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 what they actually want anyway. Drones for their business ventures.
I was wondering what happened to the drone delivery Amazon promised… It all makes sense now…
Since when do facts count as shitposts?
It’s an educational shitpost for people who think Luke Combs is the height of musical talent.
Who TF is Luke Combs?
Also, wishing you good luck!
Luke Combs is a shitty country music star who is definitely no Mozart.
I wouldn’t say he’s shitty, but he is not Mozart. At least he does co-write a lot of his songs unlike a lot of other popular musicians out there.
I think this is the creme de la creme of shitposts.
Since when have they not? (Though the reverse is not true.)
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”
- Stephen Jay Gould
Mozart wasn’t wealthy, his customers (patrons) were. His father trained him in the family trade from birth and put him to work at a young age.
He had a lot in common with Michael Jackson in that way, but Michael got insanely rich and Mozart didn’t.
Sorry, you’re right! But… He also didn’t live in a slum or have to work in an Amazon fulfilment centre lol.
Totally
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.
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.
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.
They said multiple Mozarts. Ween also checks those boxes.
There’s probably quite a few that are really only known to their immediate friends, families, and communities.
There are a lot of really talented people out there, who will remain mostly anonymous. It’s probably nicer for most to not be in the limelight, though it sucks for the rest of us who will never know.
I bet there are a ton of Mozarts who have to work shitty jobs just to exist and will never fully develop their skills due to economic inequality. If we give everyone UBI, at least some of them would develop fully.
“You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?.. It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad ploughmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when its even possible to find out. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is they can really be. Its all the wasted chances.”
Bad ploughmen? Living in an Amish paradise?
It’s from the Discworld novel Moving Pictures. If it’s spoofing something, I didn’t get it.
No, I was just referencing this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg
Yeah I can see this. I also think there’d be quite a few that just aren’t interested in the fame, or maybe want to keep their stuff private.
I know a person who writes her own songs every so often. They’re usually made as a way of dealing with something going on in her life. I had no idea about this until after like five years of knowing her she shared one. It was beautiful, she has a great voice, and she plays the guitar really well. Since the pieces are so personal it’s just not something she’ll share with most of the world.
Is she a Mozart? I don’t know, maybe. To me at least the experience was really profound.
I love this. She’s living her best life and I respect her privacy.
Oh, I make little poems or prosaic texts (not in English, ha-ha-ha) with the same purpose and limitation. Very rarely.
There are exceptions, but in general, in the modern music world, beauty trumps talent. You could be a great musician, but if you don’t look pretty on YouTube, the A&R people think no one wants to hear you.
I think modern media can offset that a little. There’s been plenty of people making use of virtual avatars to represent themselves in the past few years and still achieve decent success. Though obviously you’re quite limited in what you can do if you remain anonymous.
I recall a few years ago a singer rather like that, REOL, made her first music video which she herself starred in and it kind of did accelerate her popularity. It’s hard to remain anonymous if you’re also looking to tour and be on stage. As an aside; it’s delightful how her “face debut” song is about how she’s unsure how she wants to do her debut.
Oh for sure! I can’t help but wonder if a straightforward upvote-downvote system without the bias of algorithms aimed at clicks and profit would allow more folks who didn’t look canonically sexy to have careers. I know there are biases in general, and it may turn out to be a small percent overall, but getting a few percent more of a spotlight would still increase the Mozart count.
We can add Frank Zappa to the list.
'watch out where the Huskies go ’I would say that Zappa didn’t really fit criterion 3 like Al does.
Not to take anything away from his genius. But not every musical genius needs to be a Mozart.
I think he does fit. Consider the genre spanning records he did in the 80s like Joe’s Garage with every song from a different style. Consider how he found talent in unusual places and incorporated it, for instance Ruth playing the marimba in Inca Roads. But point also taken. No one mocks like All mocks
I guess in a way I feel like Zappa was in a class all his own.
He’s not everyone’s cup of tea but he was one for the ages. I think it a quite reasonable comparison to speak of Zapps in the same breath as Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc.
Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. dun. dun. dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dundundun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
A.I.D.S.
Fuck it I’ll die on the same hill with you.
I’m a simple man. I see Weird Al, I upvote.
The hill is going to be a hill of bodies.
You shall have my axe
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.
Bad Bad Not Good? I remember listening to them on Sound Cloud
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.
Weird Al, sure.
But also Jack Black.
You just made Mozart sound cooler to me.
Mozart slaps. I prefer Beethoven and Chopin, but Mozart got some skills.
Jacob Collier as another serious answer.
My votes would have been for Freddy Mercury (definitely) and Eddy Van Halen
Wrong place to post - this is just high quality content
I mean it’s not wrong. Kind of incredible really.
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.”
*clears throat in Weird Al fan that’s long gone off the deep end*
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
Fair, but one is innuendo and the other one is just coming right out and saying “lick my ass.”
Yeah not all the way, but still a lot closer than many people think (also “Orgy on My Own”)
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).
He actually wrote 2 of those. For the sake of education, let’s provide the complete text of one (via deepl.com):
spoiler
Lick 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.
Interesting! Thanks for the background!
Arjen Anthony Lucassen for sure!
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.
Arjen checks the boxes pretty well.
Christmas At Ground zero is the best Christmas song ever!
The video is fun too. Not the best Al video, but an entertaining compilation of 1950s civil defense footage.
Wouldn’t it also mean a thousand Musks and Trumps?
Or probably millions of them since they are not very smart at all, just attention seeking man childs.
