[tallies]

Jacob Collier is an interesting example because the general response I've seen to his music from music fans is that it is too "smart". It's impressive and novel to music academics (and apparently the Grammys) but hardly interesting to fans of the genres he favors (soul, pop, R&B). Common complaints being lack of emotion, lack of taste, poor songwriting, over production. But any negative review will also acknowledge that he's immensely talented and has massive potential.

[mabub24]

That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced", especially when he has made stabs at jazz, a genre that is in many cases "music for musicians". For a genre that prizes free flowing interpretation and individual creativity alongside instrumental virtuosity, his jazz music comes out utterly sterile compared to other modern jazz musicians. The same goes for his soul music. Everything he does feels like an exercise in a genre rather than playing in it.

Compare his stuff to the work of Kamasi Washington, Mary Halvorson's groups, or Shabaka Hutchings, or Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and you hear an enormous difference in the sheer craft of songwriting, emotional dynamics, and storytelling through their instruments.

He's clearly a virtuoso at a kind of playing the instrument, and he's extremely good at explaining music theory and concepts, which is a rather archaic and unique language all its own, but I don't think he's quite there yet for songwriting.

[Slow_Hand]

I don't disagree with you, but I'd like to make one small addendum that may go to explain why people might consider his music to feel overproduced. I believe that reason is his use of non-equal-temperament tuning.

For those unaccustomed to hearing pure intervals it can sound like a high-gloss "sheen" that gives an unreal quality to the music. In a way it becomes "too perfect" and unnatural to those who are used to hearing the equal temperament that most western music is recorded in. I hear it a lot in some acapella vocal groups and I often find the sound off-putting and it somehow feels a little corny to me.

[tallies]

That may be an aspect of it, but...

https://twitter.com/trndytrndy/status/1395944850911080459

[golergka]

I think that his use of Logic in particular is very relevant in this discussion, because not only it has excellent support for different temperaments, it also has Hermut tuning, which dynamically alters temperament of all the instruments played based on actual chords to reach perfect intervals regardless of the key you're in.

[roryokane]

Logic Pro documentation link for Hermode Tuning: https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/hermode-tuning-lgcp...

[Slow_Hand]

Touché.

Still, his virtuosity allows him to do things that very few people are capable of conceiving, attempting, and doing. We're lucky to have him in the mix.

[hresvelgr]

> That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced",

Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is an example of someone who has both the talent and the taste for making great music in my opinion. There's a really old video of him shredding like a madman [1] completely off the dome which shows he has very good command of his guitar. He's not in the same sphere as Jacob Collier mind you but here me out. If you compare that video with the music he wrote in the pumpkins, it is very restrained. He knew when to exercise the full range of his skills and when to dial it back. Having learned a lot of pumpkins songs on guitar, it is clear to me that he favoured what sounded better and was more impactful over what appeared skillful.

There's another video of him in 2012 [2] where he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big. Beyond his talent he had a very keen eye for how music was evolving. Having talent is one thing, being able to contextualise your work, and others work accurately in the arena of the world is a quality that very few people possess and in my opinion is required for producing truly influential and impactful work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hYPo2py77A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C7NCpfUC90

[FreakLegion]

> he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big

That's a great clip. You might enjoy some of what people have been doing with their desktop studios and guitars in the last few years. Two that immediately come to mind are Tim Henson [1] (already pretty well-known in the guitar world as part of Polyphia) and Manuel Gardner-Fernandes [2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHD4OVjS4E

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLCtH0KAY8Q

[awild]

I cannot leave a comment of bedroom producers go without a mention of judd madden.

Probably quite out there (doom/drone/stoner) for most people but his music has always struck me as incredibly from the heart and not some noodling to impress others.

https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/float

https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/artesian

[jacquesm]

Another person in the same vein: Tim Finn. Able to dial it back at will and to let it shine when needed.

[Ericson2314]

> archaic and unique language

archaic or arcane?

[mabub24]

Some of the words in music theory are just straight latin, or directly descendant from latin and old. A lot of people struggle with music theory until you "translate" it to using modern language (though you do lose some specificity in some cases). Like "ritardando", which is just "slow down", or accelerando, which is, you guessed it, "speed up".

You can also use arcane.

[yakubin]

Italian, not Latin. Italian is the language of music. Italy used to be the capital of European music. That's where it comes from. I also wouldn't classify it as mere "theory". It's basic notation that appears in notes. Calling it "theory" is like calling control flow constructs in Pascal (the language) "theory".

[noobly]

It's called music theory though? I agree it's a bad name, but that's what it's called..

[chuchana]

It is. This video argues it would be more accurate to call it the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA

[namarie]

I think most of it is Italian instead of Latin, including your two examples.

[TheOtherHobbes]

PG dismisses creativity, but IMO that's a mistake in an otherwise interesting essay. Creativity is the difference between someone who is merely smart and someone who originates ideas.

Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.

And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.

That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.

One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.

The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.

Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.

IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.

Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.

Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.

I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.

Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.

Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.

Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.

[earth_walker]

Ok, I hadn't really explored Collier's music until I read so many people panning his work on this thread.

One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste', 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice sounding'.

Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're missing the point.

The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia collage is experimental, creative and I find quite emotional.

Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of precision.

And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.

In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie Wonder.

The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the composers are young and popular.

[meowface]

I don't like criticizing anyone or trying to talk about "objective" qualities of art, but I don't agree with your portrayal.

I love electronic composers; I almost exclusively listen to avant-garde/experimental electronic compositions, personally. Most of the artists are quite young. I agree Collier is definitely very experimental.

I do not think he's very artistic or emotional and agree with the above comments that he's in the "intelligent/skilled but not creative" camp. I think he has a lot of potential, but his work just doesn't seem very musical to me, and I have absolutely no biases against experimental, "weird", electronic, or new stuff.

[earth_walker]

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather listen to James Blake or Moreno Veloso than Collier.

I'm not saying you have to like his music. I am saying that anyone maintaining that his compositions are not artistic, creative or musical... well, perhaps someone's definitions of these words are being biased by their preferences.

I mean, to take one example, he's rearranged a classic R&B song in 9-part jazz harmonies rarely heard in the pop genre. He layers in samples from household sounds. He put all this together in an entertaining media format without losing the sensibilities of his genre nor letting it collapse into noise.

You could argue that this is not entirely novel, and this kind of composition has been happening in less popular genres for decades. I can see arguments against his taste. I do agree with an earlier comment that this might be too sophisticated for his pop audience.

But not creative? Not musical? Not artistic? You don't have to like his music to recognise that these words absolutely apply.

When I was a teen, I hated certain genres of music - for example 'new country' and the popular dance music styles of the late 80s. My disdain for whole categories of music was part of my identity.

This made it near impossible for teen me to recognise (or more to the truth, admit) that any of the artists labelled as part of those genres had any talent at all.

This lead to all sorts of silliness, like asserting that MJ had no talent, or insisting that Neil Young doesn't play country. Or just plain missing out on some of the brilliant moments of Willie Nelson's career.

You're right that art is subjective, and I'm quibbling over words that have no quantitative meaning. But seriously, credit where credit is due.

[awild]

This is mostly a personal stance validated by the talking of some other artists and musicians, and only a weak rebuttal/addendum to your point: But I've long understood creativity as literally just creating. A lot. And publishing only what you deem worthy.

I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual production. Another example is the documentary on marina abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".

Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but choosing what to publish is probably more a question of taste.

Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are at the top of their game so their worst is likely most peoples best?

[dudouble]

>> IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.

This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for this.

[screye]

Yeah, I would compare Jacob Collier to Snarky Puppey or Tigran Hamasayan.

All of them are virtuosic and are branching away from classical ideas of jazz, and Collier might even be the smartest of the group, but he can't write a song to save a life.

Snarky Puppey and Tigram have on the other hand, found a fresh niche for themselves that is similarly creative, but has the humility of adding the necessary sugar and milk to make their supremely creative and bitter music drink palatable to a listening audience.

[baby]

I was thinking of Jacob Collier when reading GP's comment. It seems very clever, but I don't find it "nice-sounding".