Anita vs. Babyface: 4 Steps to Defusing Creative Conflicts Before They Blow Up

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You've heard the famous quote, can't we all just get along? Well, apparently not, if you're one of two major RB stars who, as I'm recording, had a major falling out and really affected both their fan bases and their reputations because of this issue that happened. So if you're listening at a different time after this is blown over, just go back and Google Anita Baker and Baby Face and you'll find out what I'm talking about. But I don't want to focus on the gossip or what they did. I want to focus on how we can avoid situations like this in our own creative lives when disagreements happen between artists.

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Give me just a moment to welcome those of you who are new to our show, and then we'll get right into this super important conversation.

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Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you so much for making this podcast a part of your creative day. If you are new to our podcast, you are in the right place at the right time. My name is Allen C. Paul.

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I'm the host and founder of God and Gigs, and we are here to help you to become a completely confident creative by helping you solve those temporary creative problems that you're facing with those timeless spiritual principles that come from our Christian background and our faith focused worldview. Well, I hope you are going to really tune into this conversation and all the rest of them. By the way, make sure you subscribe to our show and that you follow us on all our social media platforms. You can see all of that in the show notes and description on the app that you're using, but this conversation had to be had. It wasn't one I looked forward to, but once I saw all of the craziness coming off of the social media from several of my friends who are either friends of musicians or fans of these R and B artists, these great artists.

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Baby Face has written so many amazing hits from pretty much every genre and dominated the charts and is still one of the most respective songwriters, really, of American music. And Anita Baker, if you're not familiar, has been one of the greatest. I guess RMB song stresses was just one of those people that her voice really captured a major part of my childhood in the she is well loved, well, for now, still well loved by many people in all kinds of genres, in all places of music. So even if you're not familiar with the artists, know that these are two hugely well respected artists who are touring together. And apparently, like I said, you can go to Google, go to your Twitter, you'll see all the stuff that happened.

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I do not want to get into the details. So if you're looking for gossip here, you're in the wrong channel. You might want to go someplace else. But what we can talk about is why this is an issue, what happens not just to the artist, but think about if you know the store. You do know that one of the artists was basically asked to leave the tour.

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So what happened to that person's band? What happened to all the support personnel? They were left without a job or a tour that they were planned to be on, and now they're not part of that tour. There's so many other things that are affected when we as artists have disagreements that we can't resolve. Not only does it affect us, but it affects others.

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So I want to help this community. You to avoid that at all cost, especially as a Christian and a faith focused creative in the mainstream arts and entertainment space. So let's talk about this. Number one, no matter what happened between Anita Baker and Baby Face, let's just be honest. It wasn't editable.

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Not that there was going to be a falling out or a breakup or a big issue with a sound check or going over time or anything like that. Not that that is always going to happen. Although if you're in any kind of creative space, especially music, you know, always something is going to go wrong. My point is that there will be disagreements between creatives point blank. No matter how close you are, no matter how long you've worked with somebody, no matter how brotherly or sisterly you are, disagreement and basically fights are going to happen between artists.

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It's just going to happen. Artists, you and I, we are extremely opinionated a lot. We have our feelings. We wear our hearts on our sleeve a lot. We give everything, which means oftentimes we sometimes say and do things with no filter.

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It can be a very rocky road to have a relationship with just a creative period. Now put that in a work environment or a tour environment or another place where you have to rub shoulders all the time. I'm surprised that there aren't more big issues on tours, and there probably are many of them. Some of you probably have right now a story in your mind. You're thinking of it where there was a huge issue on a tour or a gig or a performance or even in the studio or back room where things blew up, and it's just going to happen.

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So I think the first thing we can learn from this is to expect the issues, to expect the conflict. No, I'm not saying that you should expect things to blow up. I'm not expecting people to have temper tantrums and to fight. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that it's simply human nature, especially in our line of work, to simply have issues with other creators who think differently than you.

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They have a different opinion than you at a time, or when things that are out of your control pop up. And everybody's got to just take a deep breath and realize that either things are going to go really bad or really good, depending on your very next decision. These are the situations that we have to be ready for and assume they are going to happen. So here's the second step. If you know conflict is coming, if you know there is going to be some situations in your creative life, how do you prepare for them so that it doesn't become something that wrecks either a career or a tour or more importantly, a relationship?

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Well, first thing I want you to think of is to examine we started with expect and now let's examine let's examine the actual situation that you're in. You see, anytime you have a disagreement, the first thing you're probably going to want to go to is how you feel your emotion. But that's the hard part. No matter how mad you get, because someone said something that you didn't like or someone played the wrong thing or somebody did you wrong or didn't pay you or whatever reason that you are now on the outs with another artist or with somebody else that's on a specific performance that you're working on, the first thing you have to do is step back and not get in your emotions, but examine the reality and the facts of what actually took place. Here's where it's super important to have people around you who do not egg you on on your emotional side.

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And I've been on plenty of shows and plenty of tours and plenty of things where there has been an instigator who actually puts gasoline on the fire and makes it worse because as soon as something pops up, there's a disagreement, they jump on one side or the other. Make sure you surround yourself with level headed people who do not quickly take sides, but who can help you to step back and reasonably look at a situation. If it's musical, if it's financial, if it's creative, whatever it is, and say, here are the actual issues that we're dealing with. Because if you're dealing with emotion, emotion is irrational by definition. You cannot have rationality and emotion at the same time because emotion has nothing to do with the rational mind.

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It has everything to do with how you feel and how you react in terms of your feelings. We don't want that. When it comes to disagreements, what you want is a step back and say, okay, this didn't go the way I liked this person or this person seems to be at fault. What's the next step? Factually, not emotionally, after you have taken a step back again, this can happen on a stage, this can happen in the studio, this can happen anywhere between the two artists.

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The next thing you have to do is then decide that you're going to keep it in house. One of the biggest things I think happened in this whole Bruha Hobby twin, the Nita Baker camp and the Baby Face camp is it was publicly aired out. And there is simply no way that a disagreement gets better when you let it all out into the open. It's got to be here's. The e exclusive.

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Keep it exclusively within the parties that are involved. Do not get other people outside of the situation involved in your creative or personal issue with another artist or somebody else. Keep it exclusive. As soon as you let other opinions in, the fire starts up again. And the Bible is very clear about that.

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That when we start a fire with the tongue. The tongue is full of fire and a deadly poison and no one can tame it. Well, guess what? When you add extra tongues to your fire, you've just set the whole forest ablaze. And there's no way you're going to come to a peaceful resolution of your situation with the other artist or with someone else if you start letting things out into the open.

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So that's the second thing. Actually, the third thing I should say to keep it exclusive inside the camp, handle it as Matthew 18 says, go to one and then go directly to the person who is offended. You'll find yourself in a much better position to find resolution. And then after that, you have to start looking for the resolution. How do you resolve this?

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How do you resolve this? How do you bring one side, another side into some kind of agreement? Okay, right here is where you really need to think about explaining, not feeling like you have to get a whole bunch of people on your side, but being very personal and being empathetic with the person that's next to you that you may be mad at. They may have messed you up, they may have done this, but they are on the same boat as you. They are a creative who's trying to make something happen.

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Now, if they've done you wrong and there's been an issue and you know you have to break things up, that's one thing. However, most of the time, two people are just looking at one situation in two different ways. And there's a resolution available if you can step back and say, okay, here's how I feel, but I can understand how you feel. How can we come to a resolution? I love this book.

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You need to check this out. I'm going to put a link in the notes of this particular episode. It's called The Peacemaker by Ken Sandy and he has these four G's that you need to think of when it comes to peacemaking in any kind of conflict. But I think especially for us Christian and faith focused creatives, we've got to think this way when it comes to conflict because people see the way we handle conflict and they will not only judge our music, they will not only look at our creative careers, but more importantly, they will judge the people. Actually, I shouldn't say the people.

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They will judge the God that we serve, and they will judge the people around us based on our conduct. So we have a higher standard that we have to get to when it comes to conflict resolution, even when it impacts our careers and our music and our art. So here are the four G's that Kinsen puts out when it comes down to resolving conflict. First, as I just mentioned, glorify god. It has to.

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Glorify God. The resolution, the conflict, however it happens, if there isn't a way to glorify God in it, there is a problem. You've got to step back and say, the ultimate authority and the ultimate person I'm trying to please by resolving this conflict is God. Secondly, get the log out of your own eye, okay? You've heard this principle.

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You cannot solve someone else's problem while you've got a big log. And you need to be able to have self awareness and say, what did I contribute to this conflict before you jump on somebody else and try to remove the spec out of their eye. Thirdly, gently restore. Now, Kensan in this case is talking about Galatians, where he says to gently restore someone who's at fault. Now, in this case, maybe both people are at fault.

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Maybe there's a tech at fault, maybe there's an agent or promoter at fault. But whoever it is, you've got to gently restore that person in a biblical way, in a biblical sense, so that you can continue to stay in relationship. And again, if there's a case that you can't keep relationship, we understand there's another way to handle that. But right now, we're talking about restoring relationships and finally go and be reconciled. So these four G's kind of line up for us, how you have to think as a Christian creative.

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And the first four I gave you, the E's, are how you have to handle any situation. So you've got this nice little package here that I gave you on how to think as a Christian creative who might be facing some issues between you and another artist or another person on your creative team, especially when it comes to something in the public eye. I hope that's helped you, and I hope you're going to really take a look at all of this. Look at that resource I just talked about. I've also got a blog post that talks about how to keep your group together long term, that talks a lot of these conflict resolution situations.

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But remember, it's going to happen. Expect those issues, they're going to happen. Okay? Then examine the reality. Make sure you keep it exclusive inside your camp.

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Do not share your issues with other people outside, in the fans. They don't need to know. Make sure that you keep it exclusive. And finally, try to be empathetic to the peer person so that you can come to a resolution. And then you, my friend, will be able to continue your creative career and your relationships without causing any forest fires that burn down a lot of houses and a lot of lives and a lot of incomes that can be affected if we don't handle this right.

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Thank you so much for listening and watching. Thank you so much for being a part of the guidance community. Please make sure you follow us on all social media networks because we share more little tidbits and strategies and help. We also have a community called the God and Gigs 360 community. Definitely want you to check that out because we do this in depth throughout our community with more trainings and things like this.

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Definitely check that out. But until next time, what I really want you to do is to continue to become the creative that you were created to be. God bless and I'll see you next episode.

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Thanks for joining us here at the God and Gigs show. Please leave us a review on itunes like our Facebook page or visit Godandgigs.com and tell us what you thought of this show. We'll be back soon. In the meantime, go create something amazing.&