Entertainment For Lively Minds
Does bad music matter any more?
Posted by spt on 18 February 2011 - 9:01am.
I still share my enthusiasms with anyone who doesn't glance at their watch and sidle off making excuses (come back...). But I really can't be arsed with the endless slagging off. Why not? I used to love it, and think it mattered. It can't just be age. I think it might be that there used to be lots of barriers to getting music out there, cultural, societal, financial. Anything that made it over all of those and wasted the opportunity was worth railing at. The barriers are so much lower these days (home recording, parental encouragement, media desensitised to shock...) that joining the ranks of the drably competent is just, well, whatever...
Anyone still got the energy to rage at dull music?
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And
Do you think it takes the edge off the good stuff?
Yes.
But I'm better at ignoring it than I used to be - mainly through avoiding all human contact wherever possible.
What is 'bad' music anyway?
Haven't we been here dozens of times before?
Personal opinion blah blah blah, it's all subjective blah blah blah, Kneecap Hill blah blah blah
not so interested in defining what's good or bad
but why I used to think it mattered, but now don't
I'll define what's bad...
Nickelback
Limp Bizkit
Three words:
Get out more.
yeah, well
That should be written above the doors of the internet.
But it's not for people that "get out more" is it?
But "Does bad music matter any more?"
Please! You're life is clearly far better than you think if you've got time to sit around dreaming up unnecessary quandaries like that.
Get her!
.
What do YOU
want to talk about Pax? Come on in, no one's listening. It's just me and you. What is it? What troubles you so? Never mind these people discussing whatever comes to their empty minds. What is it Pax. Come on. Talk to me.
My life is brilliant
Just coming up to a significant birthday and ruminating about how it has changed. That's all.
Anyhow, isn't complaining about someone raising unnecessary quandaries over music on this website rather like complaining about someone turning up to a Beetle rally in a Beetle?
I've still got
the energy but I've ditched the short sharp expletive outburst in favour of a long, slow withering and cogitated gaze that eventually turns everything it touches to stone.
I sometimes flick through the music channels on Sky
...pausing every now and then when something that turns my ear pops up on Vintage TV or MTV Classic...usually I just mither to the FPO asking "why is all music today shit?"
Mostly I don't let it bother me much. After counting 5 channels simultaneously showing that god awful Black Eyed Peas video, I found Sky Arts were showing Ziggy and the Spiders show from Hammersmith Odeon. Ovaltine went down a lot smoother...
I think you make a good point
When Sigue Sigue Sputnik were signed, there was real anger that the label decided they were the next big thing while for the same money, 10 other very good bands could have been introduced to us. That fame and place in the top 40 was seen as directly at the expense of other, perhaps more deserving acts.
As music is easier to make and distribute - and there's no chart/TOTP that everyone listens to - a crap song is now a crap song and we move on without getting hot under the collar.
I've got
so many lapses of taste in my own collection I always feel it's a bit hypocritical to cast aspersions on other people's likes and dislikes. Anyway, tastes change and moods differ and a song you thought was trash can be magical when you see your kids dancing to it a birthday party. So no, I don't tend to rage.
I'm always a bit suspicious
I'm always a bit suspicious of people whose record collections are completely tasteful. This usually means there's a cupboard somewhere in the house containing the 'offending' items or they have paid too much attention to what one's supposed to buy and it'll all come blurting out one day in a Celine Dionne binge/breakdown. Not that i'm advocating Dionne, but some record collections should lighten up a little.
I Agree
There is alot of bad music about fortunately good music is still being produced although seemingly less of it,the charts is full of crap IMO but millions seem to like it the lyrics of Funk Pop a Roll by XTC have never been so apt.
Funk pop a roll beats up my soul
Oozing like napalm from the speakers and grill
Of your radio
Into the mouths of babes
And across the backs of it's willing slaves
Funk pop a roll consumes you whole
Gulping in your opium so copiously from a disco
Everything you eat is waste
But swallowing is easy when it has no taste
They can fix you rabbits up
With your musical feed
They can fix you rabbits up
Big money selling you stuff that you do not need
Funk pop a roll for fish in shoals
Music by the yard for the children they keep
Like poseable dolls
The young to them are mistakes
Who only want bread but they're force-fed cake
Funk pop a roll the only goal
The music business is a hammer to keep
You pegs in your holes
But please don't listen to me
I've already been poisoned by this industry!
Rage at dull music?
Nah. I go searching for it. A good hearty laugh brightens the day for me. Spotify is stuffed full with the, er, stuff. There is even a Worst Of Spotify website to highlight the no-hopers. It makes the world go around sometimes when good new music is thin on the ground. Don't worry, I have plenty of good old music.
My 15 year old daughter is planning her 16th birthday party
and I asked her to give me a flavour of the sort of music she wants so I could brief the DJ.
Her list was interesting - she obviously felt she needed to ask for grime and dubstep but in between was the stuff I suspect she really likes dancing to - Britney, Girls Aloud, Bieber and the like.
As someone...
...who has just had Captain and Tennille's Love Will Keep Us Together pop up on their iPod and as someone who has just sung along to every word, I don't think I should take part in this discussion.
At the risk
of being ignored forever more. The Starland Vocal Band's Afternoon Delight has just 'shuffled' on my pod.
I'm not sure I belong here.
We should start our own forum
I have that and countless others of that ilk. In fact, in an office discussion today I discovered six Debbie Gibson songs on my ipod. And that's by far not the worst of it.
But then I don't care. I like Engelburt Humperdinck as much as I like Neu!, and Dollar as much as I like Leonard Cohen, so I can't really comment.
I was listening to Tiffany's cover of I Think We're Alone Now
the other day - but I still prefer The Rubinoos version.
Yacht Rock Rules!
I will always
seethe when I hear music that offends my ears and the amount of seething that people actually know about relates to the amount of alcohol I've had.
I don't get invited to many dinner parties any more.
Bile and single candles
I think this is a very interesting and timely observation, given the amount of bile spilled on this forum in recent weeks.
I have a Peanuts cartoon on display in my office: Linus (sans blanket, curiously), a black, starless sky behind, carries a candle, saying, "I have heard that it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness," with Lucy in the next panel facing the same black, starless sky, shouting, "You stupid darkness!"
As I grow older, I find myself drawn more to those who are positive: not uncritically so, whose minds are so open that anything can fall right in, to quote a wise man, but who tend to praise more than condemn.
Having said that, I enjoy listening to, and discussion with, people who are articulate in their criticism of a view, a work of art, or anything at all, especially if they are amusing with it, but the school of rhetoric that starts "It's rubbish [or some other, cruder term]," ends "It's my opinion and I'm entitled to it," and has little to nothing in between, does nothing for me.