Oh the humanity of it all
First of all, this is my first post here at Let’s Touch 5’s, so thanks Marc for letting me take part in your little corner of the Internet. I’ll post something clever and witty later, but first I’m curious about something.
There are lots of ways to appreciate music. For myself and most of my friends, music is a fairly serious part of our lives, transcending a mere pass-time. We don’t regard music as being background noise that we use to augment whatever is holding the bulk of our focus, but we look at music as being an active pursuit; that is to say a focal point in and of itself.
But while we rarely talk about it (and in fact 90% of the time end up in the same place in spite of it) I think that we all base our opinions on what we like and dislike on completely different criteria.
Marc, for instance, is one of the most precise and mathematical people I know when it comes to forming an opinion on an album or song. He will meticulously listen to and study each track on an album, and then after assigning a “score” to each song he will determine an overall opinion of the album based on the collection of scores. The point to all of that is that ultimately he is judging every album he listens to on nothing but the individual merits of the songs it contains; he tries to create a totally level playing field.
Another friend (many of you know him from his leakage) takes a different tack to evaluating music. He focuses on the merit of the music, of course, but he also allows the “image” (or as he calls it, the “everything”) of the band to play a strong role in his opinion forming. What that means is that an obscure, but more artistically credible band like Swan Lake, automatically starts off with an advantage to a more commercially successful band like Bloc Party, which may not have the same artistic integrity.
Now I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with either approach, and in fact I think that I lie somewhere in between the two. If ultimately our enjoyment of music is derived from the feelings that it produces in us, then both methods are fine in that they are both a basis for forming an emotional bond (for lack of a better term) with an artist or album. Marc’s system through a connection with the sounds he hears exclusively, and our other friend’s system through the sense of experience he gets from an album.
So I guess my question is, if this is a spectrum with one end being enjoying music purely on its aural merits, and the other end being music appreciated exclusively as a fashion statement (not saying that’s you Drew), then where do you lie on the spectrum?
There are lots of ways to appreciate music. For myself and most of my friends, music is a fairly serious part of our lives, transcending a mere pass-time. We don’t regard music as being background noise that we use to augment whatever is holding the bulk of our focus, but we look at music as being an active pursuit; that is to say a focal point in and of itself.
But while we rarely talk about it (and in fact 90% of the time end up in the same place in spite of it) I think that we all base our opinions on what we like and dislike on completely different criteria.
Marc, for instance, is one of the most precise and mathematical people I know when it comes to forming an opinion on an album or song. He will meticulously listen to and study each track on an album, and then after assigning a “score” to each song he will determine an overall opinion of the album based on the collection of scores. The point to all of that is that ultimately he is judging every album he listens to on nothing but the individual merits of the songs it contains; he tries to create a totally level playing field.
Another friend (many of you know him from his leakage) takes a different tack to evaluating music. He focuses on the merit of the music, of course, but he also allows the “image” (or as he calls it, the “everything”) of the band to play a strong role in his opinion forming. What that means is that an obscure, but more artistically credible band like Swan Lake, automatically starts off with an advantage to a more commercially successful band like Bloc Party, which may not have the same artistic integrity.
Now I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with either approach, and in fact I think that I lie somewhere in between the two. If ultimately our enjoyment of music is derived from the feelings that it produces in us, then both methods are fine in that they are both a basis for forming an emotional bond (for lack of a better term) with an artist or album. Marc’s system through a connection with the sounds he hears exclusively, and our other friend’s system through the sense of experience he gets from an album.
So I guess my question is, if this is a spectrum with one end being enjoying music purely on its aural merits, and the other end being music appreciated exclusively as a fashion statement (not saying that’s you Drew), then where do you lie on the spectrum?
Comments
But on your scale, I would say I like music purely and totally on whether or not I like how it sounds. Fuck image, I don't care what the band's image is unless they're attractive ladies dancing provacatively.