People need to listen to real music - Page 4

But you can't objectively say that the Mona Lisa was a better painting then Starry Night. Or any painting for that matter. It can be more realistic, more abstract, more complicated, more skillfully painted, more this, more that - but that's all it is. It is not "better" unless you consider those the tenets of a good painting. What everyone considers makes a "good" painting is different, and as such "good" cannot be objectively defined.

On May 17 2010 19:59 SoManyDeadLings wrote:
Popular music in general has very little musicality in terms of harmony, dynamics, tonal variations and other musical elements.

On May 18 2010 05:53 phosphorylation wrote:
To the OP: I understand and sympathize with your frustration, but you are not going to convince anyone by slamming down their current favorite music. You need to reason calmly and open their eyes slowly.

On May 18 2010 06:14 phosphorylation wrote:
To summarize: I believe we can objectively judge whether music is superior in terms of artistic worth. Many people seem to deny this, and that's what I have responded against in my long post. If you only value music for it's drug-like effect or purely on "what sounds good," while that's kind of sad (music can offer so much more), I cannot legitimately argue that a certain piece of classical music is better (in the non-artistic sense) for you.

On May 18 2010 06:14 phosphorylation wrote:
Let me clarify a few things here: I am saying these criteria need to be met to be judged better art (whether it is music or visual art). And, when people throw out the word "better," this is what they usually intend to mean: Is it better art? This is why I did not always bother to qualify "better" as to mean "better art."

However, that's as far as it goes. If you mean "better" to only imply that its better for YOU to listen to, because you prize "what sounds good" over everything, then i agree with you. It IS better for you. However, I, and many other people, care most about whether music constitutes a great/profound art. And here, there is an aspect of subjectivity. People seek for different purposes in music.

To summarize: I believe we can objectively judge whether music is superior in terms of artistic worth. Many people seem to deny this, and that's what I have responded against in my long post. If you only value music for it's drug-like effect or purely on "what sounds good," while that's kind of sad (music can offer so much more), I cannot legitimately argue that a certain piece of classical music is better than something else (in the non-artistic sense) for you.

On May 18 2010 04:36 phosphorylation wrote:
There is an objective truth to judging merits of art. However, these usualy involve diving into aesthetic and artistic philosophy etc (Adorno would be an example of someone who talks about this) . . .

While I agree with the OP that classical music is vastly superior to other forms of music, trying to prove that objectively/logically to people with far less exposure to classical music is going to be extremely difficult and something that even seasoned thinkers would struggle to.

But there is a problem with notion that everything in art is subjective and "up to taste." While personal experiences would predispose people to certain flavors of music, there is also a distinct and objective aspect of judging the merit of art (is it important? is it "good" art?)

On May 18 2010 05:20 phosphorylation wrote:
. . .However, this is not what we (as academics who study, analyze, and canonize art) point to to assess merit of an artwork or music. The majority of people aren't capable/don't bother to think about what really matters, because these aspects tend to be much more abstract, profound, and subtle.

So what exactly is it then? Of course, there isn't a clean consensus (there rarely is) among philosophers/academics about what it is that makes art great, but there are significant ideas that don't necessarily clash and I, also, have put much thought into it, synthesizing both what I have read and what I have experienced. Here is what I stick with at the moment:
1) Art has to say or express something. (To add a subpoint, the creator of this should earnestly believe in what he is saying, unless he is deliberately trying to create some irony etc)
2) How meaningful/interesting/original is this something? (How many times do we have to hear about a rapper croon about the "ghettos"? Was it ever meaningful for begin with?)
3) Perhaps, most important, how coherently is this something expressed? (Other ways of putting this: how effective is the rhetoric? how does it "sound" or "look" -- does it manage to communicate its message deeply and strongly to the beholder?)

Keep it mind, the third point should be perceived with great flexibility, as to cover all mediums and eras of art. For example, take an avante garde musical work expressing the confusion and illogic of the modern society. To coherently/effectively express this, ironically, we may need to express it incoherently (atonality? chance (aleatoric) music? etc)

The important point is that the most apparent parameters (music: harmony, musical style, instrumentation etc // visual art: realism, medium etc) of art only plays a part at the third part of the theory (is it coherent?) and, even then, is dependent and subjugated to the first two points.

Even with this outlined, judgment of art remains difficult. Since I am much more versed in music than in the visual arts, I can attempt this assessment on most music but struggle to do so in any other forms of art. Why is this the case? To evaluate what the art is trying to say (point 1), you need first to understand its language (the musical language = music theory + context.... the visual arts have a completely different language). This is why modern classical music is especially difficult to understand and assess; the language is complex and super-abstract (atonality, serialism etc) Second, to judge whether if that's meaningful (point 2) (once you have managed to decipher its language), you need a full understanding of its compositional background (is it important in the context of history of msuic?) and philosophy. Finally, to judge whether it is coherent (point 3), you need carefully look at its construction/details/everything to see how they culminate aesthetically/logically to express something. This requires not only deep musical analysis but also aesthetic judgments (ala Kant etc)

This great difficulty of both defining what makes art great and, then, evaluating it based on the definitions results in the majority of people completely oblivious to these profound, subtler, yet the most critical aspects of art. And this is why most people choose to just listen to "what sounds good" or look at "what looks cool." Often, what sounds beautiful happen to be good works of art (Beethoven, Mozart, arguably some Rock, electronica, jazz etc). This, of course, is not a coincidence, because art often attempts to express/speak about beauty and the sublime human experience. Unfortunately, however, this is not always the case. Often in popular music, "artists" produce soemthing that sounds cool -- due to its style, visual effect/shock/loudness/speed ("superficial parameters" referred to earlier) -- but is otherwise empty; no real meaning, no real originality, no real coherence etc.

On May 18 2010 05:10 ProTech_MediC wrote:
. . .But let me ask you this... why is the Mona Lisa on display at the Louvre museum in Paris within climate controlled conditions in a bullet-proof glass case - while your own crayon portrait of the family dog is hung on the fridge at your private residence?

It is difficult (and perhaps impossible) to compare da Vinci and van Gogh, but it becomes easier to distinguish in cases when the gap in quality is greater.

Burial - Untrue is "BETTER" than Wondergirls - So Hot

Maybe your definition of "better" does not exactly match mine... but the Louvre museum agrees with me more.

On May 18 2010 06:38 jon arbuckle wrote:
But maybe in two hundred years we'll get to see the liner notes to the Gee single on display in some museum in Seoul.

On May 17 2010 20:29 Qeet wrote:
beethoven is the pop of classic ~~

On May 18 2010 06:38 jon arbuckle wrote:


If you delve into aesthetic philosophy, you'll see how antiquated Adorno and Kant's point of views are. Adorno wrote in line with Cage and Stockhausen, two very experimental composers who did so much to alter definitions of what makes music/auditory art "art," and yet committed so much ink to keeping this within a composer-performer hierarchy. Let me address your next post:



This argument seems really similar to Immanuel Kant's argument in The Judgement of Taste, which is that, yes, taste is subjective and mandated largely by one's experiences, class, etc., but if everyone studied music, diversified their palette enough, they would all come to the same conclusions and like the same things. For Kant, this meant that you would be a wealthy 18th-century aristocrat living in Konigsburg, and for you it seems to be that they'd listen to and/or approve of classical, some rock, jazz, and "electronica" (not to be snooty or anything, but I can assure you that nobody who takes electronic music seriously uses the word "electronica"; "electronica" was mostly a buzz-word coined by the music industry in that brief period around the mid-'90s when songs like "I Got the Power" got really big).

i.e., your argument is both elitist and circular. On one hand, you gripe about rappers constantly talking about ghettos (betraying two levels of misunderstanding, because there's a lot of hip-hop that doesn't talk about ghettos, and there's a lot of meaning when rappers do talk about where they come from), implying that this effectively renders hip-hop/rap as not art. But you evoke classical music, itself a synecdoche of a larger aristocratization of art over countless centuries, where art was produced by artists in patronage to the aristocracy and for their immediate pleasure - poetic, musical, or otherwise. I mean, the counterpoint to your argument would be Slim Thug saying, Man, how long do I have to listen to Hendel, read Keats, and look at Monet play, write about, and paint nature? Damn, how long do I gotta read Shakespeare, listen to Mozart, and look at [here my relative ignorance to visual art before modernism betrays me] write about, play, and paint drama between kings and queens and kingdoms?

i.e. it betrays a staggering generalization on your part. These same criteria for what makes art "art," or what makes music "art," were applied to jazz from the 1920s onward by Adorno, Cage, and Stockhausen. Cage and Stockhausen put so much ink and thought into stating just why their aleatoric works, their visual scores, were not "improvised." They were "scores" given by a "composer" to the "performer" who played the composer's score, thereby retaining the same centuries-old hierarchy as before. Even if said score was an abstract-impressionist painting and Cage handed it to a pianist and said, "play that." Cage argues that this is still his score, that the performer is not improvising, and that the work in question is "a score that is indeterminate with respect to its performance."

If your whole argument on the existence of an objective standard of taste hinges on a certain method that is itself reliant on the listener making aesthetic judgements, then your whole method of objectivity falls apart. Pierrot lunaire, yes, is highly original, says something very significant with its atonal gestures, and says it so coherently because the entire piece is atonal. Bingo! Work of art. In a Silent Way, sure, is original in its usage of studio manipulation, gestures explicitly towards a future of jazz fusion, and is a coherent work of art in its nearly undetectable studio synthesis. Bingo! Work of art. And "Biology" by Girls Aloud is highly original in its polytonal composition and synthesis of musical genres, is highly coherent (it's like Charles Ives producing the Spice Girls if the Spice Girls could actually emote), and is highly original as a result. "The Int'l Player's Anthem (I Choose You)" by UGK featuring OutKast takes a familiar sample and transforms it into a piece of heraldry with significance outside the work (e.g. UGK is back on a track with OutKast and Three 6 Mafia; the kings of southern hip-hop are together), combining a beatless introductory verse from Andre 3000, a chopped and screwed verse from Big Boi, and boistrous, untouched, strong verses from Bun B and Pimp C, and combines this all into a track that's less than five minutes in length. And there's nothing there about the ghetto.

There is no objective standard of taste. Pierre Bourdieu wrote in Distinction: A Critique of the Judgement of Taste that art functions as cultural capital, to be combined with social and fiscal capital, in one's construction of their identity. People will like what they like, but they will be inclined towards liking one thing over another thing based on their faculties of "distinction." e.g. those kids over there are dumb gangsters whose parents have a six-figure income. Who are they fooling? They like 50 Cent .: I do not like 50 Cent. In that situation, I have distinguished between what I want to be and who I don't want to be, and 50 Cent functions as cultural capital there.

Here's a better example: I am a waifish kid in the 9th grade who really likes Celine Dion. Like, seriously likes Celine Dion. 4GB of my 8GB iPod Nano are made up of Celine Dion albums, live and in studio. She is my top played artist on last.fm by a few thousand tracks. I can sing "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" like it's my last name. It's the first day of high school, and I notice the kids with piercings, black hair, torn black denim jackets with Slayer patches on them, and I think "whoa, those kids are cool." However, I also realize that they probably don't like Celine Dion, and that the fact that I do would likely result in many months of weggieing and stolen lunch money. As a result, I start to dress like them, listen to Slayer, and talk like them; I also stop listening to Celine Dion.

That is not to say that everything is just a pose, or that taste entirely reinforces social and economic class systems (Bourdieu, a Marxist, argues this), but this is how people tend to construct notions of good taste versus bad taste.

(Disclaimer: what I just wrote is a very, very, very, very simplified and generalized depiction of Bourdieu's theories. Please read them yourself rather than solely taking my word for it.)



Not much to say beyond what I just said, but I wanted to point out that in even elementary logic this is fallacious reasoning. It's an appeal to authority.

The reason why the "Mona Lisa" is in the Louvre museum is because it's a museum and therefore will probably not care very much about my friend's year old photography/painting/visual art/performance art/whatever that was installation.

But maybe in two hundred years we'll get to see the liner notes to the Gee single on display in some museum in Seoul.

On May 18 2010 07:14 phosphorylation wrote:
Not really an objection, but I am actually surprised and almost proud that my argument is similar to that of Kant in that book that mentioned, because I have never read that book (or read much of Kant at all). Hell, if I am unconsciously thinking along the similar lines as Cage, Stockhausen, Adorno, or Kant as you say, even if my notions are wrong (I don't think they are), that's a pretty good company to be with!
You keep getting hinged on specific examples I provide and criticize the narrow, bourgeoisie context it roots from.
However, philosophers aren't that myopic (they are great thinkers after all) and neither am I. These criteria can be fairly used to judge anything, ranging from the classical canon of the 18 and 19th century; to the experimental music of Cage, Stockhausen etc; and to rap and hip hop.

On May 18 2010 07:14 phosphorylation wrote:
When I provided my examples about ghetto rap, for the convenience, I simplified my general criticism of it and that was picked up by you. I agree with you: rap doesn't always talk about the ghettos and there can be important things that can be said about where the rappers come from. However, I was providing a specific example of ghetto rap (therefore, nullifying your first criticism) and pointing out that they, almost always, have nothing original or meaningful to say about the ghettos, not to mention, how naively and carelessly they express their message.

On May 18 2010 07:14 phosphorylation wrote:
So, frankly, I am not really sure what you are arguing against here. My (and other philosopher's) criteria may seem like they have elitist roots (well, but no one else really bothers to think about these stuff) but the ideas spawned have a universal truth to them.

On May 18 2010 07:14 phosphorylation wrote:
You refer to Bourdieu. I won't really bother arguing against his critique because I need to reserve my brain power for the upcoming midterm. But I would like to point out that he is also a critic and a thinker just like Kant and Adorno are. If you are going to argue that his views are more legitimate because they are more recent.... well, that's just stupid.

On May 18 2010 07:35 jon arbuckle wrote:


Just because it's Kant, Cage, Stockhausen, or Adorno arguing something doesn't necessarily mean that it's a great argument, or that it's not stupid, boneheaded, and wrong.

Your criteria isn't great if it intends to postulate an objective process by which to judge something. If you want to use it to critique art from your own perspective, keeping in mind the tenuousness and subjectivity involved in doing that kind of qualitative, good/bad assessment, go for it. But don't use it to insist that there is an objective standard in play (you certainly haven't introduced one, especially to support the notion of classical music standing above all other forms of music).



No, see, you didn't provide a specific example. You said "how many times do we have to hear rappers croon [?] about ghettos? Was it ever meaningful to begin with?" Carelessness and naivete never played into it. And you haven't nullified anything when you say things like:

+ Show Spoiler +

Give me some examples about what you mean when you discuss mediocre "ghetto rap."



I'm arguing against the idea that classical is to be judged as greater than hip-hop or rock or whatever on some objective scale that you say exists and I say doesn't. You're backpedalling on your argument.

I would also advise you drop the elitism; a lot of people think of these things, as evidence by this topic and the general frequency of blogs about music on TL.net, not to mention other areas of the Internet.



Oh, I didn't know he was also a critic and a thinker. Thanks for pointing that out.

Good luck on your midterm.