I don’t understand what is so appealing to these self important nobodies making videos where they comment on other artists, pausing all the time to show their limitless expertise. This guy or that dreadful woman RebeccaVocalAthlete (that name alone makes me itch).
The longer they pause the video and yack the more advert revenue they generate.
This guy has an annoying accent and can't grow a proper beard. He also dresses like a 15 year old boy. Nothing about him comes across as though he's an authority on the subject. He's basically yacking away the same information we could get by surfing Wikipedia or a decade of TalkBass posts.
I see this guy on the YouTube sidebar all the time. I always get a chuckle out of the "British guitarist" tag. Like, who gives a F where he's from?
I think he's headlined Madison Square Bedroom a few times, but that is about it. He's probably in five Djent-core extreme metal bands that never gig but release technically challenging concept albums every six months on Soundcloud?
There are reasons that playing like JAE or Jamerson is rare.
JAE is extremely difficult to emulate. His bass lines and speed intimidate the hell out of me. There are people who can run his bass lines, but not many can do it well.
Jamerson is a challenge not only of technique, but of thought. He had a way of thinking that resulted in bass lines different from anyone else.
Copying Jamerson's lines and tone is one thing, but inventing new bass lines that sound like Jamerson's parts are something else.
Controversially I stopped listening to JAE's playing to learn things pretty early on. I've never played in a band that would give me the bandwidth to use that sort of tone, or to play that busily. Plus, there is something harmonically lacking in JAE's bass lines. He had the speed, the technique and the gear. He was the first bassist on the moon for all of those things. Harmonically he was pretty limited in terms of note choices and falling back on set patterns and runs for fills.
I don't pay much attention to what most of today's bassists are playing. That's not a criticism, I just don't listen to much of the music.
I sense that Bass Culture (tm) is being driven partly by nostalgia and partly by gear rather than developing musicianship. It is easier to chat shit about basses online than it is to practice scales. If you follow online discussion forums etc, you would think that Flea was an innovative up and coming slap bassist, Les Claypool was still the darling of metal, Rush were still the biggest band that ever existed, and guys like Stu Hamm and Victor Wooten are still these brave, boundary-pushing and enthralling players. Bass culture is becoming fairly boring, fairly facile and horribly stuck in the mid-'90s in terms of a lot of development and ideas. Some of the freshest new players have a style and musicianship that is a heavy nod to the Motown/Stax sounds of the '60s going into Tower of Power, etc.
