Critics of Beyoncé, Kanye West, and other (mostly black) artists for collaborating with other writers and producers get two things wrong: they don’t understand the history or nature of art, and they don’t understand entertainment law.
First, art. Art has rarely, if ever, been the product of the isolated genius. That’s an idea that was encouraged by Romantic poets and painters, who claimed to go off into nature by themselves in order to discover truth and beauty (no matter if Thoreau’s mother was doing his laundry for him every week). In reality, many of the greatest painters ran studios, in which assistants completed large portions of their work before they came in and finished the work. Shakespeare did not invent his plays from whole cloth; he borrowed (sampled?) the plots of other writers and made them his own. Modernist art and literature emerged out of a network of writers who worked closely together in a spirit of cooperation and competition and often enough commented upon and corrected each other’s work.
On even the most banal movie, the production credits dwarf those on Lemonade, and yet no one belittles directors for not writing their movies or actors for not writing their lines.
Meryl Streep isn’t celebrated because she writes such good parts, but because she creates them out of the words that are given to her. For much of modern music history, the same has been true of musicians.
Great read
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/...ce-songwriters
