Top Three Music Geniuses
Of The Pop Era
There has always been talk concerning who the true musical geniuses are throughout history. Mozart was considered a musical
genius, while Bach was considered as more of a technical composer, yet when you look at the overall body of work, and realize
which musician most music teachers based the teaching of composition on, one might be hard pressed to overlook Bach as being on
par with, though from a different era, with Mozart, if not possibly a step above. I'd pick Mozart, by the way, but that's here nor
there.
When we move to the 20th and 21st century, and more in particular this thing we call popular music, the term is still loosely
bandied about. Most of the time, it's used just because someone has released a new album that some critic thinks is really good.
But that's not how genius is supposed to be measured. Musical genius is measured by the musicianship, the diversification, and
longevity, and the relevance of that musician.
This knocks singers out of the mix immediately, if singing is their only vocation. So, we move to musicians, instrumentalists,
who just might be singers also. These geniuses must play more than one instrument, so that knocks out most of the rest. And the
other instrument can't just be a harmonica, so that knocks out many more.
When we really take a good look at it, there might be less than 5 real music geniuses in the history of popular music. I have
three that I'm going to talk about, and one of them is going to shock people.
Third on my list of musical geniuses is Barbara Mandrell; I can hear the gasps already.
Barbara
Mandrell was a country singer from the 60's through 80's, who also had a hit television show. Forget that she had the most
remarkable blue eyes for a second; this woman was a musical genius. She played seven instruments proficiently by the time she was
11 years old. She was a composer and lyricist, and learned how to dance pretty well for her TV show. She won grammys, released
30 albums but was included on 36, won Dove Awards, Country Music Association awards, and 9 People's Choice awards in 5 years.
All of this spanned over a 30 year career, and even though, by this time, she hasn't performed in 10 years, she's still a member
of the Grand Old Opry, which doesn't dole those things out on a whim.
The next two musicians are still putting out new music today. Second on my list is Prince, his royal badness. How many
instruments can
Prince
play? Almost all of them it seems, as, with his first two albums, he played every instrument on every song. And can he write
some songs; pick a genre, Prince has done it. Pop, funk, soul, country, heavy metal, ballads, soundtracks, religious, dirty, rap,
punk,… what can't this guy do? Prince has released 34 albums, and his most recent hit, of all things, comes from the movie
Happy
Feet, where another of his songs, Kiss, has been resurrected by one of the characters in the movie. Prince can sneeze and
make a song out of it. Not only this, but Prince is probably the most prolific songwriter when it comes to other people singing
his songs, as many of them he's written under other names (and I'm not talking about when he was that symbol), and sound quite
un-Prince like, such as Manic Monday by the Bangles, Nothing Compares To You by Sinead O'Connor, and has written for other artists
including Kenny Rogers and Joe Cocker.
That leaves number one, and if you haven't guessed this one by now, you're not trying. Stevie Wonder is the number one
musical genius of our time, which means, at my age, he's been the premier genius my entire life. What can't Stevie Wonder do? He
was proficient on 7 or 8 different instruments before he turned 10, when he wrote his first song. Surprisingly, he learned piano
after his first album,
Little
Stevie Wonder the 12 Year Old Genius, which produced the timeless hit Fingertips, and of course became proficient at that as
well. Like Prince, Stevie Wonder has covered the gamut of song styles, and of course added to that with jazz, reggae, and
classical. Stevie Wonder has produced hits for over 40 years for both himself and others, and has produced 29 albums along the
way.
However, his genius extends beyond music, in a way, which is what moves him up to the top. Because he was blind, he had to learn
different ways of composing his music, and of capturing sounds. He was on the leading edge of technology, working with
Raymond Kurzweil in the early 80's to develop a
computerized keyboard that could not only play instruments
that sounded like the real thing from the keyboard, but could capture other sounds, such as children laughing or bees humming as
examples, and then play them as notes on a keyboard as well. This alone helped change the music industry dramatically, as it made
it easier for other composers and songwriters to create music with all the instrumentation done because they could actually play
those instruments for themselves.
And Stevie Wonder is still relevant, judging by his last hit,
What's
The Fuss, which, coincidentally, featured Prince on guitar. Two musical geniuses together; who could ask for more?
