100 Years Since the Musical Genius Who Taught an Entire Industry to Leave Its Comfort Zone
A musical genius, a master improviser, a chameleon, Miles Davis, who is being marked this week on the 100th anniversary of his birth, was all of those things, but perhaps above all he deserves credit for the path he blazed in branding and market disruption. He simply shot himself in the foot as a method of work. ● We all need mercy: on the bottom line of the Book of Ruth ● Cannes surrendered to market forces and let TikTok take over the red carpet
Davis, who died 25 years ago, cracked an economic truth that still holds today: the greatest danger to a successful brand is staying in its comfort zone. He repeatedly proved that the only way to lead is to strip away layers before everyone else moves on. The rules he forged on stage and in the studio became a playbook for other artists, who learned that to win, they had to know how to destroy what they had built with their own hands.
In the summer of 1969, in the middle of Woodstock and the hysteria around Jimi Hendrix and the electric guitar, Davis, then 43, was already at the top of the music world. The most influential artist in his genre, he drove a Ferrari and wore expensive Italian suits. With a string of artistic and commercial successes, he could have coasted. That is exactly the stage when brands and organizations tend to become conservative. The product works, the customers are satisfied, the establishment is praising it, and the revenue machine must not be disturbed. But Davis knew that a market does not collapse in a day, it erodes gradually, through changes in taste, demographics and technology. He recognized that acoustic, melodic jazz, his winning product, had reached saturation, and that younger audiences were drifting toward new music. His trilogy of electric albums was an extreme act of self-cannibalization. A deliberate surrender of the product that had taken him to the top, even at the cost of alienating customers and critics, in order to build a new market. Apple made a similar move when it killed the successful iPod with the iPhone. Davis did it four decades earlier, without a presentation and without a board of directors. David Bowie adopted Miles Davis's anxiety about boredom, and even though Ziggy Stardust was a global cultural phenomenon and a winning formula in 1973, he went onstage and announced to the stunned audience the death of the alter ego. He understood that brands have a hard expiration date, and that self-replication leads to stagnation.
By the late 1960s, when record companies were raking in huge profits from rock bands that had conquered the mainstream, Davis saw that jazz had a glass ceiling, a limited audience and a shrinking economy. That is why his shift into electric worlds was accompanied by a move from small clubs to large rock stages. Miles understood that the system had to be forced to reevaluate him where the money and the audience were. Prince, with whom he had a friendly relationship, took that economic and political logic a step further, when he began fighting for ownership of his work. In his struggle with Warner over control of his master recordings, he became a symbol of anti-corporate rebellion, appeared with the word SLAVE on his face, and even abandoned his name in favor of an unpronounceable symbol. In the short term, there was a commercial price. In the long term, it was a preview of an era in which creators understood that control of intellectual property is their most important asset.
One of the deadliest ailments of established organizations is anxiety over mistakes, which creates a need for endless approvals for every step. The result is almost always an overpolished, too expensive product that reaches the market and is already no longer relevant. Real innovation requires a willingness to be fast and vulnerable before the market. Radiohead applied that lesson in one of the most dramatic brand disruptions in modern rock. The connection to Davis was explicit. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood admitted they were obsessed with Miles's electrified, edited and chaotic period already while working on OK Computer in 1997. "Talking about Miles makes you feel like a hack romance novelist talking about Shakespeare," Greenwood later put it with unusual candor. "We shamelessly stole from him, not only musically, but in terms of his approach to pushing things forward." When the industry expected them to repeat the lucrative guitar formula, Radiohead refused. In 2000 they carried out the total disruption when they moved to the cool, minimalist electronics of Kid A, using editing techniques that Miles and his producer Teo Macero had already employed 30 years earlier. In 2007 they also challenged the economic distribution model with the "pay what you want" idea on In Rainbows.
Conservative managers tend to surround themselves with teams that seek to preserve the status quo. Better, then, to look for the young, wild and hungry people in the market, so they can stretch, confuse and disrupt the brand from within. Davis refined that methodology into an art form. He refused to grow old with his contemporaries, recruited young, anonymous and aggressive talents, Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, and gave them complete freedom. In the previous decade, Kendrick Lamar applied that inheritance. The king of the mainstream, who had a winning commercial formula, refused to stay locked in his comfort zone. He built a hive of bold jazz and avant-garde musicians, such as Thundercat and Kamasi Washington, and harnessed their wild energy to dismantle his formula from the ground up. Producers and musicians in the studio said they approached the project in Miles's spirit, recruiting the most surprising talents and giving them complete freedom to challenge Lamar. The result, To Pimp a Butterfly, was an uncompromising masterpiece that proved the only way to lead a changing market is to inject the system with a heavy dose of creative chaos. If there is one major lesson Miles Davis left us, it is that the only way to lead the market, control the future and stay relevant is to be the one holding the match, to burn your own suits ahead of time, again and again, just to win each round anew.
