While it is valid to make music for those reasons, also said that i hate his music, not that he couldn’t do it or was wrong to do so. You can find it compelling, and that’s cool, i find it tacky, but largely in the end products. In the same way you can paint something photorealistically; it’s not creative in subject matter, but it’s still fine and is definitely technical. Hollow criticisms seem fitting for hollow music, though it all feels dismissive, whether from me, or from you criticizing the critiques.

So, bit iffy on your angle as well, cause it doesn’t really offer much other than feeling like, while you disagree, you don’t have much of a reason to not like the criticisms other than that and liking Collier, which is also fine

Album Rating: 1.0

Music aimed at musicians is good if it's noise rock

@Potsy i don't like collier a whole lot so i hope not

@MoM i'm not just responding to you with my above comment, more the general sentiment in the thread/on the site.
-i didn't say you had to think he was right to make what he does. i'm just critical of the mentality behind a common disregard for music aimed more at musicians.
-i struggle to parse the photorealism comparison. i'd be willing to argue, if anything, collier is too creative for his own good, often seeming incapable of reigning in a sprawling mass of disconnected and niche concepts into something totally unified. if he was only doing reharmonization a capella covers like he did as a teen i'd probably get it, maybe?
-"hollow criticisms seem fitting for hollow music", uh ok?
-i am struggling to understand your last sentence there, i'll be honest boss. i noted that i like his simpler and more conventionally emotive stuff, the kinda stuff i wouldn't be surprised is well received by you or others here, and that i find his more technical output grating holistically. i'd imagine we would probably score his output similarly. people can dislike it, that's fine, but remarks like "It’s like a music theory computer program ran a sequence on its table of contents" don't really compute in my robot brain. he has too much raw nerd love for what he does and it shows.

to reiterate, he has a lot of genuinely great moments in his music. chord progressions, climaxes, transitions, key changes, rhythmic concepts, etc, that, in isolation, you can pretty comfortably listen to and go "damn, a lot of love, attention to detail, time, and skill went into that", but the discourse seems so heavily skewed in one direction that i wonder sometimes if i'm even talking about the same musician as the rest of the site.

@porc i would appreciate if u wouldn't undermine the point i am trying to make by being so correct!!!

Album Rating: 1.0

tbh feel like it's less a dismissal of "music aimed at musicians" so much as that style of music is often performed insufferably by people who have mistaken technical ability for songwriting chops and have been able to get by on the "wow factor" for people that are looking for something that they feel is impressive because they can't do it themselves and aren't looking for anything beyond that, and so have never needed to hone that songwriting ability into something (anything at all)



And also not shooting this at you direct Ramon, just tryna get my two cents worth

Then my mistake! I haven’t checked out any of his stuff from more recent years, so maybe he started doing things I’d feel are creative. From what I had heard, it just seemed like music theory wank and didn’t really belie anything I’d call creative, just technical exercises in coming niche music theory concepts. Like, i never felt like he was actually passing music theory’s boundaries, just playing with already established concepts that other people had creatively outlined years before. So, unless this has changed and he’s doing something different lately, i can see where we’re misunderstanding each other here

Porc knows wassup

@porc i have a couple of gripes with that understanding too though. i'm following plenty of incredibly wanky instagram artists who constantly output 30 second clips of them just tearing up a finger exercise, though even in acknowledging it to be what it is, often times there are moments interspersed that make me marvel, not just at the technicality, but at the thoughtfulness of the piece itself (an example from an INCREDIBLY wanky guitarist: https://youtu.be/ttbC8whCeyQ)

you are allowed to have your cake and eat it. i don't get the vibe a lot of users here are willing to engage in that way though, almost as if it's an issue to find something meaningful amidst the flurries of notes and exercises and technical demonstrations. either the whole song is a soulful, emotional romp, or the whole song is bunk. wow factor is part of the fun, it's why we talk about the porcaro shuffle, or eruption, or whatever the fuck celine dion gets up to when she performs on stage. it doesn't feel like talking about music here operates the same way it does when i talk about music to people irl, where you rip a stank face when a beat switches up on a song by an artist you are only listening to because your friend likes them.

and ofc!! no issue at all, i like the dialogue and appreciate your thoughts

@MoM i can absolutely grant you that if you've only heard his older output haha. he still does the same thing even now, though the aforementioned track with mayer, stuff on his djesse records, and so on, feels pretty intently made to sound like what to him is beautiful and emotive music, regardless of how well he ultimately goes about that goal.

and back to the wow factor aspect, i do feel his "mastery" or whatever we opt to call it over his instruments does positively contribute to a lot of things he does. whether its for you or not is up to your discretion i guess but the dude tells some wonderful little stories with the way he navigates even simple progressions, and i really like that kind of attention to detail because you can't net it from just any muso, it has to come from someone who's taken the time to treat their instrument as an extension of themselves:
https://youtu.be/z5mxfYuIwfs

Maybe some people just don’t look for the same shit in music as you do

Like this whole tirade comes across as you trying to convince others to be wowed by the same shit that you are wowed by and not being able to understand why they are not even though several people have explained it from perfectly valid perspectives

It’s hard for me to work up the energy to even engage with it very critically because it seems like ur trying to dismiss subjectivity and say there’s some ulterior motive behind people not connecting with music that might display technical ability but not compelling or intuitive songwriting or emotional resonance / heart, which are major, major components to what makes music good for me

I don’t think anyone is trying to say there is no place for pure displays of technical aptitude in music just that it’s obnoxious when it’s the only facet to an artists work or if it comes off as pretentious

The usage of “hollow” to describe the criticisms is interesting because that’s exactly how I’d describe that kind of music

Album Rating: 2.0

Technical mastery of music can and imo is almost always impressive but personal enjoyment stems so much from personal objectivity that you really cannot make the expectation that people will even find a modicum of enjoyment in whatever it is Collier is doing.



To put it into perspective-My favorite band is Counterparts and while they are generally damn well received, I understand people have different parameters for what makes music enjoyable to them and for that reason I think it is still valid for someone to call them absolute dogass.



Also music made for musicians??? I am especially unsure as to what the point is there as musicians range from commonfolk pop like The Chainsmokers to tech death like Obscura to full blown complex concertos so tbh im not sure what that is supposed to mean??? Ily Crypt/Ramon but idk if I understand lol

Yeah idk with this shit

If you asked me what I thought the quintessential “music for musicians” would be, my argument would be for jazz, and jazz rules so 🤷‍♀️

A lot of jazz musicians and heads really emphasize the exploration and exercise of music theory and technical aptitude over everything else. Lots of kinds of jazz out there that perfectly showcase how pure theory and technicality can be great and enjoyable without being vapid and hollow.

@potsy i'm running into this repeat problem of having to explain that my favourite works of collier are those where he ISN'T doing all his technical wizardry, and that there are still plenty of moments of conventional storytelling in his music that get overlooked by the aforementioned wizardry. you are still talking about this topic like his entire output IS just the wank. there's every chance i'm the insane person in this thread but i feel like you guys are talking to a projection without trying to understand what i'm getting at.

"I don’t think anyone is trying to say there is no place for pure displays of technical aptitude in music just that it’s obnoxious when it’s the only facet to an artists work or if it comes off as pretentious", i'm kinda trying to allude to the inverse here, that people are quite often willing to discard the non-technical aspects of an artist's sound if the artist by and large sits in the technical realm. like you say this:

"it seems like ur trying to dismiss subjectivity and say there’s some ulterior motive behind people not connecting with music that might display technical ability but not compelling or intuitive songwriting or emotional resonance / heart, which are major, major components to what makes music good for me"

while somehow missing me linking to a segment that seems VERY conventionally intuitive, and that i'd imagine fits the colloquial definitions of heart or emotional resonance, as a jumping off point to bolster my wider point that collier is capable of that kind of stuff and actively pushes it in his catalogue. i am all for subjectivity. in my subjective opinion, collier gets a lot of undue flack that doesn't feel at all applicable to a pretty reasonable chunk of his output, seemingly for the reason that he has a lot of preconceived notions attached to him. i've just now clicked on his last upload. pretentious? sure, he goes a little buck wild in parts with his adlibs or riffs. but i'd feel just as comfortable listening to this with my 6 year old cousin or my 86 year old nan as i would anyone else, and he's got material like this all throughout his catalogue.
https://youtu.be/39RBH-2hogk

@Dedes, i love you too, but you seem to be doing the same thing haha, honing in purely on the technical mastery aspect and discarding me trying to explain that collier doesn't purely write back-to-front shred multi hour epics to appease his sense of grandiosity or w/e. like, half his public appearances take the form of trying to make music accessible for anyone.

music made for musicians is a fairly common catch-all for music that seems to only serve the purpose of being an exploration of the boundaries of music, or music that foregoes necessarily being singable or easily accessible. i'm not making it up myself so apologies if it leads to confusing implications but i see the term so often both online and offline i figured it might've been used here also.

Album Rating: 3.5

As a musician, a lot of times "music made for musicians" comes off as needlessly wanky and technical to the point of lacking emotion. Yngwie Malmsteen is undoubtedly a talented guitarist, for instance, but his wanky technical style lacks where more soulful guitarists flourish.

It's not about how many notes you can put in, but can you make those notes MEAN something. Sometimes a simpler melody is all you need if you're earnest, truth be told. This works because to me, beneath the mask it just feels more earnest and real. It's just a little bit too calculated for repeat listens, so it's fallen off a bit.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding it but idk. Stuff like Animals As Leaders reads as too clinical for an emotional fuck like me, although Tosin is no doubt a WONDERFUL guitarist.

ya, i see that, and i'm fully on board with the fact that overtly technical music is making a number of pretty hefty concessions to achieve what it sets out to do. the most memorable performances i've attended live have almost all been incredibly understated and barebones folk performances. and yea that's completely fair haha

Album Rating: 3.5

Like technically proficient stuff is cool, but I feel like there's a balance that oughta be kept between it and feeling, passion. Something that sounds super clinical and mathematically generated isn't going to usually resonate as much.

Only good thing collier has done is that sza track

i am sorry for bringing up jacob collier everyone xxxx