The one modern artist who surprised Stewart Copeland
The idea of spontaneity is practically a lost art in the modern age of music. Even though plenty of fantastic musicians are making wild and inventive approaches to melody, it’s hard to really take some seriously when they’re wearing influences so close to their chest. While Stewart Copeland is far from the first person to have created a fantastic groove behind the drum kit, he believed that the only modern artist who makes anything mind-blowing is Jacob Collier.
Before unpacking his stance, it’s essential to know where Copeland is coming from. There are a lot of people who get into the business of making music just to throw a handful of chords together, but Copeland absolutely knows everything about what he’s doing whenever picking up drumsticks or writing out scores for orchestras.
After all, this is a guy who put together jazz-style pop-rock with Sting in The Police, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to make something inventive when he performed. Even on some of the more rudimentary songs like ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’, it’s easy for Copeland to get tripped up, like at the beginning of the second verse where you can hear him getting rhythmically flustered by what Sting is playing.
Whereas Copeland relied on feel and groove at the beginning of his career, Collier is the kind of mad genius that only comes once every handful of generations. While not pop in the traditional sense, half of Collier’s material has to do with him making the most inventive chord changes possible in a mainstream song.
If you thought Joni Mitchell or even Steely Dan could be a bit confusing by pop measures, you haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to Collier, from different polyrhythms going against each other to changing key into a microtonal zone that doesn’t sit on the Western keyboard of notes.
While this style can very quickly become too theory-based for most people, Copeland was shocked to see something like this gaining traction, saying, “What you can’t get is the sense of surprise of the guy who did it first”.
Adding: “Stravinsky blew everyone’s minds, but we can’t appreciate how surprising it was because we’ve heard all the derivatives, we’ve heard it as part of the mainstream, it’s part of the zeitgeist now. That sense of wonder of discovery, you’ve got to go to a new artist who is changing the rules of everything. You’ve got to go to Jacob Collier to be surprised.”
Even if it’s difficult to latch onto Collier’s music, it’s probably the best way for someone to get an education without actually enrolling in an institute. Yes, it’s not going to be played on the radio as much as Taylor Swift or anything, but there seems to be a little overlap between what he’s doing now and the way that The Police were pushing themselves forward with every record they made.
Most of the mind-blowing artists are now available at the touch of a button, but it’s not always about making a symphony. It’s just about twisting the tradition ever so slightly, but Collier is taking the rules and throwing them out the window to pave the way for something new in pop music.
