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?
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.
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.
EDIT: typo
No offence but I think you’re forgetting about Fred Durst.
He literally broke stuff
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.
Honestly, I could see Jacob Collier doing just that.
What if some or most of those details were made up to sound nicer / more impressive?
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.
I agree, and this is easily my favorite post of the month.
Ummm
Prince.
Music fell out of him. He accidentally walked by a bass and it exploded from the funk.
Talent for days. (See also RRHoF playing “while my guitar gently weeps”)
Second vote would be Trent Reznor or Danny Elfman
Plus the moment he made it rain during his Superbowl show whilst playing purple rain.
I don’t care what anyone says, it rained because of prince.
Don’t care if it is apocryphal but when it started raining, he said “make it rain harder. “
Yes. He did make it rain that day.
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Bullshit Logic. We also don’t have 1000 Da Vincis, 10.000 Jesuses and 100.000 Moseses.
Now imagining a Pharaoh with an unstoppable army of Mosi.
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.
I love Sufjan Stevens, but I don’t see the comparison. While I really love his lyrics (one of the few I actually like them, I usually find most artist lyrics to be plain and way too cheesy), his music is very simple compared to a behemoth like Mozart.
Mozart was able to write highly complex music very fast, that went from deep themes to silly ones, and enjoyed popularity from both critics and public, which is something quite rare.
I don’t which one would be the closest today. Maybe something like Williams or Ennio Morricone.
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Jacob Collier
You ever seen that post about how classical music is closest to metal? Well Kerry King is our modern day Mozart.
\M/
Dude can definitely shred and definitely plays some complex licks. Dimebag and Randy Rhodes are definitely up there too, but then again, so are many heavy metal guitarists.
I’m a shitty guitarist and whenever I just sit back and listen to the guitar tracks on most heavy metal albums I’m always amazed by the complexity, speed, precision and just overall sound of the tracks, especially when it comes to the solos.
Kerry is a great player, but I think the shredder who embodied the spirit and the form of Mozart was Alexi Laiho.
His solos were a such distinct take on the neoclassical sound
David Bowie, few have his range and talent.
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.
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Quincy Jones
Prince
David Bowie
Danny Elfman
well since Mozart is dead, and OP wants us to name a contemporary artist, isn’t it a prerequisite that the artist still be alive right now?
Danny Elfman wins. He’s a fookin’ musical mad genius.
I don’t know anything about surfan Stevens, why him?
He has a huge discography, is a talented multi instrumentalist, and is very experimental with genre and song writing in general while still effectively connecting with a growing audience. I used to know only a handful of his songs and thought, good but meh. Out of curiosity about his broad appeal between people I wouldn’t expect much over lap from, I dove into his discography and it’s something really special.
Okay, very cool. Thanks, he sounds worth looking into
No problem, I had a lot of fun listening from his least popular album to most, just to see when it would click.
Where did it click for you? What’s considered his most popular?
I think it might’ve been this one but it was a while back so I’ll keep looking and edit if I find something that looks more familiar. Greetings from Michigan got it’s antlers in me, after that I burned through the rest of the list pretty quickly and then it became a blur of shuffle for a few weeks.
Stevens is more like Bach than like Mozart. Lots of repetition in his themes but layered and created in counterpoint like no other contemporary artist. Love that guy.
Kevin MacLeod.
I’m learning lots of good music here, but I was really hoping Surfan Stevens was a surf-rock cover artist of Sufjan Stevens and Cat Stevens.
