He popped to my mind very quickly as well. Let’s go down the list:
Significant talent, dedication and skill
Would say, though I’d say he especially shines in composition and getting the right people to shine.
Write music across a bunch of different contemporary genres
Basing yourself on prog metal is kind of cheating in that respect xD
Seriously though, the genres within albums, or sometimes single songs, of his can be a bit of a rollercoaster. If another reader is still drawing a blank, The Day That The World Breaks Down
Draws from the work of others
Isn’t that basically the standard for most musicians? And also, in the aforementioned track’s clip, he specifically refers to a few inspirations. And moments when he let his collaborators do their thing and shine. "Hey Mike, here are your lyrics: 01110100 01110010 01110101 01110011 01110100 01010100 01001000 00110001, go nuts!"
Shitposting and odd outfits
Have you been at Live Beneath The Waves? His girlfriend got an applause, his brother was heckled & booed, and his keyboard guy was called a LUL by the entire audience. All at his request.
Weird Al is a talentless hack who just makes lame jokes using other people’s work. Literally doesn’t make any thing orginal himself. There’s some who are worthy of being the modern day mozart and it’s sure as shit ain’t weird Al.
I wouldn’t say Weird AL is a talentless hack but you are right, he plays other people’s music and not known for anything he’s written. It’s not fair to compare him to a composer. Weird Al is more like a member of the orchestra.
The idea that population numbers are all it takes is so stupid. Mozart is not just one guy who was really good at writing music. I mean, obviously, he literally was, but he only existed and wrote what he did in the way he did because of not only his own “genius” but also the circumstances he was raised in, his education, the musical traditions that he drew from, the fact that he was wealthy and had time… Etc etc.
Adding more people living in poverty, with poor education, no connection to musical or artistic tradition, and no time… Will not add more Mozarts.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops"
Most of the super famous classical composers were born with in 90 years of each other. On one hand thay were brilliant musicians, on the other hand It was also this thing that was happening right then.
I’m fairly certain if the circumstances were different we still have a bunch of people doing the same work.
That’s part of what I’m getting at. The musical culture at the time arose through the work of many, many composers, and through the listeners who talked about it etc. Cultural development is complex and requires much more than just a handful of geniuses.
Those composers are famous because they were pioneers in the development of music and their work has been used to educate musicians in virtually all countries during the last century. There are composers creating similarly valuable music today, sometimes working in cinema or video games, and composers doing pioneering work, usually in experimental music. They aren’t as famous because their work isn’t being used worldwide to educate musicians, but they might be by 2123, provided society hasn’t collapsed.
I feel Damon Albarn might fit this as well, specifically with Gorillaz. They don’t have a style because it always changes on each album, hell their shit post song if the full version of Do Ya Thang where Andre 3000 just says “I’m the shit” for over 7 minutes.
There are well over thousands who have skills beyond Mozart today. The few who become well known are determined by very different things, having skills like Mozart is almost irrelevant. He’s also just sort of the token “music talent” example for people who don’t listen to music, often goes with the idea “classical music” is when music peaked.
The “gifted piano prodigy” I grew up with is a burnout in his 30s. There’s an unassuming data analyst I work with who likely exceeds his skill and just teaches on the side. My local symphony had to cancel this season due to lack of sales. A band at the jazz school my brother attended (BBNG) got sampled by a rapper and were a breakthrough success. This is sorta what it looks like for the Mozarts of today.
Yeah they were all students at Humber, in the Toronto area. Obviously all skilled musicians, but there’s a drummer Larnell Lewis who’s a student mentor there, my brother was lucky enough to have him, and while lesser known he’s a drummer’s drummer and insanely skilled. A “Mozart” of drums you could say. While he’s successful and tours with Snarky Puppy and the like, it’s not like he’s a household name or anything. There’s so much talent out there.
There’s tons of talent out there and that’s exactly why Mozarts are a thing of the past.
Music is so attainable to people [in the west], and that’s a great thing (not that it shouldn’t be more…I.e greater financing for the arts, especially in public K12). It’s so easy to access, learn, and record.
That, and the media market is so fragmented. We still have pop and chart-toppers in the major genres, sure…but man, there is so much stuff out there.
I don’t think there will be another Mozart. I don’t even think there will be another person we can compare to Michael Jackson, or Freddie Mercury, or Trent Reznor, or Whitney Houston, or any of the other modern legends. Simply because there are so many talented people and media, and the means to produce it, are so attainable.
One of my favorite things to do now is to find the bands “similar to” a band that I listen to or enjoy that have fewer than 1k subscriptions/followers. Even below 500. There’s so, so many hidden gems out there, and some of it may even redefine your own tastes in music.
I’m confused, Mozart is prodigious as a composer, and there are very few names like that.
Naturally when people knowing what they are talking about say that, they don’t mean that every modern composer should try and imitate Mozart.
BTW, about modern music - imitating something between Holst, Vaughan-Williams and maybe somebody else has been the mainstream approach to writing movie soundtracks for a few decades already.
Irrelevant - I wouldn’t say so. Just the field is wider, so people usually shape their interest in music more variably.
And then you start talking about somebody being a “prodigy” when performing on specific instruments, which is really a different thing.
There are today’s composers not widely known and overshadowed by pop music (which could mostly as well be AI-generated, it’s all the same) or somebody like Einaudi (who is, sorry, not of Mozart’s grade).
Tracker music, generative (not as in LLM-generated) music, various experiments I lack knowledge of music theory to understand and explain, but approve of how they sound and feel.
The only thing I could think of with the whole “1000 Mozarts” comment is that there’s a very real chance that if the world Musk and Bezos envision came true, those Mozart level geniuses would be working in an Amazon fulfillment center or a Tesla assembly line, wasting their talents as a slave to capitalism.
That’s actually something that’s likely already happening, assuming they manage to even achieve that.
I guarantee there are tons of potential geniuses born that are never afforded the chance to develop or even demonstrate their abilities… and when they do, aren’t recognized. Either because they are from the dirty poors and/or the Moneybags family can just leverage their resources to ensure their kids get the opportunity or recognition instead.
If you don’t believe in fairness or equality, the potential benefits to yourself by way of improvements to society from geniuses should motivate you.
I’m so tired of the pattern of a well balanced society flourishing and then a few selfish fuckwads hoard resources and starve their society back into a stagnant imbalanced fief.
Really, the only way he doesn’t fit is that he doesn’t have the massive ego Mozart had. That, and I guess he’s not quite as dirty. Mozart once wrote of piece of music called “Lick My Ass.”
He actually wrote 2 of those. For the sake of education, let’s provide the complete text of one (via deepl.com):
spoilerLick my a… right already, lick it nice and clean, lick it clean, lick my a… That’s a greasy desire, only well lubricated with butter, the licking of the roast my daily do. Three lick more than two, go ahead, take the test and lick, lick, lick. Everyone licks his own a…
The phrase, aka the Swabian Salute, had been popularized a few years earlier in Goethe’s quite successful play Götz von Berlichingen. It is the knight’s reply to a demand for surrender. Götz may be more famous for his “iron fist/iron hand”, a prosthetic hand (at least, I saw a post about it trending on reddit a few years back). Two prosthetics that are thought to have belonged to him, may be seen in a museum. He lived ~1480-1562 and lost his hand, according to his autobiography, in 1504 to a field artillery shell when he besieged a Bavarian town.
And for commercially released stuff, there’s also One More Minute with the line “Now I’m stranded all alone in the gas station of love, and I have to use the self-service pumps!” and the entirety of Wanna B Ur Lovr is just innuendo after innuendo
He’s certainly kept himself looking basically clean and family-friendly overall. I wasn’t away of the Orgy on my Own song, but other innuendo is all the sorts of things that would totally go over kids’ heads on a sort of Looney Tunes level, so I think that’s okay. I also know he really hates it when people attribute dirty song parodies to him (which happens all the time).
Add comment