 Before we get started on this video, I just wanted to let you all know that I wrote a book. Century of Song tells the story of American popular music through 101 different songs. This is not an April Fools thing. This is just a real genuine book that I wrote that's coming out in September. If you go to the link in the description, you'll be able to pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters Indigo, Blackwells, you know, wherever books are sold. More about that after the video. A few weeks back I found myself driving late at night through the South Island of New Zealand. I wound through twisting roads as the sun fell behind the mountains and a brilliant field of stars spread out across the sky. And I started to think about some things that I hadn't thought about for a long time. I thought about music and creativity. I thought about the endless pursuit for greatness and the myriad ways that the arts reflect the human condition. And above all else, I thought about my own chosen medium of the video essay. It was the first time in months that I was getting really excited about making a video again. The road stretched on and soon enough I found myself writing this essay in my head. Ideas began to coalesce and a structure came to form. An aesthetic even came into my head. Something sharp, crisp and clean but woven through with moments of profound, surreal beauty. By the time I crested a hill to see the lights of Queenstown shining below, the vision was complete. I knew that I had done it. I had developed the greatest and best video essay in the world. The video that you are watching now is not the greatest video essay in the world. It's just a tribute. In fact, that whole story I told you off the top is a lie or, well, an exaggeration maybe. I was recently in New Zealand and did have an absolutely stunning drive down to Queenstown and I have come up with the greatest video essay in the world before. In fact, I've done it a number of times in situations exactly like that because that's sort of the reality of inspiration. You can spend your days searching and searching for something only for it to come up empty and then wake up one day and find that it's snuck up on you while you weren't looking. And believe me, there is no thrill greater than having an idea sneak up on you. Whenever an idea for a video essay does that, it lives for a few moments in my head as the greatest video essay in the world. And I don't think that's just true of the video essay. I think it's true of all creative pursuits. When that spark catches, it lives and grows in a completely platonic space, removed from the gritty unpleasantries of, you know, actually making your art. I think for a lot of creatives it can feel like greatness is actually lost in the process of creating. And when we do manage to seize upon greatness, it often drifts away just as fast as it came. One way or another, I think that this painful paradoxical reality is represented beautifully in Tenacious D's masterpiece, Tribute. On the off chance that you're unaware of Tenacious D, you should know that they're a comedy rock duo consisting of Jack Black and Kyle Gass. Their music is honestly really delightful, it's full of joy and whimsy, and steeped in the rich mythologies of rock history. One of the highlights of their career is 2002's Tribute. In that song, they tell a tale of being confronted by a demon late one night while hitchhiking on a lonesome highway. The demon demands that they play the best song in the world, or else he will eat their soul. And then they just do it. Faced with the prospect of eternal damnation, Tenacious D improvised the greatest song in the world and triumph over the demon. But there's a catch. Tenacious D can't share their triumphant song with us, because after that night, they couldn't remember it. And so the song they sing for us is a Tribute to that forgotten greatness. The impetus for Tribute came about after Black played Metallica's One for Gas and declared that it had to be the greatest song in the world. That spurned a discussion on musical excellence and if the greatest song in the world could even exist, which eventually led to Tenacious D's riff on the idea. While Tribute is naturally played for laughs, its lyrics are built around archetypal aspects of rock mythology, and of wider mythology as a whole. Owing to its blues roots, the highway has always been a powerful symbol in rock music, a liminal space between destinations, and a daily reality of a touring musician. Of course, that highway is closely tied to the devil. Rock and Roll's founding myth is that of Robert Johnson's Faustian bargain, selling his soul for guitar greatness, and that Luciferian tie to greatness has roots even older than Johnson. Deals with the devil have a rich cultural history dating back to medieval Europe. The myth began with popes and priests, but it wasn't long before it leapt over to the creative sphere through artists like Giuseppe Tartini and Niccolò Paganini. I think the popularity and continued prevalence of these myths tells us something about the nature of greatness. To achieve true greatness is to stretch oneself beyond what is human, and that requires sacrifice. The selling of one's soul is a metaphor for everything we must do if we wish to achieve greatness. For some, this has meant alienating themselves from family and friends as they work on their craft. For others, it can mean pushing their bodies beyond what they were built for, and dealing with the pains that come from that. For some, it can even mean compromising morals to succeed in immoral industries. But while Tenacious D evoked demonic imagery and tribute, they don't actually sell their souls for greatness. Instead, they defeat a demon with greatness, banishing him by playing the best song in the world. The demon's response reveals another side of our cultural view on greatness. After Tenacious D plays the song, he asks, be you angels? Because as much as we love tales of deals with the devil, a much more common image of greatness is that of touching divinity. This is a parallel to the darkness of the Faustian bargain, and still represents humanity reaching beyond the mundane, beyond what should be possible for mortal souls. But rather than come as a cost, this vision views greatness as a reward, a reward for devotion to one's craft. It's an embodiment of the spiritual catharsis that comes from the creative process. Personally, I'm not a religious man by any measure, but my experience of chasing greatness aligns much more to this model. The creative process is one of the few times where I do truly feel tapped into something greater than me, be it God, the universe, or the collective unconscious. And I think Tenacious D tapped into that great unknown during tribute as well. Beyond its lyrical content, the structure of tribute itself is, well, a tribute to some rock songs that have been declared the best song in the world over the years. Like the Metallica song that inspired it, tribute features a progressive structure, moving from a dark and moody intro to a bombastic climax. There's something about that building structure that draws the rock mind. It's elevating a music based on simple forms into something sprawling and epic. Many of the songs considered the best song in the world fall into this structure. The most famous of these is Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. In fact, in the earliest version of tribute, debuted on Tenacious D's short-lived HBO show, the song even interpolates much of Stairway to Heaven. Subsequent versions were less obvious about the homage, but Stairway's chord structure can still be found in tribute. The song also has a vocal break that calls to mind the iconic operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody. And while it might seem nonsensical, a close reading of the phrase, fleegoo-ee-goo, can actually elucidate depths that the song holds beyond just a simple comedy to it. Okay, just kidding. I'm not that pretentious, and that bit is nonsense, but hey, it's really fun. The structure of tribute is a fantastic, well tribute, to many of the great songs in rock history. But there's an interesting note that Tenacious D throw out late in the song. The song they sang that fateful night against the demon sounded absolutely nothing like tribute. This seems to imply that if there truly is a best song in the world, it's something that reaches beyond even what rock's most celebrated minds could imagine. And if that's the case, maybe there's a reason that Tenacious D couldn't remember it. Here's the thing about greatness. Greatness is a fleeting and terrifying thing. It's perilous and thrilling to chase, but most often your hunt comes up empty. And then sometimes, when our backs are against the wall, when the air is just right, when the sundoth shine and the moon doth glow and the grass doth grow, we can stumble our way into greatness. And it's because of that reality that we as creatives spend so much time chasing greatness. But honestly, I think that hampers us. Personally, I'm definitely driven by greatness. I want to do great work in polyphonic. I want to do great work in my art, in my writing, in everything. But my best work doesn't come from seeking greatness. I've made no deals with the devil and had no other worldly encounters on my path. My best work, like every creative's best work, has come from just sitting down and dedicating myself to creative practice. There's a good quote that a creative friend of mine gave me once. It's become a mantra of sorts for me, especially in the days when I'm tempted toward that perilous chase for greatness. It goes like this, perfect is good, done is better. The reality of the greatest video essay in the world is that it can never be done. I will never have the time, resources, or skills to devote myself to creating a single, all-encompassing video that perfectly captures everything I have to say about music. And that's okay. I don't have to. Because ultimately, my chosen medium isn't even really at its best when it's trying to be great. What the video essay is best at doing is tributing greatness. It's a theme that I've come back to time and time again in my work. My first video to blow up and my biggest video to date was a video exploring John Bonham's unique greatness. I've done videos on the greatest album never made, the greatest guitar solo ever played, and just a few months ago I made a video questioning the very nature of what we consider the greatest song. This interrogation of greatness is one of the things that kept the spark going for polyphonic over the years, but I think I might have tied it too much into my own personal search for greatness. Writing this video is the most fun I've had writing a video in a long time because I haven't been searching for greatness with it. I've just been trying to create something a little fun, a little silly, and a little interesting, and it's been nice. So I think that if there's a lesson that we can take away from tribute, from the greatest video essay in the world, from this constant search for excellence, it's that sometimes just making something for the sake of making something is enough. But also, man am I rusty at this and conclusions are hard, so I'm just going to sort of call it a video here and move on to something that I really want to tell you all about. I wrote a book. This is something that I've been working on for a year and I'm so excited to finally be able to share it with you. The book is called Century of Song, and it's a history of American music as told through 101 different songs. It takes one song a year from 1923 to 2023, each representing what was happening culturally, aesthetically, and socially in American popular music that year. Each of these chapters is sort of a mini essay about a song that's helped shape our current cultural canon. Making it was a difficult, but really fun process, and if you like my videos, I think you'll love it. And of course, because it's me doing this, it's not just writing. Each chapter also comes with an original piece of art that I made for the decade and even the cover artwork itself is made by me. The book will be coming out on September 17th, but pre-orders are available now, so if you want to support me, or if you just want to hear cool stories from music history, check it out with any of the links in the description. And hey, thank you all so much for watching. I don't really know if this means I'm back, but this video was fun to make, so let's just leave it at that.