Mark Ronson’s “Night people” memoir is an engaging and engrossing account of his formative years as a DJ in the New York club scene of the 90s. It also illustrates one tantalising facet shared by the arts and sciences: catching the zeitgeist.

Every age has its artists. Every age is replete with talented artists. And now, more than ever before, there are myriad ways for people to create and share music, text, video, images and other content that captures and contextualises what it means to be alive right now. 

That Babel of experimentation and experience is too much for any person or even group of people to track. Even within individual music/literary/filmic scenes there’s too much being produced and the artists themselves will straddle a spectrum of self-promotion that goes all the way from aggressive self-publicity to a conscious shunning of outside interest. 

Yet, from all that collective noise, a few individual voices get singled out. In the short term they’ll be the ones that made it; in the longer term, that list will get winnowed further until only a few names remain, synonymous with that time and place – the same way Elvis = 1950s and the Beatles/Rolling Stones = 1960s. They are the voices of their generation and, sometimes, the voice of all of us. They capture the zeitgeist.

Who gets to be one of those voices is, bluntly, a matter of luck. There’s no shortage of deserving winners, all of whom deserve to make it. But while many of them will find an audience, only a small and relatively arbitrary few will capture the attention of a large mass and therefore become part of the tastemakers and trendsetters of their time. 

This is something that Ronson’s book subtly captures. Although he doesn’t draw explicit attention to it, the slow transformation of the nightlife he inhabits tangibly changes from an accessible and chaotic anarchy in the early days of 90s rap (where legends like Guru are rubbing shoulders with regular punters and Ronson is spinning his records in back rooms) to an ultra-exclusive VIP scene where seemingly everyone is either celeb or entourage and excess is everything. It tracks how rap went from being an underground sound to the front and centre of the mainstream.

This randomness is something that most artists have made their peace with. Sure, there’ll be complaints about unearned success and of course Ronson himself is one of the earlier beneficiaries of “nepo” benefits, but by and large, serious artists know that the critical thing is to be producing art and thereby documenting and exploring their personal experience. Ronson doesn’t set out playing 90s rap records because he senses that this is where the action will be in 10 years’ time: he does it because he loves the music itself. The rewards may or may not follow but the integrity of the artistic pursuit in and of itself is paramount.

It’s a zen mindset that scientists still struggle to live with. We are curiously reluctant to accept that anybody with the ability and the right tools can make important discoveries, but that only a few of us actually get to do so. The luck, the zeitgeist element, comes from the fairly random choice of what field you end up working in and what tools are currently available. 

Just as lots of people are capable of articulating what it’s like to be alive right now, there are plenty of scientists capable of discovering what’s currently lying hidden. Whether that particular knowledge is of genuine significance is something that’s very hard to forecast at the time and generally only becomes clear with lengthy hindsight (which is why the Nobels are so hotly contested). What’s important is the pursuit, the thirst for new knowledge and that ineffable satisfaction that comes from obtaining it.