24
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
24 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1427 readers
109 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Jacob Collier to me is the archetype of the rich kid with enormous talent and not an ounce of taste or integrity, so I can't say I'm very surprised by this.
See also this nonsense, though now it looks rather innocent compared to the google news.
He's such a waste of musical ability it makes me angry and his face is annoying!
I have seen that, and in terms of the cringy stuff he does, it's definitely up there.
Here are my primarily unfiltered feelings about his music and persona:
I think at his worst, he's cringe, overly-self-indulgent, and pretentious. He needs a stylist because his hair sucks, his clothes are stupid, and he wears this fucking bear hat all the time that I hate. I hate hate hate people when people wear hats and it doesn't seem to serve a purpose beyond looking quirky. Take the fucking hat off, Jacob! He's the type that uses obscure words that you suspect he doesn't know the meaning of.
He also tends to be inappropriately maximalist—I'd point to his cover of Here Comes the Sun, Blackbird, Moon River (for which he won a Grammy!), and actually pretty much all of DJesse, a series of four (four!) albums. I don't really like the timbre of his voice; it's weird. I suspect he has like a perfect vocal technique or something, but as a result, it sounds completely removed from anything natural.
Unlike every other failed rich kid, he is legitimately talented, which you've acknowledged. I like some of his songs but wouldn't recommend them to anyone. His music feels like a technical demo in that many interesting, complex, and impressive things happen, which I like! But at my lowest points, I feel stupid when I listen to his stuff, even though he is musically speaking in a made-up language, and it's not my fault I don't understand it.
At his best, he seems genuinely open-hearted, with room to accept anything that comes his way. I do find some of his stuff inspiring! I like that a person like him exists and that many people look to him for inspiration and influence.
Specific to this point: I saw him live in concert for his Djesse Vol 1. tour and managed to meet him after the show. He seemed chill and it was a good chat. I took a picture with him, which I later put on my dating profile. Not seeing much success, I showed the profile to my friend to solicit feedback, and she said: "You should take that picture off because your friend is more attractive than you." I told her who he was but deleted the picture anyway.
He's not a monster (or not as much of one) like the rest of the people we look at over here. He's sheltered, and either there's someone in his camp pushing this kind of stuff, or there's no one to tell him that this tech is awful. Again, bad feelings!
Yes whatever I think of his aesthetic priorities and the way his image is cultivated he does seem genuinely passionate about music and I do respect that. I'm sure I'd actually forgive him a lot more if only he didn't sound so ludicrously posh.
I think he can compose some really neat vocal harmonies but yes as you said his singing voice is grating and uh, honestly sometimes it's like vocal blackface
I totally get that! At least 10% of my motivation of following him is to see when he’ll drop his mask and be a huge appropriator, but so far that hasn’t seemed to have happened, except for this whole AI thing.
Veering completely off topic, if we're talking privileged young men with enormous musical ability coming out of nowhere and networking themselves into releasing crazy music, I'm rather into Hermann Szobel myself.
It's a pretty fascinating bit of history too if you're into this sort of thing.