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Am I justified in hating Jacob Collier as much as I do? I cannot stand him or the music culture that adores him. In my opinion, he divorces music from what makes it close to God — its ability to make the reasonable listener feel powerful, rare, beneficial emotions — into a contest of cramming in obscure theory which (unlike a Bach or Dirty Projectors or John Williams) fails to actually sound good. He fails the first and final task of the composer, which is making music that is Great according to someone who doesn’t know theory but has listened to music before and possesses emotional intelligence. I see this trend as an invisible poison that afflicts all of the arts, and not just music. The arts are no longer designed to heal or beautify the souls of reasonable people, but have become an incestuous competition between info fetishizers.
Given my position as this forum's self-appointed music maven, and the apparent fact that no one else here knows who he is, I feel obligated to offer my opinion. One look at the guy's bio tells you all you need to know: Raised in a musical family, started making YouTube videos at age 17, which, coincidentally, was right around the time that YouTube became viable as a medium for original content. Attended the Royal Conservatory briefly but was soon taken under the wing of Quincy Jones and whisked around the world as the next great young musical genius, and over the past decade his star has grown to the point where he can't release an album without a slew of celebrity guests.
The upshot to all this is that there was never a time in Collier's life when anyone told him no. He never had composition professors marking up his music with a red pen. He never spent years as a working musician playing shows night after night to learn what worked and what didn't. He never played his hyper-harmonized compositions in front of an audience of local teenagers at the fire hall to get public reaction about what worked and what didn't. I guess he had Quincy Jones, but Jones was by that point 80 years old and entering the no-filter interview stage of his career and probably wasn't spending too much time offering constructive criticism. Instead, he cultivated an online audience based on what was essentially a gimmick and used that as a platform for incorporating advanced ideas and educating the public about them.
But the ideas don't always work. If his output was limited to educational videos and the occasional composition when something really works, he's be a lot more tolerable. Instead he releases albums that expose the limitations of his compositional abilities. His complex harmonies sound lush when he's noodling on the keyboard, but when we're subjected to them for an hour straight on an album it all blends together in a sort of lite-funk Muzac. So there's a weird juxtaposition wherein the guy is treated like the second coming of Duke Ellington, and when presented with select examples one may believe it, but listening to an entire album reveals that the emperor has no clothes. Sure, advanced harmony and microtonality and the like have their place in contemporary composition. But that can't be all there is. It's like a spice in a dish—it's good to have an added twist, but it can't replace the meat and potatoes.
An compounding the problem is the fact that the media and his band of followers are all too eager to jump on the genius bandwagon. A few years back Wired or a similar outlet did one of those videos where they try to explain a complex topic at varying levels of difficulty by having an expert explain it to a five year old, ten year old, and so on up to another expert. They had Collier explain harmony and him talking to kids was fine enough, but at the end they had him explain harmony to Herbie Hancock, a man who has contributed more to the world's harmonic vocabulary that Collier ever will. To be fair, he was appropriately humble with Hancock, and it was more of a conversation than a lesson, but immediately prior to this, they had Collier explaining harmony to a professional cellist, and the cellist had the appearance of a high school student who was eager to learn something and in awe of his teacher. The idea that a professional orchestral cellist—who would have probably studied at a conservatory and have years of experience performing in all sorts of ensembles—would need to turn to a YouTube star to learn more about harmony is preposterous.
All that being said. I'm glad Jacob Collier exists. With music education funding in constant peril and pop music nothing but 4 chord loops, the possibilities for today's kids to have any real sense of music appreciation seem hopeless. Collier's music may be mediocre, but it's miles ahead of what's on pop radio. And that, I think, explains the adulation he receives from his fans to some extent. If you're a high school kid who normally hears nothing but Top-40 radio and a guy like Collier comes along and shows that there's a whole universe of musical possibility out there, it can be tempting to brand the man a genius, especially with the whole media ecosystem telling you he is. Even if his talent is often overstated, his popularity is entirely based on his talent and not his marketability. As someone who grew up immersed in jazz and classical music Collier's whole schtick may seem sophomoric, but let's face it; it's not like his fans would otherwise be listening to Thelonious Monk records. If Collier can at least point them in the right direction, I'd say that's a good thing.
Good thoughts, well put. Yeah I suppose his music theory lessons are good for young people, but the musical genius label is unfitting. Musical theory genius, sure, more fitting.
If I had learned even the most basic of music theory in elementary or middle school, I would probably still be a cellist and perhaps a composer of electronic music. As it is, I never learned how to produce something that sounds good, only to play rote what other people wrote.
I too only learned to play rote what other people wrote in my music education, and this was something I found to be utterly mind-numbing (in my case, I played piano). But when I was 15 or 16 I picked up how to use a digital audio workstation and started making electronic music, a hobby which I now think I'm pretty good at.
In my experience, formally learning music theory isn't that essential. Don't get me wrong, a grasp of theory helps, but it's not absolutely necessary for composition and most people who are intent listeners do intuitively pick up some sense of theory while listening to music (and you pick up even more when trying to make things).
As with anything else, getting good at making music mainly involves slowly gaining experience through trial and error and spending thousands upon thousands of hours on it. I'm fairly certain that a good amount of the artists you like aren't thinking about it in terms of formal theory, they're making things and keeping what sounds good to them, discarding what doesn't, and learning along the way.
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