Why is it that many people here seem to greatly dislike Jacob collier?

Stephen Frantzich on celebrity:

Living vicariously through their celebrities, many members of the public are seen as psychological groupies, accepting largely uninformed and vacuous celebrity musings. Looking for a good story that will guarantee them print space or television time, the media are seen as pandering to the public with its fascination with celebrities, their families, and pets. Public officials are not immune to celebrity worship, at best using them to promote the officials’ own perspectives, and at worse treating them with unwarranted deference, never giving their testimony the critical evaluation it deserves.

Going a step further, the critics see celebrity testimony as thwarting objective analysis of critical issues. Celebrity agendas do not necessarily reflect public interests or societal needs. Living in a rarified world, most celebrities are seen as lacking realistic perspectives. Stacking the deck in favor of celebrity perspectives gives the celebrities more power than they deserve. From an institutional perspective, lowering the bar in defining “experts” has the potential for demeaning the entire legislative process based on gathering the best information and making the wisest legislative decisions. (Congress, the Media, and the Public, 116)

Frantzich is speaking of the effect of celebrities on American public policy, but I think we can extrapolate a little. There is an assumption we see repeated here time and again: that Collier, being an able musician, is an expert in music theory. To the public at large, who are largely unfamiliar with the differences between musical sub-disciplines (performance, orchestration, arranging, composition, theory, musicology, mixing, producing, transcribing, writing lyrics, DJ'ing, etc.), this seems like a reasonable assumption because they don't see the training, education and practice that goes on behind the curtain. When I tell people I'm involved with music theory, they still ask me which instrument I play because that's what they think a musician is. (Of course I am proficient on a few instruments, but that has literally nothing to do with theory.) Even among musicians, all I have to do to end a conversation quickly is utter "rotational array" and watch eyes glaze over. Coming back to the public, musicians occupy a particular rhetorical role in capitalist society: as artists, musicians are ideally intertwined with and representative of the moral value of freedom of expression. This is problematic because laypeople tend to attach this moral interpretation on musicians equally without interrogating their words and actions. Ultimately, this leads to a flattening of discourse. Collier can talk about some low-level abstract concept and his public will misattribute it to him and completely blow it out of proportion. It's excessive. A prominent and enduring example is so-called "negative harmony," which anyone with real music theory training would have identified as the harmonic theory of 19th century dualists. 12tone eventually answered this with a video essay, but we were all there from the beginning saying that Hauptmann/Oettingen/Riemann did that before most houses had electricity. The function of this is to give credit where credit is due and, more importantly, give voice to those who did the work while an uninformed public silences the originators by amplifying the voice of their celebrity. Public opinion of such a defense will likely be negative, but at least we're giving the public a more informed picture of the field. So, to revisit your words for a moment...

Some people's personas are so wrapped up in being into what other people are not, that when they come across something that is popular they instinctively look for things to hate about it - and they also want you to know that there is so much better shit out there that they can tell you about.

I absolutely agree: this type of person exists. But let's go a bit deeper. The concept of self that permeates 21st century capitalist society requires contrarianism in order to preserve the illusion of consumer sovereignty. The construction of identity around consumption is a compelling force, but also a polarizing one. To commit oneself to a brand or group of brands, or a particular product, means the rejection of other brands and products. This, weirdly but not illogically, resonates into other valences of social life. What does it mean on a social and political level to be a consumer of geek culture? of gun culture? of rap music? of world music? of expensive-ass organic groceries? of education? Where does Jacob Collier fandom fit into all of this? What is at stake for the fan to come in here and start accusing internet strangers of being envious, to dismiss educated (but sometimes not) rebuttals against his theoretical claims, or to beg the question that the man if disproportionately disliked by this community (see /u/joelzaper's OP)? A lot of these discussions are incredibly shallow because they are motivated by the participants' choices about their consumer identity. What does liking/disliking someone's music or personality have to do with music theory? Why the fuck is this thread even happening in this subreddit? We are /u/musictheory, aren't we? Beethoven sucked at math and kept poop in buckets scattered throughout his living space, often hidden beneath heaps of clutter. I think he had a reprehensible personality. A lot of his music is technically pronounced (I happen to like some of it too), and while he could compose well, I doubt he would have made a very proficient analyst or theorist. These are facts and opinions that exist without any dissonance in my mind. Whether Allen Forte ever kicked a dog in his life would not change my views on his theoretical work. Who gives a damn about appearances, evaluate theory as theory.

/r/musictheory Thread Parent