Assignment: Essay (POP4C003R~002
Student ID:24101011
Research, analyse, and critically discuss approaches to creativity in Beatopia.
The album which I will be covering is Beatopia which was written by Beatrice Kristi Laus and released in July 2022. This essay will contain several points about the creativity of the album and how different academic theories and literature can be related to modern popular music. Usage of interviews and media was incredibly important to the making of the album as it relates to the creator’s personal life and the impact this album had and how it relates to creativity in popular music. Creativity can be defined under an umbrella of terms such as uniqueness, novelty, originality etc. The theories that will be brought up are “Systems model” (McIntyre, 2006) and “The four stages of the creative process” (Wallas, 1926) and will be used as a basis for how creativity can be used and how it’s aroused in musical context. The reason Beatopia was chosen for this essay was due to past discography from Beabadoobee and the meaning behind the album for the artist and audience and therefore reflected in the stylistic choices of sounds and instruments.
Creativity can be defined under an umbrella of terms such as uniqueness, novelty, originality etc. It can also be described as the inventiveness and use of ideas or original materials. A discussion surrounding creativity is the difficulty of creating something new and original due to the amount of music that can be posted through social media and the ease of access to instruments, and streaming websites. Equipment used today can mix and master music just in a bedroom, which Beabadoobee did at her guitarist’s house (Jacob Bugden). A small two-man studio in London where they recorded a majority of the ideas that surrounded the album. Included in an interview from Music is To Blame this was her place where she found that she was most creative in lockdown as they couldn’t be around anyone else at the time. Her creativity was found in the form of getting stoned and “sweating out” the bulk of the album, committing to her stages of creative process. Using Wallas’ theory and Beabadoobee’s backstory, we can get an idea of how Beatopia came to be and the creativity behind it.
Beabadoobee grew up in the Philippines and moved to London at the age of three where she was one of a few Eastern-Asian children and felt ostracised and isolated in a completely new place. Due to this the idea of Beatopia was created as an escape world where she had her own rules and language at the age of 7. According to an interview with “Kerrang”, Beabadoobee states “If I didn’t have Beatopia to express my creativity, I would have been just a quiet little kid that was sad all the time.” The album cover itself is creative in its own way as it includes child-like drawings which relate back to her album as she drew them as a kid, meaning she created and credited this album for her younger self as she wanted to be the person her younger self looked up to. She had these feelings buried and Beatopia with it after a traumatic event with her teacher. Beabadoobee further explains the situation saying, “she returned to the classroom after a violin lesson to find that her teacher had pinned the drawing onto the whiteboard for her whole class to see.” Furthermore, when lockdown hit she started to process all the trauma that had happened in her life and the problems she faced resurfaced along with Beatopia, her own magical land. This is where her preparation stage began in her creative process as she started analysing the problems collectively until she gets to her stage of incubation where she doesn’t subconsciously think about these problems but lives with them and slowly her mind starts to become more adjusted with the trauma she dealt with. “There were no boundaries, there were no rules. We just did anything and everything we wanted.” This relates to creativity as this is her process of how she came to create the songs as her soundscapes she creates reflect her mood and feelings with hidden messages in her songs. Some of the creative ideas that she had were in “Lovesong” was her maturing in nature about her 7-year breakup that recently occurred before the album. “The catharsis of creativity had done her a world of good.” (Emma Wilkes, 2022) which emphasises the relativity of Wallas’ creative theory as she found an outlet to project her mixed up brain into mixed genres of songs into an album. Her creative process consisted of this quote, “there may have been parts pre-written in my bedroom half the time, but a lot was made in the moment. There were lots of trying new things and finding something we haven’t done before to run with! We had a playlist of songs we knew we wanted it to feel like.” She uses hybridisation as she mixes a bunch of genres together to create a new style of bedroom pop and alternative rock mixed. Syncretism is also present in this album with the blending of rhythms and styles with the 8th song on the album “Talk”. With a mix of dreamy pop vocals with some distortion, thrashy drums using the crash cymbals and classic rock guitar rhythms with added extremely fuzzy bends and melody lines that sound extremely computerized or dense in effects. This clash of ideas creates this 90’s nostalgia feel which creatively enhances her lyrics which make her feel relatable to younger women and girls who feel they have not got a place in society or don’t know how to process their feelings.
Relating back to Wallas’ Stages of the creative process, using lockdown as an incubation period allowed her creativity to flow into her work when she came into the studio with Jacob. Use of Novelty was prominent throughout this album (the quality of being new or original). There are hints of other works used in alot of her discography that links with her past. Csikszentmihalyi distinguishes that personal creativity is equal to something creative to you and your eternal validation. Her album “Fake it Flowers” had a completely different style and atmosphere due to the way her creativity ruminated and her mental health at the time. It had hints of hybridisation throughout in the music itself but lyrically talked about the struggles of women not being heard and the sexism that sub consciously takes place in a relationship, whereas growth as a human takes place in Beatopia. Use of new electronica and different guitar sounds allowed for more creativity. In the verification stage of the creative process, verification is the stage where “both the validity of the idea [is] tested, and the idea itself [is] reduced to exact form.” (Wallas, 1926). The testing of her new equipment and mixing and mastering her project with others, whilst also simultaneously working with other artists such as Matty Healey who created demos, and she altered them to her style. Beatopia itself grew in the verification stage as the final product creates a story that introduces prototyping and testing of these new genres she wanted to implicate into her music.
Another section of creativity can be used in her music videos. The style of her music videos includes trippy cinematography, opposing colour schemes and seemingly drug influenced subjects and events. According to the Music to Blame interview, Beatrice was on shrooms for a few of the songs she wrote and in songs like See you Soon, but her music video Talk was the main factor of how she creatively visualized being on stage and being on drugs. Having a collective amount of people screaming and being obnoxious in different colours creates a chaotic feeling similar to how it is represented in the song. There are mushrooms also represented in the crowd which can relate to how her creative process came to be. Using visual representation makes the audience relate if they have taken drugs before or have a simulation of something mild but similar to the endorphins they should experience when listening to the song.
Using McIntyre’s Systems model, creative process of Beabadoobee can be placed into categories of novelty and how her ideas came to be and the possibility of how original her work is. When it comes to music in general, popular music stimulated from standards created in WW2 and an influx of American art forms that built into blues, and then rock. As Beabadoobee’s main genre she is associated with alternative rock, we can see the link to American art forms and some usage of appropriation used in her music. ‘Appropriation can be considered an umbrella term, a synonym for “use”, which includes related concepts such as transculturation, hybridization, indigenization, and syncretism. Collectively, these refer broadly to the process of borrowing, reworking, and combining from other sources to form new cultural forms and spaces’ (Shuker, 2005:11). Relaying back to Shuker, her use of hybridisation as explained before used innovation and creative new ideas that stemmed from her creativity, but she also uses positive cultural appropriation. In her song perfect pair, she has a complete juxtaposition from her usual style with a bosa nova styled acoustic guitar chord sequence, which is a Brazilian art form from the late 50’s in jazz, relinking to jazz in WW2 and standards that use a similar style. This would have transmitted information to Beabadoobee, and she could recall her song writing skills and express her musical craft through gaining information and listening to different artists to get ideas for Beatopia. She says she takes inspiration from grunge artists from her older phases but gained her mother’s music taste in her “Kerrang” interview. The Sundays and the cardigans supposedly had a huge impact on her song writing and is present in her slower songs of the track. “Ripples” and “Lovesong” are particular tracks where you can see the inspiration shes taken from these artists as they have slow love ballad themes. In “Ripples” you can hear the string section as the main accompaniment, which the cardigans did for a select few of their hits like “Your new Kuckoo”. McIntyre’s diagram also states that the field in which a musician is in can stimulate novelty and select novelty. As her field was now in lockdown and she could not fill her time with new tours, Beatopia was the creative output that can stimulate new ideas.
In conclusion, creativity in Beatopia is very prominent and fully understood when dove deeper into Beatrice Kristi Laus mindset and creative process of the way she merges genres and uses syncretism and hybridisation to shape her own style of music. Using models such as Wallas’ and McIntyre’s allow a further understanding of how Beabadoobee’s creativity came to be and where it comes from, relating to what creativity is and how she used it. Creativity in Beatrice’s way is different due to the actual meaning behind what she creates, and her mindset and backstory is reflected in the mood and atmosphere of the songs in the album. Her sound being indie and alt rock, Beatopia strayed away and became a lovable mash of new songs and non-conformity which elevated her creativeness and skill in song writing which is hard to replicate in another artist due to the selection of genres and sounds she used.
Bibliography
Works Cited
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Mattson, Chris. “Graham Wallas: The Creative Process.” The BYU Design Review, 25 Mar. 2022, www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/graham-wallas-the-creative-process.
MusicIsToBlame. “Inside Bea’s Mind: Beabadoobee on Her Sophomore Album, and Imaginary World, “Beatopia.”” Musicistoblame.co.uk, 18 July 2022, www.musicistoblame.co.uk/2022/07/inside-beas-mind-beabadoobee-on-her.html. Accessed 7 May 2025.
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VEVO. “Beabadoobee – Talk (Official Video).” Www.youtube.com, 23 Mar. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCw80xpI3k0.
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Yuk, William, and William Yuk. ““Beatopia” Is an Indie Rock Refuge of Repressed Emotions – the Vanderbilt Hustler.” The Vanderbilt Hustler – the Official Student Newspaper of Vanderbilt University, 21 July 2022, vanderbilthustler.com/2022/07/21/beatopia-is-an-indie-rock-refuge-of-repressed-emotions/. Accessed 7 May 2025.
