Genius: How Teams Nurture Individual Brilliance

Week 2

 

Introduction

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Obama, July 13:

You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

 

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

 

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

 

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.

- Barrack Obama

 

 

This speech certainly kicked up a firestorm. At a campaign speech on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia, then Presidential candidate Barrack Obama, raised the idea of collaboration, cooperation, and standing on the shoulders of others.

 

It didn’t play too well with some of the political spectrum who hold the ideal of individualism as core and sacrosanct. But the truth is we all rely on others.

 

We rely on the previous, and the current learning, input, and support of others.

 

And whenever something new is developed, invented, or created it is almost always on the shoulders of others.

 

Others who may be collaborators who may help and nurture ideas and even others who may be competitors and push our thinking and doing to new heights.

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Week 3

 

PART 1 WORLD

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On the shoulders of others

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We have a preponderance, in the Western world especially, to raise the value of individual genius up and to diminish the role of the collective. We praise those individuals who have invented new ways of doing things without acknowledging the group or environment that allowed them to flourish. We raise the name of one as worthy of adulation but often remain ignorant of the help or accomplishments of others who created similar or identical findings. And in many cases, the ones whose name we know off by heart are only the ones we know because they arrived at the patent office first, and in the case of Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone only by a couple of hours ahead of Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. The patent surrounding the invention of the telephone is even more of a ‘group effort’ as both were reputably claiming the caveat patent of another inventor, Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant to the US, whose had invented the telephone but whose patent caveat had expired. All these inventors are worthy of the praise and adulation but they were often one of many on the same or similar path, and frequently on that same path together either as collaborators or competitors.

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Yet both, and others as well, were on the same path to inventiveness and the invention that the former is known for. In some cases, the latter or another made the discovery for the former to claim the patent. It is not to dimmish the inventiveness of the former but it is to recognize that we could just have easily been sitting in a stadium named Pac Meucci Park watching baseball rather than Pac Bell Park.

  

Steven Johnson, in his recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From, utilizes idea of the adjacent possible theory that biologist Stuart Kauffman raised, to explain the duplicate invention phenomenon. The adjacent possible theory says that biological systems have a potential to evolve to a higher order, but only in incremental steps. Improvements, in other words, will occur in steps or stages rather than any giant leap forward.

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Johnson goes on to theorize that ideas can be looked at in the same way. Each idea leads to another and builds on the previous one or ones. The iPhone can’t be invented before the telephone as a crude example, as the idea and the technology hasn’t yet developed to a stage where it is even remotely possible or imaginable. So, taking the adjacent possible to its logical next step (pun intended) any new ideas can only evolve in incremental steps from previous ones. And while each incremental idea may be small, several small ideas can add up to huge discoveries.

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Adjacent possible can work in a couple of ways. There is adjacent possible in terms of ideas and discoveries where each person reads, hears, and learns about the ideas of the others. And there is also adjacent possible where you learn from those physically near you and those who you collaborate with.

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These could be delineated as competitors – those physically or logistically further away whose ideas you hear about - or collaborators – those physically or logistically closer with whom you work together, but it’s not always that simple. Suffice to say, that both exist and both impact and benefit learning. Sometimes both exist together – think some of the great art movements or musical endeavors – where there is a typically healthy dose of both collaboration and competition.

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The fact is that there is collaboration or competition doesn’t diminish the new ideas or inventions, rather it helps us understand what is likely to help other new ideas and inventions to be created. It’s less likely to be the Eureka discovery of one person in a bathtub – and more on that later – and more so the environment in which ideas, and creativity flourish. Surely as societies where new discoveries are valued, we should be looking at how these new ideas germinate. In what environments? With what input? With how much collaboration and competition?

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Whose name is recognized and whose is unknown to us?

• Thomas Edison or Joseph Wilson Swan

• Isaac Newton or Robert Hooke

• Galileo or Johann George and Christoph Scheiner

• Charles Darwin or Alfred Wallace

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Edison or Swan?

While we all can recite the name Edison when talking about light and electricity the actual origins of the invention are a little murkier, as are almost all inventions and discoveries. It was less the flicking of switch and presto we have light and more so a combination of factors and some good timing that raises Thomas Edison to the fore.

 

Thomas Alva Edison, did rightly obtain the earliest patents for incandescent light bulbs, in 1879 and 1880, but it was according to many historians the logical step in the journey that many were on. The British inventor Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, for example, who worked on the discovery at the same time and later partnered with Edison. Before that there was Italian inventor Alessandro Volta who pioneered concepts in controlling an electrical current. His "voltaic pile" effectively functioned as a battery and, yes you guessed it, his name became the electrical measurement of "volt" and therefore “voltage”.

 

Other including British chemist Humphry Davy designed his own battery and use it to power an arc lamp. The arc lamp was also very similar to the eventual light bulb that we are familiar with and it was some seventy years earlier than Edison.

 

This is not to discount Edison’s fame or value but rather to show – some might say shine a light onto – that discoveries and inventions, even those we take for granted, are frequently, more often than not, almost always, the culmination of a journey taken by many.

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Newton or Hooke?
Sir Isaac Newton is the one whose name we recall when discussions about gravity, motion, or the grand sweep of the Scientific Revolution arise. It is also why we call him sir, an honor conferred on him by Queen Anne in 1705. We are taught it in school and it is recounted every time a debate on physics occurs. Rarely do we hear the name of Robert Hooke.

 

Robert Hooke, a brilliant yet often overlooked scientist, was exploring many of the same questions Newton was. In some areas he even got there first. Hooke’s early ideas about the behavior of light and color, for example, helped lay the groundwork for later breakthroughs. He suggested that planets move in curved paths because a force pulls them inward while their motion carries them forward—a concept that sounds suspiciously like the starting point for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Newton, of course, took these ideas further. Much further. He wrapped them in mathematics, built a unified system of physics, and gave the world Principia—a monumental work that turned early hunches into universal laws. His fame is warranted but so is the contribution of Hooke. The point is not whether Newton “borrowed” anything from Hooke; it’s that both men were circling around the same big questions at the same time, each contributing pieces of the puzzle, each borrowing from each other, and as a consequence, moving our understanding and discoveries forward together.

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Their relationship, however, was anything but smooth. Hooke was outspoken, quick to claim credit, and not shy about pointing out flaws. Newton was more private, meticulous, and famously a little sensitive to criticism. Put the two together and you don’t get harmony—you get competition and some confrontation.

 

This, as we described earlier, is a version of Kauffman’s adjacent possible theory that describes how we learn from those near us, in location and focus, whether that is by collegial collaboration or sometimes by competition. There were arguments over optics, priority disputes about gravity, and competing claims, yet, even in competition with each other, their tension pushed the science forward. One challenged, the other refined; one suggested, the other proved.

 

Discoveries rarely arrive fully formed from one mind alone. More often than not, they emerge from a web of ideas, experiments, rivalries, and conversations.

 

Galileo or Locher or Scheiner?
When we think about the early days of astronomy—the telescope sweeping across the heavens, the first sketches of sunspots, the shift from an Earth-centered universe to something far bigger—we tend to picture one man: Galileo Galilei.

 

The names we are not familiar with are those of Johann Georg Locher and Christoph Scheiner. Working together under the same Jesuit umbrella, they were studying the Sun through telescopes at almost exactly the same time as Galileo. Scheiner in particular was convinced he had spotted something remarkable—dark patches moving across the Sun’s surface. Today we simply call these sunspots, but in the early 1600s the idea that the heavens might be imperfect or blemished was, to put it mildly, a theological and scientific disruptor.

 

Scheiner was cautious. His instinct was to protect the old worldview, so he initially suggested that these spots might be small planets or clouds drifting between Earth and the Sun—anything that would avoid admitting the Sun itself had marks. Galileo, seeing similar patterns, took the bolder route. He argued the spots were on the Sun and that their motion revealed the Sun’s rotation. Both groups were observing the same phenomenon; what differed was interpretation, confidence, and willingness to challenge established belief.

 

Locher and Scheiner recorded, sketched, theorized, and published. Galileo did the same—but somewhat faster and louder. And in the clash of letters, publications, and public debates that followed, it was Galileo’s framing that took hold. Not because the others lacked skill or insight, but because Galileo pushed harder, broke more assumptions, and ultimately connected the dots in a way that signaled a much larger shift toward a new scientific worldview.

 

Galileo may have become the symbolic figure of this shift, but Locher and Scheiner were part of the same journey, helping shape a moment in history when humanity first realized the heavens were not so perfect after all.

 

Darwin or Wallace?
The outlier in these examples is that of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Here was an unusual case of the two explorers discovering almost the same findings separate from each other.

 

The Galápagos Island are famous not only because of the vast beauty of its fauna and flora but also because of Charles Darwin. When we think of the Galápagos and we think of Darwin and his finches. We think of natural selection and evolution, the changes in species that evolve over time through small, constant pressures of their environments. His portrait sits in museums, his books line the shelves, and his story has become justifiably part of scientific folklore. Yet at the same time there was another naturalist walking a remarkably similar path: Alfred Russel Wallace.

 

Wallace, working thousands of miles away in the Malay Archipelago, was studying the diversity of species with the same passion and curiosity that drove Darwin years earlier. Through his travels, meticulous collecting, and keen observations, Wallace developed an idea—strikingly familiar—that species change because individuals better suited to their environment survive and pass on their traits. It was, in essence, natural selection. And in one of history’s great intellectual coincidences, Wallace wrote these thoughts down and mailed them to Darwin.

 

Imagine Darwin at that moment. He had spent more than twenty years quietly developing the same theory, gathering evidence, refining his ideas, and hesitating to publish. And then, suddenly, a letter arrives from a fellow naturalist outlining the very concept he had been shaping in private. Not copied. Not borrowed. Simply the result of two people staring at nature long enough to see the same pattern.

 

Yet even here we can credit adjacent possible theory as what followed was a co-learning and co-clarifying of findings.  It wasn’t the years long piece by piece collaboration until one got to the discovery but rather it was the final synthesis of discovery of a new theory.

 

Instead of competing or rushing to outdo each other, Darwin and Wallace agreed to a joint presentation of their ideas in 1858. It was a shared moment of discovery, even if history ultimately placed Darwin at the center. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published the next year, was more expansive, more detailed, and more persuasive, and that is the version the world remembers. But it doesn’t erase the remarkable fact that Wallace arrived at natural selection independently—and with clarity.

 

Darwin’s fame is deserved. His long, careful work, wide evidence base, and sweeping narrative truly reshaped biology. But Wallace’s contributions remind us of a theme that keeps repeating itself: groundbreaking ideas often emerge from many minds at once.

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Week 4

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Individuals and the continuum of collaboration

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This is not to say that ideas can’t be formed by an individual or inventions invented. There are examples throughout history of new discoveries and what we call eureka moments – moments of breakthrough or realization. However, even these breakthroughs are very rarely the act of one individual or an individual in isolation. They also reflect the adjacent possible theory, and it can be adjacent both location and in shared understanding.

 

Eureka! Meaning ‘I found it’ comes from the story of Archimedes realizing and discovering that the amount of water being displaced from his bathtub was equal to his body mass, has been used to capture that moment of epiphany. Supposedly running naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting it at the top of his lungs, after he had jumped out of his bath in joy and exclamation. Whether or not this happened, or whether or not this discovery was true, the term has come to mean that sudden blast of clarity.

 

But even these moments of epiphany don’t appear out of the blue, they are a moment of realization in a quest to solve a problem, and more often than not these problems are being sought by a number of people working together or in competition with each other. One could describe this as being adjacent. It is rare that something is discovered or undiscovered. It is more accurate to say that discovery is a journey and a process of many smaller discoveries along the way.

 

This could be described both as a path, or a continuum of adjacent discoveries where one thing leads to the next and so on. It could also be described as a continuum of adjacent collaboration where the findings or discoveries of those we interact with one are built upon by the next and so on.

 

And even these would be simplified versions of the actual learning and discovery process.

 

We can look at discoveries as a build-up of adjacent knowledge.

 

The world is rarely made up of binary things, or binary choices, but rather continua of things.

• Good or Bad

• Right or Wrong

• North or South

• Yes or No

 

There are always intermediary adjacent selections in between these supposedly binary ends.

• Good or Bad

Good – mostly good – somewhat good – neither – somewhat bad – mostly bad - Bad

• Right or Wrong

Right - 90% right – 75% Right – 50/50 – 75% wrong – 90% wrong - Wrong

• North or South

North – North North East – North East – East North East - East – East South East – South East - South South East - South

• Yes or No

Yes – Yes probably – Don’t know – I don’t think so - Probably not - No

 

And some things extend this continuum into a circle such as Day and Night

• Night or Day

Day – midday – sunset – evening - Night – midnight – sunrise – morning – Day- midday – you get the picture….

 

This book isn’t dismissing any claim to individual success because of that individual’s uniqueness. What this book is doing though is showcasing how more often than not individual success is more likely to happen when part of, nurtured by, and challenged by, the group.

 

This book is an attempt to better understand how we learn and grow, and what conditions allow or make us fulfill our potential. I will argue that it is less likely to be purely chance, but rather some degree of chance (talent) intermixed with a large degree of appropriate conditions and settings.    

 

What’s the chance that two 15-year-old Scouse lads from the same Liverpudlian high school would go on to be considered two of the greatest musicians ever along with a couple of other teenagers from the same working-class area? Was it chance? Were they all gifted? If so, their music teachers didn’t notice it as they all – except John Lennon – failed music as part of their schooling.

 

The answer is not very likely. If we had to plot this on a continuum it would probably run clear off the page into extremely-radically-preposterously unlikely.

 

Even our knowledgeable friend ChatGPT was unable to come up with a number.

"Assigning a statistical probability to two high school friends becoming the world's greatest musicians is not feasible. The factors that determine success in music are highly subjective, multifaceted, and influenced by a combination of talent, hard work, opportunities, and luck. Statistical probabilities are typically used in situations where outcomes can be measured and analyzed based on historical data. However, the music industry is characterized by its fluidity, subjectivity, and unpredictability. It is challenging to gather comprehensive data on the success rates of high school friends specifically becoming the world's greatest musician."

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Week 5

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THE GREATEST BANDS IN THE WORLD WERE MATES

Scouse Supremacy

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A fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney met George Harrison on the bus to the school that they both attended and bonded over their love of music. The Liverpool Institute High School for Boys wasn’t a school for the musically gifted but rather an English Grammar School. It had a good academic reputation and was seen by its pupils and their families as a good step forward in life.

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It didn’t, however, sense the budding musical genius that lay dormant in both Paul and George, with both struggling musically at the institution. While the families encouraged music, no one seemed to notice the talent – potential or otherwise. They didn’t learn to read music at school and didn’t have anything remarkable mentioned in their reports. John Lennon, on the other hand according to one teacher at his school, the Quarry Bank High School for Boys, was “Certainly on the road to failure ... hopeless ... rather a clown in class ... wasting other pupils’ time.”

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These non-descript lads and class clowns were not seen as roses ready to bloom in front of everyone’s eyes, but they certainly bloomed – and proved a few people wrong – a few years later.

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And it wasn’t just school that was oblivious to their genius. Paul’s father encouraged him to audition for the Liverpool Cathedral choir, but with no luck. He wasn’t successful, though he was later accepted into the choir at St. Barnabas’ Church at Mossley Hill.

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It seems the only people to truly think they had something were themselves, but even they, as every teenager does, had doubts. Paul and John, 15 and 16 at the time, met as John was setting up to perform with his band the Quarrymen, named after his high school, the Quarry Bank High School, that was booked to perform at the Woolton church fete. Paul played guitar on a couple of numbers that evening, and even though it was less than memorable, he was soon offered a permanent spot in the Quarrymen.

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“For my first gig, I was given a guitar solo on ‘Guitar Boogie.’ I could play it easily in rehearsal so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was just too frightened; it was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn’t do it. That’s why George was brought in.”

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So, to just go over it again, and to reemphasize the unlikeliness of individual genius only, here were three of the four Beatles, that turned out to be, one of, if not the greatest band ever, who were not seen as geniuses or even potential geniuses. They struggled, or were bored, musically at school. Their lead singer failed at a local choir audition, and then froze in one of their first performances. No one swooned or screamed. No one described this as a Eureka moment. No stars were born that night, or for many nights to come. But they were suddenly adjacent, both physically and also creatively.

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This doesn’t detract from what they achieved and rather it raises what they accomplished. Their genius was developed. Their greatness wasn’t merely ability, it was nurtured. And it was cultivated together in adjacent collaboration.

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Ashfield’s Acca Dacca

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A decade later in another working-class suburb, but this time literally halfway across the world, a pair of brothers and formed a group with a few other mates to become one of the greatest rock bands ever. There are similarities between the Beatles and AC/DC – working class, no real musical training, teenagers from the local area, and none considered musically exceptional.

 

Neither the Young brothers, not McCartney, Lennon, or Harrison, were necessarily musical prodigies who rose to exceptional and worthy fame, they were a bunch of lads who together grew, learned, became creative, and ushed musical boundaries together, and became great. AC/DC – Acca Dacca, as they are often referred to in Australia – were a couple of brothers, and a few friends from the inner-west of Sydney. The two brothers, Angus and Malcolm, were Scottish-born and Sydney-raised and who along with Dave Evans, Larry Van, and Colin Burgess.

 

None of the band members excelled at music in school – though suffice to say that hard rock wasn’t part of the curriculum at Ashfield Boys High School in the 1970s. While the family had musical talent with elder brother George who formed the successful band The Easybeats in the 1960’s, there was nothing to suggest that greatness on a global scale was about to erupt.

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A classmate of Angus Young at Ashfield recalled how the school wasn’t a nurturing environment for future rock stars.

Ashfield Boys High School, a school that cannot claim much credit in helping Angus Young develop his music skills. The Music Department boasted a set of recorders and some brass instruments that were hardly ever touched. I recall just one dance with a rock band. I’m pretty certain that they were an early incarnation of Dragon. During the performance, the Principal charged down the length of the hall, pulled the plug on the band, and the lights came up. He screamed at one of the boys, “Get your hands off that girl! Her parents sent her here thinking she was safe.” So it was hardly a nurturing environment for a future rock superstar.

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Their genius, along with that of The Beatles, appears to have been developed over time, with each member, and new member, of the band, adding something new creatively. The Beatles evolved themselves and evolved music at the same time often pushing boundaries musically and culturally. Was this born genius or was it nurtured – adjacently – by the group itself, the times, the culture, and other bands such as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin? Of course, there is never a definitive answer but there is a logical answer. Creativity sparks creativity and environments that can harness that – such as a band, a recording studio, a lifestyle – can elevate the creative to a point where it becomes expected, almost normalized. This is often where great potential becomes genius.

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The group, the setting, the input help develop and adjacently create what we have labeled genius. Maybe it lies within all of us, or at least many more of us than we assume. And maybe we are needing the right conditions to allow it to bloom. If Paul didn’t meet George on the bus would it have happened? If Angus and Malcolm weren’t brothers would it have happened? Is their physical presence wasn’t so adjacent to each other would either band ever have happened?

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What did cause it to happen was the right environment and the right people – none of whom were considered geniuses before they met each other. And then over time genius was created.  

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What was The Beatles best album? These things are always subjective and in the eye of the beholder but most fans and music critics will sound out St. Peppers or the White Album. 1967 and 1968, seven years after they formed and at least four years after their first album. For AC/DC? Perhaps Back in Black (1980) also released seven years after they formed.  

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Genius, at least as seen via these two examples, is created, and created over time working adjacently together.

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Do the Right Thing Together

 

Spike Lee wasn’t the only new producer and performer coming out of New York City in the 1980s. It was a hotbed of new, up-and-coming, and era-defining musicians and artists.

 

The scene was changing both socially and artistically.  But the names of that era – before fame hit – were still unknowns and frequently unknown individuals until they met up with other unknown, yet creatively inclined, individuals.

 

The more one looks into it, the more often it is that bands – including some of the greatest bands of the last century – developed via friendship or random meetups. They were kids hanging out together and more often than not hadn’t launched any significant musical career. Their careers started and grew in connection and collaboration with others. They weren’t brought-together as finished products but rather they blossomed-together as a learning compact. This adjacent possible – working, growing, developing together – allowed or perhaps sparked creativity to flourish. How many times do we see great performers who came out of obscurity together? Or artists who began to build their own works and careers only once they were in the same environment and alongside or around other creative people?

 

Whether they met at high school, college, or at the Sears Department store lunchroom – as was the case with Salt-N-Pepa – they became who they were via the group. These were musical entities that grew great and developed together, not musical prodigies who were selected, assigned, and then pieced together.

 

Public Enemy was formed in 1985 by two friends who met at Long Island’s Adelphi University in the mid-1980s. Carlton Ridenhour or Chuck D and William Drayton, better known as Flavor Flav, released their first song in 1985, aptly named Public Enemy #1, while calling their band Spectrum City. Working at the college radio station WBAU they soon met up with Hank Shocklee, and Bill Stephney, who also worked there. Like so many great musicians before them they weren’t hailed as gifted musical geniuses with the four members rather studying business and radio communications; graphic design; working at the radio station; and delivering furniture.  But this adjacent possible allowed them – as a group and as individuals – to flourish.

Public Enemy gained and grew their musical prowess and are considered one of the most influential groups in rap.

 

More than any other Rap act, Public Enemy are credited with rewriting the rules of Hip Hop, both as a musical form and as a market force. To many, the group’s arrival in the late 80s signaled Hip Hop’s maturation into a serious art form”

• https://teachrock.org/people/public-enemy/

 

Similar to the starting points of Public Enemy, The Beatles, and AC/DC, the three members of Run-DMC met as high-school aged friends in Queens, NYC. As a teenager, Joseph Simmons (DJ Run) was recruited into hip hop by his older brother and soon aligned with Darryl McDaniels (Easy D) to perform. After this they met and linked up with one of the most popular up-and-coming DJs in the neighborhood Jason Mizell, then known as "Jazzy Jase" and later as Jam Master Jay. There was musical interest and passion there but before DJ-ing McDaniels had been more focused on athletics than music.

 

Soon after graduating from high school and starting college in the early 80’s, the three of them recorded their first record with Simmons and McDaniels as a duo, and Mizell DJ-ing. The following year, in 1983 they recorded a new single and landed a record deal with Profile Records. Run-DMC, whose name is most likely considered to be a combination of DJ Run and either D(arryl) Mc(Daniels) or D(evastating) M(ic) C(ontroller) released their debut single that year and went on to create groundbreaking fusion of raw hip hop and hard rock that would become a cornerstone of the group's sound and paved the way for the rap rock-subgenre movement of the 1990s.

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Individual friends with talent and passion meet up but only together develop and nurture their craft before creating a new genre and sound. The music may be different but it’s a similar path as many if not most of what are considered great, groundbreaking bands.

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This list goes on.

 

De La Soul met and formed in high school, soon catching the attention of producer Prince Paul another Long Island, NY native. De La Sol launched their first album on the new Def Jam Records itself just launched out of a college dormitory at New York University, by Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons. Def Jam has gone on to produce and make famous such names as LL Cool J, Slick Rick, The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, as well as Jay-Z, DMX, Ja Rule, Method Man & Redman, Ludacris, Rihanna, and Jeezy and currently has over hundred performers under their name. This is adjacent possible on steroids.

 

As Dave Runcie, founder and host of the Trapital Podcast said “Def Jam created what people identify as the modern record label, and its founders had a big influence on what people consider to be hip hop and how people think about hip hop, not just the music, but all of its various extensions.”​

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Nurturing and growth in collaboration and competition resulting in new sounds, new vibes, and new talents. 

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Sarah Denton and Cheryl James weren’t high school friends but rather met when they both worked at the Sears department store and were both enrolled as nursing students at Queensborough Community College in Queens, NYC. Nursing and the Sears department store doesn’t sound like the formative nurturing ground for most performers but together, and along with an at-the-time boyfriend and record producer Hurby ‘Luv Bug’ Azor and DJ Spindarella, a 16-year-old high school student who was recruited in for her prowess, they went on to change the rap genre and expand female appreciation and ownership of the genre.

On Oct. 12, 1993, Salt-N-Pepa released their landmark fourth studio album, Very Necessary. This wasn't just any release—it was a bold proclamation, echoing what Salt-N-Pepa had stood for since their inception: wielding their brand of feminism powerfully within a male-centric Hip-Hop landscape.

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Salt, Pepa, Spinderella, and Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor were the masterminds behind the album, creating iconic hits like "Shoop," "Whatta Man" featuring En Vogue, and "None of Your Business." While their previous works had already established them as formidable forces, Very Necessary set them apart, further establishing them as pop stars. The album not only sold over seven million copies worldwide (with five million in the U.S.) but also scaled the heights of the Billboard 200, reaching #4. This wasn't just a musical milestone—it turned them into the first female rap act (solo or group) to lay claim to a multi-platinum album.

 

"[We brought] fun, fashion and femininity to Hip-Hop," Salt explained in a 2022 interview with Hip-Hop legend Roxanne Shanté. "You know, we were just to round away girls, actual friends. Just doing us being us... We were just figuring it out. You know what I mean? That's being authentic and being ourselves and I think that resonated with everyone all women."​

 

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Carole the Kingmaker

 

Anyone who has read Carole King’s biography A Natural Woman: A Memoir, seen the recent Broadway production Beautiful: the Carole King Musical, or listened to all the music she has been associated with over the years cannot be but amazed at the scope of her talents. From The Loco-motion, to Take Good Care of My Baby, through to Natural Woman, You’ve Got a Friend, It’s too late and of course Beautiful which the Broadway production was titled after. Ove her career she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.

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She didn’t have a close friend, or a sibling follow her through her career - though her first husband was a fellow songwriter and cowriter of many of the songs they helped produced up until their divorce in 1969 - but she did becomes the catalyst for an amazing number of singers, bands, and soloists, including herself.

• The Shirelles - “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” 1960

• Bobby Vee - 'Take Good Care of My Baby' 1961

• The Drifters - 'Some Kind of Wonderful' 1961

• Little Eva - 'The Loco-Motion' 1962

• The Everly Brothers - 'Crying In the Rain' 1962

• The Beatles - 'Chains' 1963

• The Chiffons - 'One Fine Day' 1963

• Herman’s Hermits - 'I’m Into Something Good' 1964

• Maxine Brown - 'Oh No Not My Baby' 1964

• Dusty Springfield - 'Goin’ Back' 1966

• The Monkees - 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' 1967

• Aretha Franklin - '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' 1967

• The Byrds - 'Wasn’t Born to Follow' 1968

• Blood, Sweat & Tears - Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll)' 1970

• James Taylor - 'You’ve Got a Friend' 1971

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Carole King wrote. co-wrote, sung, or co-sung a ridiculous number of songs that through collaboration helped launch or boost bands and singers that spanned the musical era’s and styles of doo-wop and pop, R&B, soul and rock.

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Her early start in songwriting was working alongside her husband, the lyricist Gerry Goffin and co-writing hits, in close collaboration, as well as competition, with others.

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"Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky," Carole said years later. "You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific – because [publisher] Donny [Kirshner] would play one songwriter against another. "He'd say, 'We need a new smash hit' –and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition for Bobby Vee's producer."

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And as for who was the competition inside the Brill Building, there were, over that period of time, some genius songwriters and songwriters in their own right including, Burt Bacharach, Jeff Barry, Neil Diamond, Ellie Greenwich, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Johnny Mercer, Mort Shuman, Paul Simon and Cynthia Weil. But even though there was competition, there was also a purposefully developed and created creative culture and atmosphere.

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In the early 60s, this building became an exemplar of “vertical integration” that gave birth to a unique type of “assembly line pop”. This building’s culture enabled a writer to take a new song and make the rounds of publishers until someone bought it. You could then take it and go to another floor and get an arrangement. You could then purchase a lead sheet, then buy some copies at the duplication office; book an hour to make a demo in a studio; then hire some of the vocalists and musicians from among the artists that hung around, and cut a demo of the song. Next, in the same building, you could walk it into publishers offices, record companies. You could even shop the song to an artist’s managers or even artists who may be in the building. When a deal is done you could even negotiate with a radio promoter who could help you promote and sell the record.

The independent music companies in the Brill Building had a creative culture that came to define the influential “Brill Building Sound” and the style of popular songwriting and recording created by its writers and producers.

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The key appears to be working or rather learning – with others. In competition, in collaboration but always learning with a focus on creativity.

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