PG dismisses creativity, but IMO that's a mistake in an otherwise interesting essay. Creativity is the difference between someone who is merely smart and someone who originates ideas.
Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.
And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.
That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.
One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.
The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.
Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.
Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.
Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.
Ok, I hadn't really explored Collier's music until I read so many people panning his work on this thread.
One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste', 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice sounding'.
Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're missing the point.
The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia collage is experimental, creative and I find quite emotional.
Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of precision.
And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.
In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie Wonder.
The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the composers are young and popular.
I don't like criticizing anyone or trying to talk about "objective" qualities of art, but I don't agree with your portrayal.
I love electronic composers; I almost exclusively listen to avant-garde/experimental electronic compositions, personally. Most of the artists are quite young. I agree Collier is definitely very experimental.
I do not think he's very artistic or emotional and agree with the above comments that he's in the "intelligent/skilled but not creative" camp. I think he has a lot of potential, but his work just doesn't seem very musical to me, and I have absolutely no biases against experimental, "weird", electronic, or new stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather listen to James Blake or Moreno Veloso than Collier.
I'm not saying you have to like his music. I am saying that anyone maintaining that his compositions are not artistic, creative or musical... well, perhaps someone's definitions of these words are being biased by their preferences.
I mean, to take one example, he's rearranged a classic R&B song in 9-part jazz harmonies rarely heard in the pop genre. He layers in samples from household sounds. He put all this together in an entertaining media format without losing the sensibilities of his genre nor letting it collapse into noise.
You could argue that this is not entirely novel, and this kind of composition has been happening in less popular genres for decades. I can see arguments against his taste. I do agree with an earlier comment that this might be too sophisticated for his pop audience.
But not creative? Not musical? Not artistic? You don't have to like his music to recognise that these words absolutely apply.
When I was a teen, I hated certain genres of music - for example 'new country' and the popular dance music styles of the late 80s. My disdain for whole categories of music was part of my identity.
This made it near impossible for teen me to recognise (or more to the truth, admit) that any of the artists labelled as part of those genres had any talent at all.
This lead to all sorts of silliness, like asserting that MJ had no talent, or insisting that Neil Young doesn't play country. Or just plain missing out on some of the brilliant moments of Willie Nelson's career.
You're right that art is subjective, and I'm quibbling over words that have no quantitative meaning. But seriously, credit where credit is due.
This is mostly a personal stance validated by the talking of some other artists and musicians, and only a weak rebuttal/addendum to your point: But I've long understood creativity as literally just creating. A lot. And publishing only what you deem worthy.
I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual production. Another example is the documentary on marina abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".
Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but choosing what to publish is probably more a question of taste.
Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are at the top of their game so their worst is likely most peoples best?
>> IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for this.
Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.
And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.
That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.
One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.
The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.
Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.
Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.
Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.