RE: Music
August 17, 2017 at 1:19 pm
(This post was last modified: August 17, 2017 at 1:32 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(August 16, 2017 at 3:52 pm)Haydn2 Wrote: Why do the 'oldies' always think the old stuff was the best and that newer music is rubbish. It got me thinking.... it reminds me of religious belief. When these musical preferences are formed in the brain, they become fixed neurological pathways that are difficult (if not impossible) to break from and new musical forms probably just sound like beating white noise. The brain just doesn't have the ground work done to make any sense of, or to appreciate. The brain just resorts to what it knows and what it likes, what it understands and it assumes its just better music.
People tend to prefer the music that was prevalent when they came of age and first started enjoying music as such.
No doubt we cling to other views we also developed in our formative years.
(August 16, 2017 at 6:28 pm)Alex K Wrote: I'm kind of a music fanatic in my own way. The soundtrack of my teens was shitty 90s dancefloor music. I reacted by becoming a death metal and classical music enthusiast. But I kind of make a point now of being a music enthusiast and think about each piece I hear individually in terms of whether I can find something interesting in it. That doesn't change the fact that the music I will actively seek out is almost always from my favorite genres.
In ninth grade my music teacher asked us to put on music we liked in class, and the first guy put on some punk rock thing, after which our teacher went off on a rant about how this was inferior music. I wasn't a fan of that type of music at all back then but I remember that the teacher's reaction annoyed me a lot. Thinking back, today I believe that if you sit in your ivory tower where only certain sophiaticated classics even count for anything and everything else is not worthy of consideration, you don't really get music and what it's all about, the different roles it plays and purposes it serves in people's lives. So the ideal I aspire to is being not like that music teacher of mine, may she rest in peace. A GOOD musician will listen to a Beyoncé song and tell you what musical tricks and harmonies they employed to create the effect that they got, and understand why that makes it a successful pop song. Raising an eyebrow because it's not Mozart doesn't require any effort, it's faux sophistication in my eyes.
I was having this discussion last night with a dear friend after I came offstage from a 7-song, 30-minute set on solo acoustic. He was arguing that there is music that is objectively better, and I was arguing that it depends on what you want from it.
I get that some musics are technically more accomplished and in that sense I can say that jazz is better than punk -- it requires more technique and musical understanding to both play it and enjoy it. But the real point of music is to add enjoyment to our lives, so if it's three-chord punk that gets your motor revving, that's the best music for you at that particular moment.
It took me a while to get where you're talking about, where I listen to each song as it is without imposing my own tastes on it. I can find something interesting about any song I hear, although that might sometimes take some real searching. But it's a good place to be, as a musician, because through that active listening, I open up my musical world to a wider variety of influences that help me grow artistically ... even if it's "only" three-chord pop.
(August 16, 2017 at 11:14 pm)Astreja Wrote: There are a few more recent bands I do like, though: Blind Guardian, Foo Fighters, Green Day, and AFI are some that spring to mind.
Dave Grohl writes great songs. Very little of his stuff that I don't care for.
