When asked by a Billboard interviewer about how Jameela Jamil, star of the US TV show The Good Place, 'inspired' his new album Assume Form, musician James Blake immediately corrected the question. 'She helped make it,' he said. He added that Jamil 'has an incredible musical instinct ... she has a credit on the album, it's not just a shout out, it's genuine work.'
He followed up in a series of tweets further critiquing how the significant others of artists, usually women, do invisible labour that goes unrecognised. Blake tweeted: 'Shout out to all the partners who selflessly placated a musicians during a very self absorbed process like creating an album, who got the title of "muse' afterwards which basically amounts to being an object of affection while the musician exercises their genius.'
He continued in a reply, pointing out a double standard: 'In addition, women who helped their partners with their album, being a sounding board and often their only emotional support during the process, almost invariably go uncredited, while majority male producers come in and make a tiny change to the track and they're Mr golden balls.'
The Ancient Muses were goddesses of the arts, and mortals could test their skill against the Muses' at their own peril, but what has lingered in the modern conception of the muse is an emphasis on 'inspiration'. As Blake points out, the muse is an objectified woman who is seen to have no direct impact on the creation of the work itself and no creative life of her own, but is merely the source of the male artist's inspiration and a vehicle to project his own desires onto.
And while women's labour being ignored is hardly new, the way we conceptualise genius as a sole act actually is. When the Victorian era rolled around, a Romantic ideal developed of the artist as a solitary creator/god, when in reality many of the people we hold up as singular geniuses worked collaboratively and drew inspiration from many different sources. This Romantic idea of the genius also ignores how that work is usually possible through some kind of labour going on in the background, often from women.
Many examples of this can be found in the 2017 hashtag #thanksfortyping. After speaking with some colleagues about how wives often facilitated their husbands' work in academia, Bruce Holsinger started to screenshot in google books parts of the acknowledgments where wives were