Everyone on Substack is Wrong About Jacob Collier

Except Me

I was working on a piece about a couple of recent novels when I came across this post from Toby James about Jacob Collier. Mr James doesn’t like Mr Collier’s music:

For me, music is an ever-changing problem to be solved... The tension created by the ‘problem’ and the resolution found in the ‘solution’ is what makes music exciting, passionate, and relatable.

Jacob’s music doesn’t do this. It’s too clean, too clever, too perfect. I don’t hear struggle. I don’t hear turmoil or passion. I don’t hear an artist wrestling with something beyond themselves. I just hear precision.

Despite hoping to finish that piece on those novels, I can’t read these words from Mr James and remain silent. The distending force of my disagreement cannot be contained.

Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!

Comrades, I’m not a complete snob. If Mr James doesn’t like Mr Collier’s music, fair enough. I think you should listen to the music that you enjoy.

But I also think you should try to enjoy as much music as possible and try to hear the best in everything. Many of Mr Collier’s critics don’t give him this courtesy. In the bituminous lake known as YouTube, you can find videos such as:

Although Mr James is much more polite than these cleverheads, their criticisms are basically the same: Jacob Collier is too good. He’s an example of music theory killing creativity, he has no taste, he doesn’t know when to stop, he’s all head and no heart.

The excellent music channel Mic the Snare has addressed all these points in his video, and I’d like to use his response as a starting point. This whole discussion isn’t new — in fact, it goes back at least to the seventeenth century.

Let’s start with some things we can agree on:

1. Jacob Collier is a technically gifted player of many instruments and technologies including his own voice.

2. He knows a great deal of music theory and speaks eloquently on the subject.

For these reasons, he’s often belittled as the “music theory kid” even though he’s in his thirties. But the label does capture something: his childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. The bloke loves music. No one can deny that. And no one can deny that he really does seem to be enjoying himself.

This seems to be what annoys some listeners: like the work of the Metaphysical poets such as John Donne, his is playful, puzzling, maybe even a little pretentious. Although the Metaphysicals are today quite popular, for a long time they languished in obscurity before their reputation was rescued by TS Eliot. Their immediate successors weren’t as favourable. The criticism of them is almost identical to what people today say about Jacob Collier. Here’s Samuel Johnson:

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour… they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction…

… The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections…Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before…

What they wanted, however, of the sublime they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole; their amplifications had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.

This was John Dryden’s assessment of John Donne:

He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where Nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of love.

All this goes to show that tastes change, and lot of criticism often comes down to “this isn’t my style.” Jacob Collier writes complex, maximalist music. If you prefer The Clash, that’s fine! Art can be anything! Why should everything be reduced to its starkest possible form? Why not have fun with abundance and flourishes and what the grammarians used to call copia? Occasionally, less is more. More often, more is more.

Over the decades, pop music has become more harmonically simple and rhythmically predictable. Then comes Jacob Collier with every kind of opulence and instead of celebrating his creativity people complain? Surely it’s a good thing that he’s expanding the possibilities of what can conceivably go into a pop song?

A comment on Mr James’s post scolded Mr Collier for building on the struggles of others and Mr James responded:

“Building on others’ struggles” is an interesting idea - I’d not considered that, thank you.

I imagine him a little like people who upcycle furniture: it’s very clean, it’s very nice, it’s very pretty - but it’s not honest.

This is ridiculous. Which artist does not build on the work of their predecessors? How does anyone develop except by observing, copying, adapting, wrestling, and rebuilding the labours of others? Would anyone say that Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald were merely “upcycling furniture” because they mostly sang other people’s material? Gimme a break!

Jacob Collier did start his career by doing covers, but if you hear how he transformed them, you’ll notice that the end result is unmistakably his. No one else could do this:

In any case, I think Jacob Collier’s music does have the emotional affect that his critics claim is missing. This is especially true of his slower songs. For example:

For all the talk of Mr Collier’s emotional sterility, let me tell you what happened when I saw him live at a sold-out show in Sydney. With the other enthusiastic admirers, I spent a few hours lining up. There was no support act, so Mr Collier didn’t appear on stage until two hours after the doors had opened. He told us that he’d suffered an allergic reaction (dodgy Sydney takeaway, no doubt) and was brought back to life by an epipen. As someone who thinks about calling the morgue when he stubs his toe, I was impressed Mr Collier still performed his full set.

There were thousands of us — did we stand for most of the night so we could analyse polyrhythms and voiceleading? Maybe we appreciate those things; it’s more likely we all had some sort of emotional connection to the music. Even if Mr Collier’s records do nothing for you, being at one of his shows is a luminous, and ethereal experience. You become a part of a transcendent journey, most obviously when you sing in the audience choir:

Sure, there’s no struggle here — but there is wonder, delight, and the joy of making something beautiful with others. Not every work of art needs a bruise to be taken seriously. Some things can shimmer like the shallows and still hold the depth of the ocean.