Entertainment For Lively Minds
I hereby propose
that there is no such thing as "rubbish" music. Sure, there is lots that may be uninspired, derivative or not to ones taste, but I can't think of anything I've heard that I would describe as rubbish. By that I mean something that falls below an acceptable standard, either in the playing of instruments or vocal ability. Live performance would probably be a different matter, and lyrics also, but in terms of recorded music is there anything that is truly rubbish?
Compare, for example, music with TV programmes or films which can have rubbish scripts and rubbish acting, or books which can have rubbish plots, characterisation or writing. I come across these all the time and switch off or put down, but as music, at it's very simplest, can be one chord lightly strummed, I find I can listen to it no matter how basic or lacking in skill. Even the stuff I don't like I can listen to, and I can't say the same for rubbish in other artforms.
So, is there any rubbish music?
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Yes, there is rubbish music
It's by Scouting for Girls
But...
He said "music"
Ba-doom tish
Also, someone I know once claimed that Scouting for Girls is a concept album and that's why it all sounds the same.
Oh yes
I saw a support act last night and assumed they were having technical problems. The horrible realisation that it was *meant* to sound like that came soon after.
Erm... would beg to differ.
Erm... would beg to differ. You haven't heard one of the local buskers.....
Some music - of almost any variety - is just so annoying I can't co-exist with it - I don't do tuning out unless volume is low. My brain seems to be wired that way. Normally it's something that's desperately trying to grab my attention - and possibly produced with just - possibly only - that aim in mind.
That what annoys me is entirely subjective I'd readily admit.
Lighthouse Family
I know some people must like them but, using your rubbish acting as a guide as it's performance that I'm querying, I suggest that The Lighthouse Family falls into the rubbish music category. Their records are so poor that whenever I hear them I try to imagine the producer in the studio saying "yes! that's the take!" and wondering what on earth the other efforts must have sounded like if that's the best and it's unlikely to get any better.
Obviously there is no such thing as a worthless genre
However, there are genres where there is an over-supply of sub-standard executions. Therefore there is more tired, uninspired indie music than tired, uninspired classical music because it's a lot harder to master the basics of the latter than the former.
Speaking as someone who's got more catholic tastes than most - although not quite as catholic as Fraser Lewry who can speak with authority on Balkan trumpet music - I can find enjoyment in everything except that variant of punk and heavy metal that is associated with the likes of Slipknot. It seems to me there are hundreds of bands operating in that kind of territory and they seem to lack all the qualities to which music aspires. In fact, they are an assault upon music. If anybody could think of a name for that genre, I'd be happy to sign up to the view that it's *all* rubbish.
Isn't that Nu-Metal?
Personally, I think that Slipknot have had their moments, and that you actually can't get that big and be entirely rubbish.
Nope, I'm wrong. Limp Bizkit confound the theory.
Faith No More
were great, but they have an awful lot to answer for.
It's the production
on that genre which baffles me. They all seem to have been produced by the same person. The guitars, and the vocals especially, all seem to have been recorded with the same settings on the microphones and mixing desk. The highly compressed guitars of one Linkin' Park song could easily be mixed into a My Chemical Romance song and it would fit like a glove as they sound so similar.
The vocals really suffer as the production squeezes all spontaneous life out of the performance and makes it sound polished, expensive, digitally manipulated, edited and soulless.
I believe that's because it *is*
one bloke responsible for vast tracts of the first flush of this type of metal, a born-again Christian called Ross Robinson.
I have heard of him
before because it was considered odd when he produced The Cure's self-titled album from 2003. Which I happen to think is by far and away the best Cure album I've heard. Clearly Robert Smith didn't allow him to use his usual presets on the mixing console.
dont know anything about production methods but I think
you are prbably spot on there. In fact ALL of the music (well 90%) I hear on my wife's radio station while driving around Toronto is that same horrible production. Its is unlistenable and downright ugly on the lugholes.
One man's trash...
isn't it just that you can't possibly like everything? For example, I think Living In A Box were rubbish. But I have a friend who thinks they're marvellous.
Living In A Box
I'd like 'em played at my funeral.
You having a cardboard coffin?
(No subject)
There most certainly is music that is rubbish
otherwise I would call myself a musician which patently I am not. When punk emerged on the scene most of the people making the music couldn't play their instruments to any level of technical ability however some did make music that was pleasing on the ear. However lets be honest there was also an awful lot of crap around too. Now it may not be fair to cite one example of music that is rubbish and the matter is somewhat subjective anyway but let me throw this one into the debate: The Faust tapes. Music? Not in my book. Rubbish? Most definitely.
DH, maybe we could call the genre you refer to as slipshod?
Faust
I listened to The Faust Tapes on my mp3 player not too long back and I loved every minute.
One man's meat is another man's gravy or whatever. Rubbish music? Jokkmokks Jokke. Check him out, if you dare.
I take the view
that there's music I like, music I don't like and an awful lot in between. Sometimes a song, an artist or an entire genre will travel along this scale from one category to another. Just because you or I like it or not, doesn't mean it's good, bad or indifferent. It's music. Enjoy it, or if you don't, play something you do.
Of course....
U2 seem to have made a 30 year career out of producing the stuff.
Eggnog anyone?
Anyone heard anything from that product-haired homunculus who was on last year's X-Factor? I'm steering clear of it myself, but Peter Robinson of the Guardian claims that his album is 'the worst thing ever made'. Go on, Ceepee - check it out for us and review only its positives.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/18/eoghan-quigg-x-factor-pop
I shall Spotify
and find the thread of gold that my theory dictates must run through it.
I Spotified
and, while it will never make it onto my list of top 1000 albums, it does have redeeming qualities, at least in terms of my original claim. The songs vary between OK and not bad (I know they are covers, at least some of them), the playing is of a pretty high quality and his voice is at least as good as lots of others. It's not original and may well be a cynical cash-in, but it's not rubbish in terms of what I was trying to say.
That is, listening to music that I don't like is never as painful as reading a book or watching a film that I would say are rubbish. Music can have a simple aim, to be music, whereas books, films or TV programmes have to do much more - they have to be realistic or believably fantastic; characters have to act in a way that is rational or believably irrational; plots must follow certain rules or at least break those rules in such a way that the deviation from the norm is a logical progression based on circumstance and character. By virtue of not trying to achieve much music can't fail, therefore can't be rubbish.
Fair dos
I applaud your dedication.
Incidentally, I was walking down the high street on Saturday and saw that Eggnog was performing in the local Chaicago Rock Cafe that day. What surprised me wasn't that they advertised a matinee show for kids, but that there was to be an evening one too. Surely he's too young to even be allowed in for his own evening concert?
Nickelback
and all other forms of "corporate"music. Oh and all those bands with constipated sounding singers who worshipped at the blueprinted altar of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other depressing bands of their ilk.
Here's some rubbish music
In a former life
I undertook music reviews for a website. The amount of dross that I had to listen to was incredible. Possibly the worst CD I received was of a guy who'd made a kind of ambient album promoting his spa complex somewhere in Florida. It made Kenny G sound edgy and hip but the real crime was that this guy was peddling his music as a complimentary therapy when in reality it was creating the audio equivalent of a landfill site on my tympanic membrane.
Believe me when I say that the world is awash with rubbish music it's just that the majority of these acts get no airplay.
Maybe there is a theme emerging then...
if spa complex guy made the music not for making music's sake, but to promote his spa, and the creators of Eggnog's effort made it simply to make money, then is rubbish music that which is made without any care at all for the music itself? For this to apply, everyone involved in the process of creating the music would have to 'not care'. Many people, including those posting on this site, don't like the music of, say, U2 or Duffy or Girls Aloud, but it wouldn't be fair or right to say that these acts, or their producers or songwriters, don't care because it is apparent to me at least that they do.
All music I don't like is rubbish
I have no problem with this, until, as can happen, I change my mind.I used to worry about not liking fashionable music, which, at my school included tosh like Bee-Fart, but now I'm old and ugly I will say without fear of censure that I don't like him at all. Apart from a few songs, like "This is the Day"
Isn't that the problem? You cannot generalise about anyone any more.
And the pleasure.
Is it though?
For example, I don't particularly like Frank Sinatra but I would not dismiss him as rubbish since he is liked by too many people whose opinions I respect and value (my Dad was a big Sinatra fan). Whereas e.g. Owen Paul (mulleted mid-eighties muppet) is in fact genuinely rubbish. Ultimately I don't really enjoy either singer but the distinction is that I will occasionally try again with Sinatra but unlikely that I would choose to listen to "You're my favourite waste of time" ever again.
Even Owen Paul knew he was rubbish...
...he couldn't even bring himself to mime his own song!
Because it wasn't his own song...
It was Marshall Crenshaw's. Paul was just briefly renting it
Oh, God. I feel a list coming on...
I know it's subjective, all this liking music, but really: rubbish music - where to start? As someone just before wrote: It's hard (or easy) to generalise, but what the hey, I'll kick off:
U2
Wetslife.
Boyz One.
Robbie F****** Williams ("Angels"? F*** Off. "Millennium"? F*** off. "Swing When You're Winning", "I Don't Wanna (probably) Rock, DJ". (Continues in similar vein...)
It's either Leona Lewis or the other one, so put them both in (the one about "Umbrella-ella-ella-ay-ay-ay". No, really, please f*** off. AutoTune? VoCoder? Who cares?
aRse Kelly.
A lot of rap and hip-hop stuff. I know there's some really good stuff - I have loads but it's hardly consistently good, with only Wu-Tang managing a half-decent consistent career throughout. The quality control on some records, both from back in the day and now-ish means that 3 or 4 really strong tracks get missed and end up on an album full of filler.
Bob Dylan (yes, I know I don't get it, obviously, but no amount of brow-beating will make me buy loads of albums because-I-don't-know-what-I'm-missing).
A fair bit of Radiohead (for pretty much similar reasons as above, but less albums to worry about, just the potential lack of cool for not getting Thom's angst. Soz, no, I don't. Must be REALLY shit growing up, middle-class in Oxbridge)(P.S. I'm not jealous. Wish I'd thought of it, etc).
Was gonna add Elvis but then I realised that I just don't like his stuff, but that doesn't mean it's rubbish. Unless you refer back to my comment about it being subjective.
Most pop songs, but then they transcend rubbishness by being naff. And so cool again.
Oh, God, I feel like an apology coming on.
It was a combination of Tourette's and a little too much Budvar that caused my fingers to over-employment of the "F" word. Soz. Mind you, I thought I was being a little clever at the time.
I'll try to think of some more pleasant and truly colourful ways of spleen-venting.