Is some music better than other music?

[wakibaki]

I think you have to take sales as some measure of quality.

 

This is uncomfortable for me because I don't like Madonna.

[InfernoSTi]

8+10=1

[wwaldmanfan]

I think you have to take sales as some measure of quality.

 

Not necessarily.

[wakibaki]

Not necessarily.

 

Well, obviously, I’d prefer to find some other kind of explanation, particularly in the case of Madonna, but I just gotta treat her as the exception that proves the rule. You can't expect to be too hard-and-fast in human affairs, so I'm just saying there's some correlation. Obviously marketing is a factor. Fashion. There are a lot of corrective factors that could be applied. Size of the market at the time. Means of distribution. Disposable income. But I tend to think, that of, say, a given artist's output, that what is best sells best and vice versa.

[InfernoSTi]

I think you have to take sales as some measure of quality.

 

Toyota Corolla

 

"Quality" means anything. High quality? Low quality? (Some other) Niche quality? So yes, sales is a measure of one type of quality: popularity by the masses. Same as the Corolla...

[AudioDoctor]

Yes, the music I like is much better than the music I do not like...

[petaluma]

8+10=1

 

How big and how many speakers are there in your avatar... If you have the proper amplification you could make someone's head explode...ie Scanners.

 

And 8 + 10 = 1, now I'm just depressed....Thanks for nothing....

[Teresa]

Yes, the music I like is much better than the music I do not like...

 

You nailed it, the music that resonates with one individual may not with another, thus it's personal.

 

In my opinion all music is good, as musicians bring enjoyment to those that like their music.

 

To me paintings are art, calling any music art is an elitist position in my opinion, to loosely paraphrase Star Kist Tuna “Sorry Charlie, We don’t want music with good taste we want music we like.”

[semente]

I disagree with Teresa; in my view if "bad music" is good for those who like it then view need to be educated about what's good and what's not...this is what I (try to) do with my kids.

 

 

Well, obviously, I’d prefer to find some other kind of explanation, particularly in the case of Madonna, but I just gotta treat her as the exception that proves the rule. You can't expect to be too hard-and-fast in human affairs, so I'm just saying there's some correlation. Obviously marketing is a factor. Fashion. There are a lot of corrective factors that could be applied. Size of the market at the time. Means of distribution. Disposable income. But I tend to think, that of, say, a given artist's output, that what is best sells best and vice versa.

 

And taste.

Quite a lot of people never reach the intellectual and spiritual "maturity" required by more elaborate and expressive music; they're satisfied with the plain and simple, mainstream, unsophisticated, superficial entertainment.

One can call it elitism or whatever, but the fact is that standards of the masses are very low...

 

 

This blog called "How To Save Popular Music" has an interesting two-part chronicle on ART VS ENTERTAINMENT:

 

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/art-vs-entertainment-pt1/

 

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/art-vs-entertainment-pt2-there-is-no-art-industry/

 

R

[semente]

P.S.: and unfortunatelly the (north american) entertainement industry has been infecting the whole planet with "bad music", dumbing youngsters all over with this deeply low-level barrio or 'hood culture...it's disgusting, criminal.

[Jud]

You nailed it, the music that resonates with one individual may not with another, thus it's personal.

 

In my opinion all music is good, as musicians bring enjoyment to those that like their music.

 

To me paintings are art, calling any music art is an elitist position in my opinion, to loosely paraphrase Star Kist Tuna “Sorry Charlie, We don’t want music with good taste we want music we like.”

 

Hi Teresa. I like what you say in your comment. I mildly disagree with you (or perhaps not even disagree, just look at things from another perspective) in only one respect, in that I feel art can be defined as "that which inspires," and I am inspired by lots and lots of different kinds of music.

 

I think many folks here are unaware of the true sophistication that lies behind a lot of our deceptively simple sounding modern entertainment. Here's a comment I posted years ago in a similar discussion:

 

Very entertaining discussion, crisnee and bissie. I see things a third way. Don't need to put down any form of music in order to enjoy another. And IMO it is always good to try to "stretch" yourself, not by being blindly accepting of pap, but looking for what's good, progressive, even groundbreaking, about things you haven't listened to very much before.

 

Musical geniuses seem to love a tremendous range of music, far more so than most listeners.

 

When most of us who grew up with rock and the Beatles disdained funk and disco, John Lennon put out a funk song, "Fame," with David Bowie, and said he loved disco.

 

Miles Davis dropped the musical giant Sonny Rollins as his saxophonist and hired a green kid named John Coltrane. Through the years Davis dropped more giants and hired more kids, like Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, Bernard Purdie, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter.... With Bird and Diz he was a forerunner of bebop, technically unbelievable but thought by many swing fans to be just noise. Then he pissed off the bebop vanguard by changing to "cool jazz;" left the traditionalist cool jazz fans aghast when he began jazz fusion; and the last few who weren't mystified by jazz fusion or didn't think it was rock and roll-ified electronic crap were likely left disgusted for good when Miles finally turned to funk and rap to mix into his fusion.

 

Dylan of course provoked a near-riot when he abandoned traditional beloved folk styles for that popular electrified rock crap at Newport, backed up by some Canadian (not even American, birthplace of jazz, folk and rock) hicks whose previous experience was playing behind an Arkansas bar singer named Ronnie Hawkins. (Hawkins got the Hawks, later The Band, to come on the road with him by promising "You'll get more pu**y than Frank Sinatra!")

 

And speaking of rock music, before disparaging it as simple, recognize that it managed to meld the rhythmic sophistication and exotic chords of the African tradition that gave us blues and jazz with melodic and harmonic traditions that originated in England, France, and Spain, and were passed down through Acadia, Appalachia, Louisiana, Mexico, California and Texas. No mean feat, that. Yes, instrumentation was elementary and vocals came from a few singers at most rather than chorales. The people playing the forerunner styles in Mississippi and Tennessee weren't wealthy enough and didn't have the population to put together chamber orchestras and large choirs. They had the sorts of instrumentation relatively isolated poor people could afford to keep themselves and their families entertained - guitars, upright pianos, maybe drums and even upright bass. And perhaps they'd have the use of a church organ, and a couple of friends for harmony vocals. It's no accident that this is the traditional rock lineup (with upright bass and upright piano now changed to electric bass and keyboards).

 

But don't mistake the simplicity of instrumentation and presentation for lack of sophistication.

 

Bissie, you mentioned Stravinsky. He famously *did* cause a riot with Rite of Spring. The unfamiliarity of the sound of that piece and others like Petrouchka was caused in part by the rhythmic sophistication ("syncopation" was the primary feature it was known by then) he'd lifted from the ragtime and Dixieland musicians who were at that time the foremost exponents of the African rhythmic traditions that made their way into blues, jazz, rock, funk and hip-hop. Yes, blues is primarily 4/4. But just ask Eric Clapton how easy it is to play a rhythmically "simple" blues by, for example, Robert Johnson. The drop step, the shuffle, the backbeat, the syncopation, the hesitation, the strut - all that is in there if you have the ears for it. On Miles Davis' "Get Up With It," there's a track called "Red China Blues" that sounds like any normal blues (if "normal" means master musicians and music that absolutely cooks). But listen - it's in 6! Yep, Miles is causing you to want to dance your ass off to a track in 6/4 time - maybe just to show he can, as a guitarist friend said to me. And of course a lot of today's hip-hop could cause some of us poor white boys to break our ankles if we tried to dance to that "simple, popular" music.

 

There's melodic sophistication, too. My father thought the Beatles were just noise, though he wasn't the sort of person to put down what other people liked. Then our backyard neighbors - a Juilliard piano teacher and a chemistry professor whose brother played violin in the New York Philharmonic and was a pretty fair amateur violinist himself - showed my father some of their melodic inventions, like chords that had never been tried in Western music before. (This started right from their earliest songs - listen to the last "Yeah!" in "She Loves You." That's a chord that doesn't exist in Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, yet it resolves the song perfectly.) In a few years, my father was even able to appreciate Frank Zappa! (Zappa's broadly satirical lyrics may have masked for some a melodic and rhythmic prowess that drew frequent praise from the likes of the jazz critics at DownBeat.)

 

Of course there is plenty of garbage, just as not every opera singer is Pavarotti (or the late Anna Moffo - opera lovers, if you can obtain something sung by her, do it). But why concentrate on the junk that is easy to criticize? Far, far better IMO to find the gems you've been missing. And part of finding those gems is being able to hear them as clearly as possible, everything from Pavarotti's cry of "Vincelo!" to Aretha's wail, to Janice Joplin's howls, to the edge in Lennon's tenor, to Gillian Welch's pure contralto.

[semente]

Hello Jud,

 

I don't doubt that there are alternative, rock and even pop music songwriters producing more sophisticated, complex work but these cater for small minorities.

Even in jazz and classical music, the most sold recordings are hardly ever the best ones.

A quick visit to Amazon's most sold list places very commercial peformers like Diana Krall and Michael Bublé side by side with Sinatra, Ella or Miles.

The masses tend to prefer something that's is easy on the ear and are happy to consume whatever the industry pushes at them as good or trendy...

 

Ricardo

[Zakus]

I disagree with Teresa; in my view if "bad music" is good for those who like it then view need to be educated about what's good and what's not...this is what I (try to) do with my kids.

 

And taste.

Quite a lot of people never reach the intellectual and spiritual "maturity" required by more elaborate and expressive music; they're satisfied with the plain and simple, mainstream, unsophisticated, superficial entertainment.

One can call it elitism or whatever, but the fact is that standards of the masses are very low...

 

 

This blog called "How To Save Popular Music" has an interesting two-part chronicle on ART VS ENTERTAINMENT:

 

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/art-vs-entertainment-pt1/

 

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/art-vs-entertainment-pt2-there-is-no-art-industry/

 

R

 

Are you for real? What gives you the right to dictate good taste. I may agree with your music taste, I may not, but that does not give you the right to ram it down my throat!

[Jud]

Hello Jud,

 

I don't doubt that there are alternative, rock and even pop music songwriters producing more sophisticated, complex work but these cater for small minorities.

Even in jazz and classical music, the most sold recordings are hardly ever the best ones.

A quick visit to Amazon's most sold list places very commercial peformers like Diana Krall and Michael Bublé side by side with Sinatra, Ella or Miles.

The masses tend to prefer something that's is easy on the ear and are happy to consume whatever the industry pushes at them as good or trendy...

 

Ricardo

 

People think of commercial success as antithetical to artistic merit, but there's no necessary opposition there. Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Haydn, etc., etc., were popular "commercial" music of their eras; and even Bach's semi-legendary lack of popularity as a composer during his lifetime was somewhat offset by his fame as an organist (the Eric Clapton of his day ).

 

Edit: And hey, just look at your own list, Ricardo. Frank Sinatra had teenage girls screaming at him and swooning before Elvis and The Beatles and Stones. (And unlike the former two, the latter two wrote music as well as performing it.)

[Zakus]

Hello Jud,

 

I don't doubt that there are alternative, rock and even pop music songwriters producing more sophisticated, complex work

 

Ricardo

 

So music to be good has to be sophistacted, complex, a very narrow view.

[semente]

People think of commercial success as antithetical to artistic merit, but there's no necessary opposition there. Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Haydn, etc., etc., were popular "commercial" music of their eras; and even Bach's semi-legendary lack of popularity as a composer during his lifetime was somewhat offset by his fame as an organist (the Eric Clapton of his day ).

 

I don't think that is entirely true because most Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Haydn music wasn't performed for the masses, with the exception perhaps of some religious works.

If I am not mistaken the first music hall for the "commoners" was built in the mid 19th century.

Even nowadays, with orchestras in most major cities of the western world, most people don't go and listen...

[Zakus]

Edit: And hey, just look at your own list, Ricardo. Frank Sinatra had teenage girls screaming at him and swooning before Elvis and The Beatles and Stones. (And unlike the former two, the latter two wrote music as well as performing it.)

 

Love it, +1

[InfernoSTi]

How big and how many speakers are there in your avatar... If you have the proper amplification you could make someone's head explode...ie Scanners.

 

And 8 + 10 = 1, now I'm just depressed....Thanks for nothing....

 

Hi petaluma,

 

I always enjoy seeing you screen name...that is (nearly) home for me...I grew up a little closer to the coast just west of Sebastopol and my mom is still there.

 

How large are my speakers? It's a big stereo. Speakers so loud, they blow women's clothes off! (i.e. The Italian Job)

 

The avatar is the left speaker, so x2 of what you see. The mid and woofers are 15" drivers, while the AMT is about 6" with a wave guide that is about 12"x16" and plays flat down to 500 Hz. So that is eight 15" drivers and two 6" AMT with wave guides with a sensitivity of 99 dB. There is no replacement for displacement...

 

Yes, with those two married, they are nearly billionaires....

[Zakus]

I don't think that is entirely true because most Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Haydn music wasn't performed for the masses, with the exception perhaps of some religious works.

If I am not mistaken the first music hall for the "commoners" was built in the mid 19th century.

Even nowadays, with orchestras in most major cities of the western world, most people don't go and listen...

 

So the masses "commoners" are the unsofisticated (sic) unclean.

[Jud]

I don't think that is entirely true because most Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Haydn music wasn't performed for the masses, with the exception perhaps of some religious works.

If I am not mistaken the first music hall for the "commoners" was built in the mid 19th century.

Even nowadays, with orchestras in most major cities of the western world, most people don't go and listen...

 

They were successful in the commercial market of their day, which was comprised of those wealthy enough to offer musicians a living.

 

Since music halls attended by the masses began, many (most?) of the people we revere today were selling out those halls then.

[semente]

So music to be good has to be sophistacted, complex, a very narrow view.

 

It's up to you to decide what's good for you, of course.

I find that most music that I listened to in my late teens and through college no longer fulfils or satisfies my intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs; the same is true for some of the writers/books and movie directors/films I admired at the time.

I still listen to some of it sometimes but mostly as background; some, I find, are good in their genre, others I listen to for nostalgic reasons, and I am still moved by both...

I also listen to ethnic music from different parts of the globe and while most of it is not complex nor sophisticated it has other atributes that dig deep inside, though at a primitive level.

 

 

 

P.S.: I'm currently listening to Harper's "Fight For Your Mind" while doing the house chores...

[Zakus]

I also listen to ethnic music from different parts of the globe and while most of it is not complex nor sophisticated it has other atributes that dig deep inside, though at a primitive level.

 

We in Adelaide have just had Womadelaide Festival https://www.womadelaide.com.au/ with a number of world acts, fabulous. Loved it but my album of the evening is Y from The Pop Group

[semente]

I've just had a quick look at the programme, it must have been fabulous...I miss going to festivals but the kids are growing fast, soon I'll be able to take them along.

[Zakus]

I've just had a quick look at the programme, it must have been fabulous...I miss going to festivals but the kids are groing fast, soon I'll be able to take them along.

 

Yes it was, set in parklands, under trees. Young kids catered for and encouraged!

[Jud]

We in Adelaide have just had Womadelaide Festival https://www.womadelaide.com.au/ with a number of world acts, fabulous. Loved it but my album of the evening is Y from The Pop Group

 

Love Bombino and Youssou N'Dour. Sinead O'Connor, well - no longer appeals to me. Buffy Sainte-Marie(!) - Was always an acquired taste, one I didn't acquire. Think Joan Baez being rapidly shaken (strident, yet quavery).

 

Several others I like or am curious about. Who didn't you know about before that impressed you?