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Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

Yes and anyone can write poetry too.

There are always 'rules' to any real discipline. If you aren't skilled in something then of course we say 'he is a natural'. But if you go up to talk to a 'natural' you always find that they worked at it an incredible amount.

Fun read either way though. Her comments on Ozzie were the most surprising to me.

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That's the thing, anyone can create poetry. But only a group of people of the same taste will appreciate it. There aren't any rules, if you suck at singing, your cd will probably be dead in sales, but that doesn't make it "not music". I've seen there's people for everything in the world, and when people start saying he is not singing right it's usually about the context. If you're gonna sing opera of course you need to sing opera-like, but in general you should be able to experiment in any sense. That's how new styles are born.

If you suck at singing, you'll wreck your throat and need surgery to fix it. That's a large part of what vocal coaching is for. In that sense, there's definitely a "wrong way" to do it.

Empirically that doesn't seem to be true for many areas of rock--- there are singers singing "wrong" with no surgery for 30+ years. Note that she incorrectly predicted that Ozzy Osbourne would have a short career based on the way he was singing, when in fact he had an exceptionally long and successful one.

From an artistic perspective, in some areas an operatic-style voice is just inappropriate. Operatic vocals on a punk band might be an interesting novelty, for example, but it's not usually what you want; you usually want something more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGjk1Y_j8QE

(From that perspective, metal was a fairly good choice for this interview, because operatic vocals are often appropriate in metal.)

Ozzy's a bit of an exception though, isn't he? He's literally being studied for his ability to survive quantities of drugs that kill most people.

You're right in that there are clearly people who have been successful this way, but it's a self-selecting group. We don't hear about the ones who are too hard on their larynxes and have to give up early.

There's clearly a safety margin in what vocal coaches teach, and I think it's safe to say that Ozzy must be over the margin, but the right side of critical.

A classical case of survivor bias.

I think if you look at what she said about Ozzy there is a bit of truth in it. He may not have had a short career but at the end of his career you couldn't understand him at all. Moreover, in that show he did a few years back he is almost completely incomprehensible. Maybe it's from drugs? Maybe alcohol? Maybe he did it on purpose? It always sounded to me like he had a cat in his throat.

You have to be really careful when extrapolating like that. For example, you could train as hard as Michael Phelps but you'll never swim like him; you weren't born with his flipper-like feet and extraordinarily long arms. What will probably happen is that you'll just burn out.

The people at the top of any field you will find combine hard work with genetic predisposition. They can be an inspiration sure, but imitating them is unlikely to yield the same results.

Among singers who have damaged themselves singing incorrectly are Freddie Mercury, one of the best rock singers who ever lived. Over time, he lost his range and stamina, and had to schedule tours in such a way that he had ample time to recover in between performances, otherwise he would lose his voice (this happened once).

I haven't heard him in a recent live performance, but reportedly Robert Plant has also ruined his voice. One person said that he "sounds like Winnie-the-Pooh".

I'm going to come back to this because I think it's an interesting point. Without "rules," how do you identify an example as belonging to a set? Rules for inclusion and/or exclusion must exist for the set to be defined. "I know it when I see it" is only really acceptable if you're a supreme court judge :-)

Specifically, we're talking not just about "music" here - which has an absurdly broad definition - but "metal," which falls under the category of western vocal-led performance. There are rules to this, and while breaking them might leave you with something that is ostensibly "music," it may well not leave you with "metal," "singing," a "song," or a "performance."

I feel that technique and skill are secondary to passion though with the arts. Music or poetry, I don't want to subject myself to it if it lacks passion. Passionate musicians and poets just happen to frequently also have the technique and skill down as well, but that's not always the case. Some of the more interesting artists are often the ones that break the "rules" of their discipline.

Alexander Pope disagreed:

"True ease of writing comes through art, not chance,

As he moves best who learns the steps of dance,

'Tis not enough no harshness cause offence,

The sound must seem an echo of the sense"

Learn the rules, then maybe break them.

Another famous example is Picasso. Sometimes considered the greatest painter to have ever lived, he was incredibly inventive and broke basically every "rule" in the book. However, if you look at his really early pieces -- he was a fantastic classical painter. He didn't start by breaking the rules, he started by mastering them.

The same can be said for many professions, certainly my own (programming) you should learn the basics and best practices before you can know when it is okay to break them. And like singing or painting it can come down to personal preference whether the rule breaking works or not.

Did I just equate my work to Picasso? . . . I think I did!

I don't think you need to master the rules before you can break them, you certainly need to be aware of the rules though! How else would you even know you are breaking them?

You don't need to be aware of the rules. You might not even care whether or not you're breaking them.

By "The Rules" I think we mean an accumulation of techniques and practices developed and refined by many people over time because they have proved useful. If one has any interest at all in the ones art one will surely be aware of its history and of what others have done. How else does one become interested in the first place? In this respect some awareness of this heritage seems to me to be unavoidable.

It doesn't necessarily have to go back centuries, though. If you're doing rock, you might be intimately familiar with the past 50 years of rock, punk, metal, post-punk, grunge, etc., without having a clue about opera.

I have always been fond of this description:

"Picasso didn't start with painting women with three eyes and square breasts. He knew how to paint a cow."

The things I write are always more interesting when I follow a simple structure (sometimes one I've used for a long time, sometimes one made for the occasion). The "creative" brain dump stuff is always wandering, unclear, and a couple thousand words longer.

Creativity always happens when I'm editing what filled the structure. The basic rules I lay down in advance make sure I get to that point.

And to bring this back to visual arts, it's rare to find a good artist who doesn't study references and do thumbnails.

You look at someone like Ozzy, compared to the others there. I say this as a Sabbath and Ozzy fan, he's got a rubbish voice. There's something there that makes him interesting -- his persona, songwriting and the other guys in the band carry his performance. It's not "breaking the rules" as such in terms of his vocals -- he simply can't sing. It's more like successful marketing.

Songwriting carries a band a long way. Ozzy is still coming out with well written, catchy metal songs, which is rarer today than it was 20 years ago.

One of my favorite bands is Maiden, mainly for the fact that their songs have the ability to capture the energy of their lyrics. Which is exactly what Ozzy has when singing Iron Man, Crazy Train, Bark at the Moon and even with his modern stuff.

Of modern bands I'm hard pressed to find bands that adequately capture the energy of their lyrics just right. I really only have Coheed and Cambria who can nail so many different musical styles with the right energy for their lyrics.

With no technique or skill, your passion means nothing. Passion is the content, and technique and skill is the delivery vector.

As for breaking the "rules", the theory goes you have to master the rules to break them. Expressed in a more technical way, once you know the rules, you know when and were it's ok to break them, and you can also adhere to most of the rules while only breaking one or two.

In music in particular, I often don't find this to be true, at least for my personal tastes. A good proportion of my favorite musicians are "outsiders" who went directly into doing unconventional things--- Roky Erikson, most punk bands, most grunge bands, etc. There are a handful of folks with formal music training (Bad Brains had jazz training, although it's only recently that's counted as "classical" training), but they're fairly uncommon.

In arts like anything else, to paraphrase Edison, genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In fact the difference between a really great artistic genius and simple talent probably is the ability (physical and else) to work extremely long hours without too much strain.

I couldn't agree more - here's my take on technique vs. passion: http://www.claudiafriedlander.com/the-liberated-voice/2010/0... Thanks for all the comments on the IO post!

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