengthy pronoun preamble...

First and most importantly: the pronoun situation. You open by identifying your partner as non-binary but then go on to use she/her pronouns in reference to your partner throughout the rest of your letter. Since you’ve been seeing this person for three years — and since this non-binary person doesn’t strike me as the kind of non-binary person who would let misgendering slide — I’m gonna assume your partner is one of those non-binary AFAB persons who uses she/her pronouns. They’re out there, they’re totally valid, they like to keep us binaries on our toes.

With that out of the way…

…Phew! The amount of time/energy/brain power that's been wasted (by even the most progressive folks among us) trying to navigate the Misgendering Obstacle Course™️ is something else.

🌽 My big problem with crypto people is how much they love awful art/design.

🌽 Advice for college students: No one will ever care what your GPA is. Also: All you will remember about college is the people you met.

Comedy

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Here’s a clip of me speculating about Superman’s religion (sound on):

🃏 Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby returns on 9/14 to the Psychedelic Assembly (a trés cool space/society in midtown). It’s a comedy show re: psychedelics, death, mindfulness, and therapy. Also includes visuals (mixed live by Sophia Sobers) and sounds (ambient soundscape performed by Steve Pestana). There’s a one hour open bar from Misguided Spirits before the show too. Early bird coupon code – MISGUIDED5 – gets Rubesletter readers $5 off.

🃏 Other NYC shows: I’m at Comedy Cellar every Tuesday night for Hot Soup and NY Comedy Club (East Village) every Wednesday for Good Eggs. Come through.

🃏 Check out my other newsletter: Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian. Recent posts there about hosting, hack material, and working clean.

5-spotted

🗯 How to behave around celebrities and other muckety-mucks, according to Bob Lefsetz.

If you meet a rock star don't tell them how much you love their music, or maybe just employ a line, but then ask them about their hobby, what they're interested in. If you're that much of a fan, you know what that is. They love to wax rhapsodic on these non-music topics, because no one ever asks them about them, or cares what they really have to say about them. And ask deeper questions, to show you are listening. If you are listening you are one step ahead, then someone can see you as a friend, and they have to see you as a friend before they see you as a possible business partner.

And certainly don't waste anybody's time. If the big muckety-muck has been talking to you for a while, excuse them, let them off the hook, let them go. They respect this. Because you demonstrate understanding of their position. The bigger the person, the more time-challenged they are. You do not want to use up more than your allotted time. If you're dominating the person, not letting them go, they'll never want to talk with you again. And you'd be surprised how well people remember those who are friendly and express interest. Much more than the salesman trying to push something upon them.

Gonna print that up and hand it out to people when we meet so they know how to handle me.

🗯 Lizzo as an icon of female empowerment and body positivity? Paul Ollinger replies, “Don’t try to convince me that the sky is green and that your motives for doing so are high-minded.”

Here is the inconvenient truth – in addition to being incredibly talented and charismatic, Lizzo is also excruciatingly fat, which isn’t a sin, but certainly isn’t a virtue. The CDC reports that the obesity epidemic costs the American healthcare system $173 billion annually, a cost we all share. Celebrating or even normalizing obesity weakens our society and threatens the health of future generations…The left dresses its mission in lofty terms but its philosophical demands are not based on a commitment to fairness, equity, or – least of all—kindness. Like religion, they use guilt and shame to acquire and retain power.

🗯 A prescient review of The Blind Side (if Michael Oher is to be believed) upon its release.

The essential message of “The Blind Side” is that poor black children matter, and are seen as worth helping, not because of the content of their characters but because of their physical prowess. Like most fans — myself included — [Michael] Lewis prefers not to notice the prejudices that belie our lust for sport, the perverse arrangement by which watching young black men engaged in violent spectacle has become our most profitable form of entertainment. I have no doubt that this book will become another Lewis bestseller. It will play to the masses as an inspiring underdog saga, spiced with proper pieties about the power of hope and individual destiny. It should also stand as an inadvertent testament to the national blind spot that still prevails when it comes to our racial pathologies.

🗯 Profile of Rey Flemings, “one of the premiere fixers for the global elite.” He ain’t buying all those conspiracy theories about the ultrawealthy.

To Flemings, the concept that the world’s richest people are conspiring together to rig the game in their favor seems foolish. He believes the closest the rich have come to assembling as an illuminati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christmas and New Year's Eve, because he’s been there. 

“I gotta tell you, some of the richest people in the world are struggling to talk to a girl,” he said. “There is no way these people are leading some f*cking global conspiracy.” 

Only thing I’m doubtful about: If this guy really works with the world’s richest people, you’d think job #1 is to shut the hell up about it.

🗯 James Cameron once met his hero, Stanley Kubrick, who kept asking about one movie: True Lies. Cameron:

I went to see this reclusive guy knocking around this big house and he just totally wanted to know how True Lies was made. He had a print of it on his KEM down in his basement, and made me sit there and tell him how I had done all the effects shots…I spent the whole time talking about my movie with Stanley Kubrick, which was not where I thought the day was going to go. But I want to be like Stanley, I want to be that guy. When I’m 80, I want to still be the guy trying to figure it all out.

See, we’re all still trying to figure it all out.

Thanks for reading. If ya dug this, forward to a friend (or two). Appreciate ya.

-Matt

P.S. My Kind of a Lot podcast is worth a listen too. Check it out:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 26 episodes