On Feb 24, 11:40 pm, Jorgen Grahn <
grahn+n...@snipabacken.se> wrote:
> I've come to the conclusion that "music" means different things to
> different people. I don't get "serious" music and don't think I ever
> will. The poetry and the raw emotion seems to be absent.
>
> That doesn't mean that Bach isn't real music. But it also doesn't mean
> that "Vivisect VI" by Skinny Puppy or the pakistani album by Taken by Trees
> (the albums that happen to sit at my desk at the moment) aren't real,
> and worth bleeding for.
Raw emotion isn't an important component of music. In
fact, if I want to experience the kind of "raw emotion" that
would be invoked by listening to Skinny Puppy albums
all the time, I don't really need music at all. The same
effect could be accomplished by running arbitrary portions
of my anatomy through a wood chipper. (Yes, I have
heard Skinny Puppy's attempts at "music". I knew a
guy in college who was into them. He admitted point
blank that "sure, it's basically feedback and distortion
amplified, but I like it". There's no accounting for taste.)
> For music, I think Sturgeon's law works like this:
> - 1% is played constantly on the radio
> - of that 1%, 10% is brilliant but overexposed. The rest is crap.
I'd have said more like 0.1% and 99.9%, but sure, the
basic principle holds.
And yes, the stuff not played on the radio has just as
high a percentage of drivel and garbage as the stuff
that *is* played on the radio -- maybe even higher.
The difference is, if you're selecting music for yourself
rather than letting the radio people do it, you can listen
mostly to stuff that's good and choose NOT to listen
to the junk.
> This means you have to make an effort, or be stuck with music which
> mostly sucks. I haven't made that effort with rap, but I have reason
> to believe it's true there too.
There are a small handful of rap pieces that I actually like.
Actually, there are really only two genres that I absolutely
categorically can't stand at all (those two being country and
polka -- I would rather listen to an amalgam of used car
dealership commercials and construction-site sound effects
than country or polka). Most of the rest is vaguely tolerable
but not what I would choose to listen to on purpose without
some kind of ulterior reason (e.g., when I was studying the
Japanese language I actually listened to quite a bit of jpop,
not because I think it's good music -- it's mostly not -- but
because it had lyrics in the language I was studying).
But I've noticed that almost all of the really good stuff
is contrapuntal.