Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
Is there danger of being too good? Many people say they didn't like Steely Dan because it was too precise, for example, or that slick highly produced works are unauthentic or even worse, sterile.
My own example of this is the Hooters, who started with a *wonderful* 5 song local EP that everybody in Philly heard, it just rocked. And then we were all deeply disappointed when they did some of the same songs on their major debut. They had enough studio time to slick-ify their sound, which just ruined the songs, from our perspective.
Then there's, like, Ben Folds, who is clearly quite talented as a player and yet there's a certain lovely imprecision about how he plays. He tours with a grand piano, which must be a constant tuning nightmare, and yet he throws his stool at it at the end of the show.
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Whew.
Like Flint, I could write a novel about this.
I think I come down on this side of the argument: the cases you've cited are not a problem of being "too good", they're an issue of being very bad at artistry, and overcompensating on something technical. That technical thing can be studio editing, use of error-correcting software, or just highly technical execution of difficult playing.
Artistry is the craft of knowing what matters, at least that's part of it. It's knowing that the thing that matters most is this passionate thing here, more than this technical thing here. That's not always the case - if the guitarist hits a very passionate clunker of a note, then the technical matters waaaaay more than the passion. Artistry is knowing the difference.
I almost came to blows with an artist on an album last summer. That never, ever happens, I'm a very low-key guy. I know this artist really well, and we have a long history, so I treat him a little differently in the studio. We were recording a song that was wide open, exposed fender rhodes and voice, and that's it. The rhodes was bleeding into the vocal mic, and there were all kinds of things that were technically bad on the song. But, in the middle of the verse, he sang this incredible, soul-wrenching vocal that had a crack right in the middle of it.
The crack was wrong (technically) but it was right, in every way, for the song. He wanted to trash it and start over. I fought to keep it exactly as it was. I was right. He was wrong. He was too close to the project to see it. Eventually, he kept it in, and everyone who hears the record just goes nuts over that song.
It's not an issue of being "too good", it's an issue of knowing what matters for a particular song. Which stuff is important changes based on genre, the mood, the instrumentation, the specific song, all of that has to come into consideration, but it's the job of the artist to be very, very good at picking out the thing that matters.