Different Dialects. Same Language: Why Great Art Doesn't Need to Reinvent the Wheel

We've all met that person. The one who predicts the plot twist halfway through a film, leans back in their seat and proudly says, "I knew it."

Or the friend who hears a new album and dismisses it with, "It's just another breakup record," and "It's just four chords." – as if recognising the ingredients somehow tells us whether the meal was worth eating.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately, especially after coming out of an early screening of the latest Spider-Man and overhearing a journalist say, “…it was quite predictable.” Then I started wondering whether predictability and effectiveness are actually the same conversation.

Not because I think criticism has become worse. In many ways, we've never been more visually and musically literate. We recognise three-act structures. We notice callbacks. We anticipate fake-out endings. We hear when a producer strips everything away before one final chorus. We can almost predict the emotional beat before it arrives.

We've become incredibly good at spotting the machinery. But the question I’ve been sitting with is whether we've confused recognising the mechanism with understanding the work. As in, knowing how something works isn't the same as understanding why it works.

Every art form we engage with, no matter how revolutionary it eventually becomes, begins by inheriting a language.

None of us invented English. We inherited its grammar, vocabulary and rules. Yet somehow Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Kendrick Lamar and your friend can all use the same language to say completely different things.

Art works much the same way. Film has a grammar. Music has a grammar. Poetry has a grammar.

In film, a close-up tells us where to look. A lingering silence tells us something dialogue can't. In music, a chorus returns because our brains crave familiarity. A blues progression creates expectations. Jazz bends those expectations. Hip hop samples the past to create something new. Punk strips away complexity in pursuit of urgency. Ambient music often lets atmosphere do the work that melody usually would.

Different dialects. Same language.

That's why I've never been convinced by criticisms that begin and end with, "I've seen this before." Of course you have. The real question is what the artist did with it.

Take Christopher Nolan's Memento. For years it's been described as the film that broke all the rules because it's told backwards. But look a little closer and something interesting happens. Chronologically, the film runs in reverse. Emotionally, it doesn't. The tension escalates. New information reshapes old assumptions. The mystery deepens before it resolves. Strip away the unconventional chronology and what's left is an incredibly disciplined thriller.

The innovation wasn't that Memento abandoned structure. The innovation was that it changed our experience of structure.

Music has its own versions of this.

One of my favourite examples is Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. Whether or not Kendrick originally intended the album to function equally well in both directions almost becomes beside the point. The Collector's Edition presents the same songs in reverse order, creating a noticeably different emotional journey without changing a single lyric. The words remain the same. The production remains the same. What changes is the listener's relationship to the story.

It's the musical equivalent of rotating a sculpture. You're looking at the same object, but suddenly you're noticing entirely different shapes.

Again, the language hasn't disappeared. The experience of it has changed. Maybe that's what innovation so often looks like. Not inventing an entirely new language but rather changing the way we experience one we already know.

History is full of artists doing exactly that.

When Kid A was released in 2000, many listeners (and critics) heard it as a rejection of rock music. But even if you listen to that piece of music today, beneath the synthesizers, fractured textures and electronic influences is something surprisingly familiar. The songs still create tension and release. Ideas return. Emotions develop. Yes, the vocabulary may have changed but the grammar largely remained.

Frank Ocean's Blonde creates a similar illusion. On first listen it can feel almost formless, drifting from one emotional fragment to another. Spend enough time with it, though, and another architecture begins to emerge. Instead of chasing obvious choruses, the album builds emotional memory. Melodies return in altered forms. Harmonic colours reappear. Themes echo across the album. The structure is there. It's simply asking you to listen differently.

Perhaps no modern album illustrates this tension better than Kanye West's Yeezus. When it arrived in 2013, many listeners didn't hear ambition. They heard chaos.

People described it as abrasive, unfinished, noisy and directionless. It alienated fans who had fallen in love with Kanye's soulful sampling and lush production. To them, it sounded like he'd abandoned the musical language that had made him one of the defining artists of his generation. I remember wondering whether I was hearing something everyone else wasn't, or whether I simply hadn't developed the vocabulary to explain why I liked it.

Looking back now, it's difficult not to hear how influential that record became. Industrial textures. Distorted bass. Minimal arrangements. Harsh electronic sounds. You can hear pieces of that vocabulary across hip hop, pop and electronic music over the decade that followed.

Yeezus didn't abandon the language of popular music. It expanded its vocabulary. That's often how artistic language evolves.

Someone speaks with an unfamiliar accent. At first, it sounds strange. Then enough people begin speaking that way that, eventually, it simply becomes part of the language.

This isn't just true of music. It's true of stories themselves.

Take The Odyssey. Nearly three thousand years after Homer first composed it, we're still telling that story. Not because every retelling is identical but because every generation finds a new way of speaking it.

The story of The Odyssey has been told through oral poetry, theatre, paintings, opera, novels, television, and film.

Today, we're watching one of the biggest filmmakers in the world reinterpret it on perhaps the biggest cinematic canvas imaginable. Christopher Nolan's latest adaptation uses 70mm IMAX cameras, practical filmmaking techniques and blockbuster scale to revisit one of humanity's oldest stories.

What struck me most is that Nolan isn't replacing Homer. He's entering a conversation Homer started. The medium has changed. The audience has changed. The artistic language has evolved, but, most importantly, the story remains recognisable.

Maybe that's why no great artist truly begins with a blank page. Every songwriter inherits chords. Every filmmaker inherits images. Every novelist inherits archetypes. Every generation inherits stories. Originality has never meant starting from nothing. It has meant saying something unmistakably your own in a language millions of people already understand.

The same could be said for Spider-Man. We've heard the outline countless times: Peter Parker is an outsider. An ordinary young man who acquires extraordinary power and slowly learns that responsibility is inseparable from it.

Whether it's Sam Raimi, Marc Webb or Jon Watts in the director’s seat, the broad shape remains remarkably familiar. Even the rhythms of the modern superhero blockbuster have become part of our cultural vocabulary. As fans, we know the emotional setback. We know the inevitable final confrontation. We can almost hear the music swelling before it happens.

And yet we still come back. Why? It’s not because we don't know the story. It’s because we're curious about what this storyteller might say with it.

Unfortunately, I think this is where many conversations about art stop too early. We identify the mechanism and mistake that for criticism.

In film: "It's another hero's journey," and "It's another coming-of-age story."

In music: "It's just another breakup album," and "It's another Pop song."

Those observations aren't wrong. They're just incomplete. They tell us where the work sits on the shelf. They tell us almost nothing about whether it succeeds on its own terms.

To be fair, artistic languages can absolutely become stale. Genres develop clichés. That’s why my favourite type of critical analysis is one that begins after recognition. The one that asks, why this structure? Why this chord progression? Why this silence? Why this ending? Why this genre? What is this artist trying to express that this particular language allows them to express?

Those are much harder questions, and they're also just much more interesting.

I agree that Pop music sometimes mistakes repetition for memorability. EDM went through a period where build-drop-build-drop became so predictable that audiences could anticipate every beat before it arrived.

Critics play an important role in recognising when a shared language has become lazy. But recognising repetition isn't the destination. It's the starting point.

The better question is whether the artist has found a new way to speak that language.

However, I am not here to just defend every artist under the sun. I don’t believe artists deserve a free pass simply because they're experimenting. Sometimes a film is confusing because it lacks clarity, not because it's profound. Sometimes a song abandons structure without offering anything meaningful in return.

Sometimes "you just don't get it" is less a defence of the work than an excuse for its shortcomings.

Innovation is not automatically meaningful. Breaking convention is only valuable if it allows the artist to express something convention couldn't.

Understanding this distinction is important because if we celebrate everything unconventional simply for being unconventional, we're making the same mistake as those who dismiss everything familiar simply because they've seen it before.

I am still trying to figure it out, but maybe the healthiest way to engage with art is somewhere in the middle. To recognise the mechanism without reducing the work to it. To appreciate tradition without demanding conformity. To welcome experimentation without mistaking obscurity for depth.

After all, we don't judge a haiku by the standards of a Victorian novel. We shouldn't judge punk by the standards of jazz virtuosity. We shouldn't judge ambient music because it lacks a singalong chorus. And we probably shouldn't judge Whole Lotta Red by the standards of good kid, m.A.A.d city. They're asking different artistic questions. One leans into atmosphere, repetition and energy as deliberate aesthetic choices. The other builds its power through narrative, character and social observation. Different dialects. Same language.

I think the greatest artists rarely escape the language they inherit. They stretch it. They bend it. Occasionally they break it.

And in doing so, they expand what that artistic language is capable of expressing for everyone who comes after them.