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Comment by keyist | Hacker News Reader

An interesting corollary is that jazz musicians tend to not have as striking an image when it comes to their marketing. Compare what you first visualize when you hear the names KISS or Flava Flav versus say Brad Mehldau or Keith Jarrett.

EDIT: This is probably due to jazz musicians taking themselves more seriously and wanting to be known more for their music than anything else. If a jazz artist enlisted Dir En Grey's stylist, it may invite insinuations that any success is due to marketing instead of artistic merit.

EDIT: To further clarify -- average person's image of:

Rock/Metal: shirtless guys with long hair and tattoos playing guitars

Pop: Pretty boys/girls in shiny costumes who can dance

Jazz: dude with curly hair holding a saxophone

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Have you noticed how much more sophisticated Lady Gaga's music is than the rest of what's popular these days? Her popularity has nothing to do with that. It's the way she throws in catchy verbal chants and is equally brilliant at visual and personality branding. And she as a great name.

No, I have not. All of her songs sound the same to me, the repeated nonsense stuttering included. And I say this as a person who as listened to thousands of hours of techno/electronica/drum and bass.

I'm not comparing The Fame Monster to the Diabelli variations.

She's (very) commercially successful -- her revenues have surely long since eclipsed the entire D&B economy totalled over time.

Among commercially-successful acts, her product happens to be a lot more richly constructed than the competition. But the Mac isn't loved for it's BSD kernel -- it's the complete package. Gaga's success should be instructive to anyone hoping to make a splash in any industry.

Hit youtube and search for 'lady gaga acoustic'. You may be pleasantly surprised, as I was.

I would have to disagree re: Lady GaGa's music.

I find her visual image and brand are very well executed and interesting. However, the quality of her music is just not up to snuff. If you compare her tracks to those of other contemporary pop producers such as The-Dream, Xenomania, and Richard-X, you will find that there really is much room for improvement.

That being said, I am almost certain that GaGa will get her act together and start collaborating with better producers and she will become one of the true great pop artists of our time

Wait, what? No. I haven't seen/heard Lady Gaga do anything that Kylie Minogue didn't do better.

It's like, hmmm. Imagine you have a bag of Starburst™ brand fruit chews. You eat one, it's an orange. You eat the next, it's an orange. You go through an entire bag of orange fruit chews when suddenly -- out of the blue -- you encounter a strawberry-flavored chew. And you start raving about how the strawberry is more subtle, more nuanced, more rife with unexplored avenues of flavor than the bag of oranges you've just consumed.

No. It's just superficially different. It's still ground-up pig toes, HFCS, and artificial flavorings and colorings.

I never thought I would see Lady Gaga and sophisticated in the same sentence.

> than the rest of what's popular these days?

Depends on your definition of popular.

More like Jazz marketing got undercut by the popularization of cool. That used to be half the marketing: they were superhuman levels of cool. Untouchable. Today's Jazz musicians are just nerdy.

Quite. There's a snobby attitude in many areas of art that fun = not serious, which drives me crazy. By fun I don't mean comic, but emotionally engaging.

Same in theater. I've seen umpteen productions of Macbeth resembling a 3-hour funeral because Shakesperian tragedy is Serious Business. The best production I ever saw had no set and cheap costumes, but Lady Macbeth was greedy slut, Banquo was a snotty jerk, Macduff was a vengeful maniac, and Macbeth himself was a gullible, venal coward. The tickets were cheap, the theater was shabby, but instead of a literature class we got a bunch of foulmouthed armed sociopaths fighting over possession of a shitheap. It was the best action movie I've ever seen.

Don't settle for bad art. If you get bored, tear up your ticket and walk out.

You're cherry picking. Sun Ra, Herby Hancock (he's jazz, no?) and there's plenty of "boring"/non-striking artists across most genre's.

You're so right. Jazz musicians are boring. Worst than that, I hear them complain every time that "the crowd was not in it". So, they don't even try to be less boring, they blame their clients for it. Way to go jazzmen!

This brings up a great point. Great jazz players are horrible marketers. Oddly enough, I think some of their "practice" time could be better put to use spreading the word or pounding the pavement.

I think they understand their market just fine. You're just not in that market, so you don't notice.

It is niche music, there is no doubt about it. The jazz festival circuit seems to be doing just fine, albeit, most of the popular festivals are outside of the US. Heck, most of the really good older jazz musicians moved to Europe 30 years ago, anyways.

I've shared an apartment with three jazz musicians, and I can assure you that they're not boring.

I mean, they are not boring in their everyday life. They are boring when they do a show.

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