 This video is sponsored by Raycon. Go to buyraycon.com slash polyphonic to get your new headphones at 15% off today. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. It's a sentiment that's been expressed in many ways by many people over the centuries, but Isaac Newton's 1675 quote is probably the most famous instance. People take it to mean that the successes of Newton's career only came from building on the brilliant minds before his. And I think that standing on the shoulders of giants is a powerful metaphor in the musical world too. No music is truly original. Each new artist builds on the greats that came before them. And I think one of the clearest examples of this is Hozier. Pulling from a history of jazz, folk, and rhythm and blues, Hozier has created his own distinct sound and established himself as one of the most compelling artists in the rock world right now. But one of my favorite things about Hozier is the way he openly admits his influences. He goes beyond just borrowing styles. He builds many of his songs around explicit references to those who came before. Let's take a closer look. Most of this video is going to be talking about Hozier's musical influences, but I actually think it's important to start outside of the music world. One of the biggest influences on Hozier lyrically is his fellow Irishman James Joyce. Joyce was a seminal modernist author known for books like Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. His writing is famously dense, filled with stream of consciousness passages and allusions to classical mythology. One of the biggest themes throughout the work of Joyce is criticism of organized religion, particularly Catholicism. And this is something clearly present in Hozier's music as well. His most famous song, Take Me to Church, uses religious imagery to talk openly about sexuality. The video is an overt criticism of anti-LGBT policy in Russia, policy that's heavily influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church. There's one Joyce work in particular that can be found all over Hozier's music, a portrait of the artist as a young man. In an interview with The Cut, Hozier talked about his interpretation of that novel. It's very much about a man's struggle to find his own identity in an oppressive culture of church, in an age influenced heavily by the Catholic Church, and a nationalism that he just wants to be free of. The themes of identity and religion play out all across Hozier's self-titled debut album. You can even see them in the song names, Foreigner's God, From Eden, and Angel of Small Death and the Codeine scene. Hozier even explicitly quotes the portrait of an artist as a young man in The Angel of Small Death. Alongside these themes of religion and identity, Hozier's music is intensely sexual. He told The Cut that this came from the way that blues influenced him. Blues is a very physical music. It's often about sex, whether it's through innuendo or not. It's often about the relationship between two people. So in that sense, in a lot of my songs, there's a lot to do with the interaction between two people. Blues music runs in Hozier's blood. His father was a blues musician in Dublin as he was growing up, and so he spent his youth listening to the likes of John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, and Muddy Waters. Alongside blues, Hozier draws on other traditional music, like folk and gospel, even pulling specific lines into his songs. Work song builds his chorus around Ain't No Grave, a traditional gospel song famously covered by Johnny Cash before his death. The worlds of blues and gospel eventually collided and grew into soul, where we find some of Hozier's biggest influences. This might be most obvious in Jackie and Wilson, a song named after the soul legend Jackie Wilson. Hozier told NPR about the influence that Jackie Wilson had on him. He's a big influence for me. He's fantastic. I think Elvis was the white Jackie Wilson rather than the other way round. Jackie and Wilson couches the soul reference into a song about identity and coming of age, more of the themes pulled from James Joyce. Hozier's influences play out even more blatantly on his second album, Wasteland Baby. This is most clear on the album's second single, Almost Sweet Music. Almost Sweet Music is a feat in lyrical acrobatics, crafting a beautiful love song out of the titles and lines taken from jazz standards. These references also tie into the themes of the song, as Hozier explained in an Instagram Q&A. Alongside Almost Sweet Music, Wasteland Baby also features Nina Cried Power, the most blatant acknowledgement of Hozier's influences to this point in his career. Nina Cried Power's title is a reference to the legendary Nina Simone, but it also goes on to name-drop Billie Holiday, Mavis Staples, Curtis Mayfield, Patty LaBelle, John Lennon, James Brown, BB King, Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Marvin Gaye, and Woody Guthrie. It even features two of Hozier's influences performing alongside him, Mavis Staples and Booker T. Jones. The chorus of Nina Cried Power is a reference to a specific musical moment in particular, Simone's stunning performance of Sinner Man. Much like Hozier's music, Sinner Man uses gospel influences and religious imagery to make a political point. And that's a really important aspect of Nina Cried Power. It's not just about referencing the musicians that influenced Hozier, it's about acknowledging their important role in social change and trying to pick up that baton. Nina Simone was a major figure in the civil rights movement, writing political songs like Many of the other artists Hozier name-drops in Nina Cried Power had major impacts on the civil rights movement, including Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Billie Holiday. Mavis Staples herself even performed at Martin Luther King's rallies. But the politics of Nina Cried Power are more than just the civil rights movement. All of the great musicians name-dropped were actively political in the name of social justice. John Lennon championed the cause of feminism, Bob Dylan was intensely critical of American imperialism, and Woody Guthrie used his music to try to take on fascism. Nina Cried Power is about the importance of these social movements, but it's also about the necessity for action, not just holding woke thoughts, but tapping into the history of activism to try to change the world. Hozier spoke about this on a phenomenal episode of the Song Exploder podcast, which you should definitely check out by the way. Moving forward from Nina Cried Power, Hozier has continued to draw on his influences to write songs for political action. Before live performances of the song Jack Boot Jump, Hozier has said that it was inspired by the music of Woody Guthrie, and Jack Boot Jump isn't just political in the abstract, it specifically references the Dakota Pipeline protests, student protests in Moscow, and the ongoing Hong Kong protest movement. Hozier has made a career by standing on the shoulders of giants. Rather than pretend to be something wholly original, he has embraced his influences, letting them seep into his lyrics, his music, and even his political ethos. By embracing the generations before him, Hozier has carved out his own unique style, and he's found a way to become a voice for political change, and that style and that political voice will surely carry on influencing the next generation of musicians to come. When I'm working on a video, I obviously listen to a lot of music for research, so I was basically listening to Hozier non-stop the entire week I was making this. That means I'm pretty grateful for wireless headphones. They let me listen when I'm on the go, when I'm doing chores, when I'm pacing the house trying to figure out how to end the script, and that's why I'm really stoked to be working with Raycon on this video. Raycon make affordable, comfortable, and stylish wireless headphones. They're half the price of any other premium wireless earbuds, but they sound and feel just as good, if not better. 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