Publishing your creations is a funny thing. It means sending them out into the big bad world and inviting both praise and criticism. It also normally means calling time on any final nips and tucks and declaring it a “finished product”, but this isn’t always the case. A host of filmmakers, musicians and authors have refused to subscribe to this definite end point to the creative process and continued to amend their work long after sharing it with the public.
A century ago, the likes of Sibelius and Mahler would rework symphonies for years before “final versions” were performed. More recently, fans were blown away by Ridley Scott’s Final Cut of Blade Runner, which is generally considered to be the definitive version of the feature and a major improvement on the original that cinema-goers saw in 1982. This is a proven process; best case scenario, creations evolve to become something more than their original versions. Worst case scenario, the work ends up compromised, bloated with unnecessary digressions or frills.
So why do people take this iterative approach to their creative process? When does it work and when does it fall flat? Three examples worth exploring are William S Burroughs’ work on The Soft Machine, George Lucas’ various reworkings of his original Star Wars trilogy, and Kanye West’s recent studio releases. They handle things differently and for different reasons—let’s take a look.
William S Burroughs
Burroughs is renowned, if not infamous, for penning novels that are subversive in both subject and structure. When it came to writing the follow up to his seminal novel The Naked Lunch, Burroughs pulled together disparate threads, ramblings, and Naked Lunch manuscripts to produce the intensely memorable The Soft Machine. There were three versions of this novel published in the 1960s, each more perplexingly structured than the last. Editions published in 1961, 1966 and 1968 represent considerable experimentation based on a single source text, revisions compounded in their complexity by the fact that the other works in The Soft Machine’s Cut-Up Trilogy were also published in the 60s, in between these vastly differing texts.
In Burroughs’ case this is pretty much par for the course: readers expect to have themselves pulled into a patchwork of scenes and settings, so what are a couple of different editions between friends? You could also go as far as to suggest that this haphazard publication history is a philosophical statement in line with the novel’s winding narrative and its unreliable Guide – it’s a story that was never meant to be set in stone. Just as Kanye would later refer to The Life of Pablo as “living”, Burroughs talked of his own longstanding desire to “create something that will have a life of its own”, rather than a novel, which is “something finished, that is, dead”. This idea that a work that transcends definite start and end points somehow possesses a life of its own is certainly a romantic interpretation; it glorifies what could just as easily be considered throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. That being said, the lengths Burroughs went to achieve non-linear expression shows the opportunities available to those willing to take scissors to their art. He gave his readers swathes of text to chew through and cross examine, something that has kept his novels at the epicenter of literary discourse decades after publication.
George Lucas
Before he handed over the reins of Star Wars to Disney in exchange for a cool $4.05 billion, George Lucas released a number of controversial remastered versions of his original trilogy of films. They were attempts to create the perfect realisations that budget and technological restrictions had supposedly prevented him from cutting in the first place. These changes ranged from tweaks to colour and audio mix to new visual effects, dialogue, scenes, and even characters. The lion’s share came in 2004, when Lucas had completed his divisive prequel trilogy. He took various steps to modernise the films and make them consistent with this new trio, with added CGI that ironically has already dated both these new versions and the prequels faster than the originals. Another change made for continuity was the replacement of Anakin Skywalker’s force ghost in the original trilogy, played by Sebastian Shaw, with the prequel trilogy’s Hayden Christensen—a choice that suggests a desire to canonise a new collection of films that had been less-than-well received. For Lucas, it was one continuous saga and fans of the originals should be acknowledging the significance of these new films.
More controversially, Lucas also settled the “who shot first?” fan debate that had raged for years around Han Solo’s brief standoff with Greedo in A New Hope. Lucas changed the scene so that Han clearly shot second, a divisive decision that sparked a wave of criticism of what was seen as a revisionist approach to his beloved character. The problem with settling this kind of debate in a remaster is that it makes fans feel like their experiences of another version are in some way de-legitimised. He acted as an arbiter of right and wrong with his films, just like J K Rowling when she announced that her character Dumbledore is gay (something she is currently failing to substantiate in her own cash-in prequel series). Creators are within their rights to do this kind of thing, but it has the potential to ruin the magic that brought people to your work in the first place.
When talking about new cuts of two of his other films, American Graffiti and THX 1138, Lucas referred to the final version of each film as “the place where it will live forever”. He made an assumption that you can make some Platonic form of a film, but in the case of Star Wars he failed. Ridley Scott tried to do something similar with Blade Runner, but actually improved upon the original theatrical release by removing a clumsy voiceover and forced happy ending in the Directors Cut and Final Cut editions, as well as adding a dream sequence with a unicorn that raised more questions than it answered. These changes shaped a subtler film. In contrast, Lucas’ desire to create something immortal in its perfection led him to add questionable visual effects and even make concrete changes that hampered fans’ ability to freely interpret the films for themselves. 2004’s changes were arguably less about creating some “living” art than tarting up the films, in effect throwing some earrings, a full face of makeup, and a tramp-stamp on the original models.
Kanye West
Mr West is constantly inviting controversy. One day he’s wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, the next he’s in the Oval Office presenting Donald Trump with someone else’s designs for an hydrogen plane that could replace Air Force One – and still wearing the “Make America Great Again” hat. There’s never a dull moment. When it comes to his music, much has been made of Kanye’s decisions to revise his recent album, Ye, and before that The Life of Pablo. Although both albums were amended, these amendments were different in both nature and extent.
2016’s The Life of Pablo underwent extensive post-release changes. Verses were altered, a new artist feature from Sia was thrown in, as was an entirely new track, “Saint Pablo”. The album initially dropped on paid streaming service Tidal in February, but updates fell in March, April, and finally June. Ye’s label Def Jam referred to the album as “an innovative, continuous process” in a statement and he himself referred to it as a “living breathing changing creative expression”. This wasn’t just spin, there were fundamental overhauls post release and to Kanye’s credit each one built on what came before, making for a compelling listening experience.
In June 2018, new album Ye was tweaked in the wake of the controversial TMZ interview that saw Kanye suggest that 400 years of slavery sounded like a “choice”. A week after it dropped, a line about choosing not be a slave was added to the clean version of opener “I Thought About Killing You”. This was an minor change to reiterate thoughts that Kanye was expressing at the time and was something already referenced in the album on “Wouldn’t Leave”, but was widely reported in the media regardless, with journalists asking whether we would see a repeat of The Life of Pablo’s creative process. There’s something about the decision to retrospectively change an album that is still considered inherently newsworthy or provocative—particularly if you’re Kanye talking about slavery.
The bigger picture is that the digitisation of the music industry affords musicians like Kanye a whole lot more wiggle room to change albums that they didn’t have with vinyl records or CD’s. You can make a change to a track and it’s there in this new form for everyone to experience straight away, be it a line about slavery, a feature, or more. This new creative toolset has granted the album some much needed pulling power in a world of increasingly short attention spans—just look at The Life of Pablo, which went platinum and was the first album ever to top the Billboard 200 with over 50% of its listeners derived from streaming. Fans can look beyond the singles and listen from start to finish in search of oddities and nods to recent events. On the other end of the spectrum, vinyl is also enjoying a comeback, but there’s undoubtedly something exciting about this new form of iterative digital creation.
So…
Ultimately there’s no right answer here, just as there’s no perfect version of an artist’s work. People can hash and rehash things indefinitely—Burroughs did so for the best part of a decade and it wasn’t until the big black mouse acquired Star Wars that Lucas stopped fiddling with his beloved franchise. The process can yield great results: The Soft Machine is an example of how creative re-workings can be shared over a long period of time, while Kanye has shown how new technologies stand to benefit creators and audiences alike. Works can now be updated and shared in real time, and we will increasingly see the power of online communities in responding to art through live streams or other forms of online distribution, even playing an active role in shaping it through co-creation.
However, we’ll see backlash too. Back in 2004 Lucas failed to make meaningful improvements to his films and managed to alienate fans in the process. As social media and other online platforms grow more and more influential, fan criticism will be just as much a part of this iterative creative process as constructive feedback. For the artists, knowing when to stop may well be where the real genius comes in.
gabriel burrow 