Inspired by a post that popped on lemmy world today about Weird Al it got me thinking. I listed out a bunch of names but the one that I think fits the most would probably be Surfan Stevens. Who do you all think?
This is the kind of question that makes me hate my mortality, because culture is so scattered and vast and changing so rapidly these days that it seems difficult to imagine anything “modern” lasting for hundreds more years, and we’ll never actually be able to know the answer.
King Gizzard. They love weird-ass time signatures (look up the ridiculousness that is Crumbling Castle for an example), polyrhythms, unconventional tuning, and such. They hop from one genre to another, they probably have one of the highest album-to-year ratios in music (not including live and demo albums), sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re silly, sometimes they’re silly-serious. The biggest blow to them however, is that nothing they make is truly a “masterpiece”. It all ranges from “good” to “great” but nothing they’ve made is really a “masterpiece”. Maybe in time they’ll make a true masterpiece, but nothing yet quite qualifies imo.
The other nomination I’d make is Devin Townsend. Where King Gizzard is extremely prolific but doesn’t make masterpieces, Devin Townsend takes his time and makes masterpieces. Despite its silliness, Ziltoid the Omniscient is one of the best, if not the best, metal albums, period. It’s an album so good that even my parents, who don’t like metal, have songs they enjoy from the album. Empath is a stunning blend of metal, electronic, prog, praise & worship/gospel,^1 and god knows what else. The man just does things and they come out amazing.
^1 Afaik Devin Townsend’s not a Christian, sorry to any Christian peeps hoping for good Christian music. He just incorporated that sound into the album.
Tanking Janet Jackson’s career and slut-shaming Britney. Both were accepted behaviors at the time, but IMO that just makes it worse, he never even had to really account for it.
ITT: people who have severely underestimated Mozart’s musical capacities and contributions.
Mozart is a musician that is studied by nearly any professional musician. There are historians, musical scholars, and museums dedicated to him. He’s a household name across the world. He established a period of music. As a teenager, he deciphered a 12 min choral piece with multiple groups and solos after hearing it once and by memory wrote it down later that night (he heard it a 2nd time a few days later for minor corrections). When he presented the score to the clergy, they said he got one note wrong. After investigation, Mozart heard it right. The musician’s score was off by a note. Could any popular musician mentioned here decipher just a 6 min song of 4 instrument band after hearing it once with pen and paper ready? Imagine telling any music legend now, “Hey, you’re off by a half a step on the 3rd note of bar 28 of your own song.”
Comparing an awesome popular singer, guitarist, or band to him is like comparing your friend that got a job at NASA to Einstein. There is no modern Mozart. There have been greats since Mozart, but there haven’t been any Mozarts since Mozart. I say this as a Beethoven fan. Mozart was the only Mozart. He was so good, that his name became a title for great musician: Mozart. No one listed in this thread is anywhere near being a Mozart.
Likely the closest I could picture in a modern sense is Jacob Collier, who can indeed perform these types of musical feats. But the crux of the issue is that while Collier is much loved, he isn’t a dominant force of popular music like Mozart was.
Yeah, that’s exactly my first thought while reading this. If I rewrote the list of achievements above to sound like I was claiming they all happened to me, and then posted it to twitter, it would be indistinguishable from most other “🙄 that happened” posts.
People will be saying similar stuff about Taylor Swift in 100 years; by definition being legendary means being unreal.
When you put it that way, the list of candidates thins out and the one figure I see still standing is John Coltrane, who in his day was running circles around fellow jazz musicians, they couldn’t wrap their heads around how Coltrane’s chord progressions and jumping between keys from note to note made any sense… yet it did, and beautifully.
Well, Mozart was a composer, so I don’t know what parallels you’re drawing from to compare hin to Weird Al or Surfan [sic] Stevens. If we’re talking strictly in terms of best living musicians, Joanna Newsom is probably the best songwriter of the past fifty years, and in my opinion, the second place isn’t even close.
Alpine Universe is pretty damn good, I thought it was a band until I looked them up on Instagram and found out it was one dude that multi-tracks his voice and plays multiple instruments. I watched a few of his production videos and was amazed.
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