Vibe people

So maybe you already saw John Seabrook's piece, in a recent New Yorker, on Lukasz Gottwald. And so maybe you know that he goes by the moniker Dr. Luke, and that the guy is on a real run when it comes to composing pop hits. Maybe you even knew some of them: Katy Perry's 'Roar,' perhaps? And maybe you were interested enough to read through the third paragraph, where you would have seen Dr. Luke defining his role as a vibe person. Vibe people, he tells Seabrook, don't write lyrics, or even music, in a traditional sense. Instead, they "know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can't play a chord or sing a note." Vibe people, in essence, nudge ideas for songs in a direction that makes them more listenable, more memorable, more infectious. They give them life.

I like the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think that we vibe people probably exist in all walks of life. Kerouac's Dean Moriarty, full of charisma and a productive disdain for convention? A vibe person. That old guy in the cap at the Berkeley Springs McDonald's on Saturday mornings, who keeps the chatter of the senior citizens going with his brief utterances and clever quips? A vibe person. Jean-Michel Basquiat was, I suppose, a vibe person; so, too, was Khalid El-Amin, the now-forgotten point guard for the 1999 UConn men's basketball team that won the national championship. They knew how to make it happen; they understood energy.

Is Cleo a vibe person? I suppose that all four-year-olds, to a certain extent, are. They seem to know where music is going, even though they can't play a chord. And even when they've had no training in mark-making, in composition or contrapposto, they seem to have a native instinct for the balanced and the dynamic. Or, at least, that's what this happy father thought when he saw the page of sketches above, which Cleo drew up as her dad read, one chair over, in a lounge in a Johns Hopkins science building, where young men and women training to be physicists and robotics experts ambled to and from class. Rules and systems, as the students knew, have their value. But that value lies at least partly in the fact that it can produce the architecture, or the environment, in which vibe people work.