Quote:
Originally Posted by robertn
topicstarter:
1.) it's easy to generalize + it makes your point of view less interesting.
2.) hate is a strong word, don't throw it around like that.
3.) you're an elitist, get fucking over yourself and accept people make choices for themselves. some people can't appreciate bach's 'groundbreaking' music since they just can't be bothered. don't forget people are different and they have the right to be different.
|
1) Generalization makes a point both more parsimonious and more forceful (that’s why a lot of scientific knowledge relies on generalization). I could say 'pop music is simplistic, uninteresting, etc. ...
except certain more artistic kinds of pop music such as....' or 'I hate pop music,
except this and that pop music which is actually quite good', but the melancholy truth is that these exceptions are numerically negligible.
2) This point is related to 1. True, there may be a lot of pop music I merely dislike but don’t truly hate and even some pop music I actually like, but still, I do hate pop music
as a genre on the whole, with all its characteristics and implications, as highlighted in my original post - its meagre musical substance, its grossly overrated cultural value, the media hysteria surrounding it, the way its ubiquitious omnipresence numbs our listening capacities, the way it has changed our conception of music, etc.
3) Oh but I accept that people have the right to be different and choose to listen to whatever music they like. The question is, how great actually is the freedom of choice (with respect to musical genres) that kids growing up in this society have, if each day they are exposed to an almost exclusive diet of pop music? (The same could be asked for religion – how great actually is the freedom of religion young children have, if the Christian Protestant religion is almost exclusively imposed on them?)
Quote:
Originally Posted by robertn
music still has the same meaning as it has centuries ago, and that is to entertain (yes, and to 'worship', but put that aside for a second). people are just trying to make new music, problem is, everything's been done before, but not with beats and synths though.
|
It’s naive to think that 'everything’s been done before'; music always keeps evolving and there will always be people finding new musical territories, new ideas, new concepts, etc. (and I mean genuinely new, not just adding beats and synths to what is already known). Further, I strongly disagree that music is for entertainment purposes only. This may be true for pop music (which indeed is mainly made to entertain), but not for art music (and hence not for most classical music). Art is not just made to entertain audiences, but it is something that needs to be expressed because it comes very strongly from within the artist, but I won’t get into that argument again since I’ve already discussed it in other very recent threads (check out, for instance, the thread on Carter’s string quartets in the Repertoire section).