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Necharsian
Best Ever User
Gender: Male
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- #31
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:06
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| sp4cetiger wrote: | | If someone is putting up albums that they think are mediocre purely for the sake of diversity, then their chart is worthless to me as a source of recs. |
I think it's a fair assumption to say that this never happens, no?
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samistake2ice
General Grievous Angel
Gender: Male
Age: 37
Location: Houston
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- #32
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:08
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Charts should be comprised of what you enjoy or what you think the "best" albums are. I dont think you should include albums of different genres just to advance your charts "diversity". Although I do think people should expose themselves to as many types of music as possible to truly understand your personal preference.
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| Kiki wrote: | | You're chart is sooooooooo american. It's like a diner in here. |
Check out my new review/pop-culture site MAD DISTRACTION
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sp4cetiger
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- #33
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:16
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| Necharsian wrote: | | I think it's a fair assumption to say that this never happens, no? |
Isn't that the situation we're talking about? You just said you didn't care if someone put actual favorites on their chart.
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denmarkman
Gender: Male
Age: 30
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- #34
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:30
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| Necharsian wrote: | | Honesty is nice ro whatever, but it still doesnt mean im going to like your chart. Im probably not going to waste my time even looking through a chart that has 8 u2 albums on it or 6 beatles albums etc. I mean yeah, obviously do what you want; it's your chart. But im not going to praise every single one because they put stuff on it that they like. Id rather look at a diverse chart and I dont care if theyre secretly not youre actual favorites. Why would I? |
Well no, I'm not saying you should. As I said, a chart like that isn't terribly fun to look at. I wouldn't go to it for recs and I doubt if I'd even take the time to comment on or rate it. That being said, I still don't feel like it's fair to say "This chart is bad" just because it doesn't interest me. If it's what the user likes it's what the user likes. That's the only point I was trying to make.
Then again, if to you "This chart is bad" equates to "I don't like this chart" then that's a different story. That's a fair interpretation, just not how I think of it.
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Necharsian
Best Ever User
Gender: Male
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- #35
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:54
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| sp4cetiger wrote: | | Isn't that the situation we're talking about? You just said you didn't care if someone put actual favorites on their chart. |
Maybe I worded it poorly. I dont judge on if I think it's honest, I judge on what I see.
| denmarkman wrote: | | Then again, if to you "This chart is bad" equates to "I don't like this chart" then that's a different story. That's a fair interpretation, just not how I think of it. |
It's less that i think a chart is "bad" and more that I just dont care about it at all. I mean I dont really openly shit on peoples' charts, mostly for the reason you mentioned (it's their biz not mine).
I suppose I dont get this weird "well id rather it be an honest boring chart than a fake diverse" thing. Who's chart isnt honest??
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Hayden
Location: CDMX
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- #36
- Posted: 08/27/2014 14:56
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Put albums that you like on your chart.
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Skinny
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- #37
- Posted: 08/27/2014 15:07
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| Skinny wrote: | | I've made this sort of comment before, but I fully regret doing so and would never do it again. People will like what they will like. However, I'm drunk as fuck and I can't put into words exactly what I want to say, but I'll be back here to elaborate. But sorry to anybody who has ever been on the receiving end of one of my "not enough black music" comments. |
I'm sober and back to elaborate. For some bizarre reason, this shit used to bug me. I don't know whether it was youthful exuberance, or just standing up for the genres I loved and believed were underappreciated here, but I would look at somebody's chart and the first thing that would often strike me would be how "white" it seemed, which is dumb as fuck. I certainly don't agree with the wishy-washy "in order to be totally free of racism you must be colourblind" bullshit that a lot of people perpetuate, but I do recognise that viewing charts as I was doing - on a largely racial basis - was unfair and pretty detrimental to actually convincing people to listen to the genres I'm talking about. It just made me seem like a little prick with a chip on my shoulder, and going around calling everybody a "racist", or implying it anyway, is never helpful in any situation ever. All it does it serve to antagonise people and turn them against you - nobody is too likely to want to hear what you have to say if they remember that time you called them a "racist".
As for charts, cultural diversity is something I value, but it isn't the be-all and end-all. My favourite charts are charts that contain a number of albums I like + a number of albums I haven't heard; that way I know that I can probably take recommendations from those charts and enjoy them. That is why I'm here, primarily. This site is my main source of fresh recommendations. I don't grab them from the overall chart, I grab them from users whose tastes align somewhat with mine and whose charts I can trust to throw up some gems. Often this means that I favour charts which are culturally diverse, because to some extent my tastes are culturally diverse (though it's all relative - my knowledge of eastern music is embarrassingly small). As for my own chart, it is what it is. I have no way of determining what my one hundred favourite records of all-time are. It would take weeks to come up with something accurate, and I have real life to worry about. At the moment my chart is made up of albums I have been enjoying since I rejoined the site under this username, hence the presence of a number of doom metal albums. It's a genre I've been listening to a lot recently, and my chart represents that current trend in my listening habits. I'll always be listening to soul and hip-hop and reggae and electronic music, so they get represented healthily too. It's probably not the most accurate way of displaying my tastes over the years, but I have no interest in doing that. It would be stressful and time-consuming. And so, for the moment at least, my chart just represents my current listening habits. I like to look at varied charts - I find them more interesting. But rating other people's taste is a silly thing to do. I've stopped rating charts altogether, and when I comment on charts I attempt to find the positives and maybe give some recommendations. I don't comment on charts I dislike - they're unlikely to have any recommendations for me, and so there's little point in me spending my time thinking of something to say about them. Even if I do leave any of you a comment bemoaning your lack of variety or whatever, I will always try to accentuate the positives somewhere because I like your chart enough to have written something about it. It's a chart I find interesting to some extent. And sometimes I like charts with very little cultural diversity. There was a chart of the day recently by a user called Floydian that I enjoyed immensely, but besides a couple of jazz picks it was mainly made up of that old bugbear of mine, "white men with guitars". But it was made up of albums I liked, and I knew that I would probably enjoy those that I was unfamiliar with. That's a great chart to me.
And as for this idea that there aren't many people here who take much of an interest in non-white music, that's just hogwash. There are a number of users who are extremely educated when it comes to hip-hop. Norman knows more about African music than I ever will, not to mention his vast knowledge of jazz. Mercury could talk for hours about the blues. dividesbyzero knows about the genesis of house and techno. joyofdivision has thrown some awesome disco recommendations my way. Gowi is one of a number of massive soul fans on the site. noWaxJim's reggae chart is a goldmine (seriously, go check it out). bongritsu and satiemaniac, among others, take an active interest in searching out and listening to music from across the globe, whilst bong in particular takes a keen interest in forms of hip-hop that most other users don't. Kool Keith Sweat has a number of great free jazz recommendations for anybody who is willing to take them. Yes, most of the forum regulars would probably say their favourite genre is indie-rock, but that doesn't mean that there aren't users who wouldn't love to discuss plenty of other forms of music, be they primarily white genres, black genres, western musics, eastern musics. When I joined the site, I was quick to bemoan the lack of talk about hip-hop or soul or reggae or whatever it was that week. I soon learned that best way to get others talking about a wider variety of genres was to talk about a wider variety of genres myself. The more I kept banging the drum for hip-hop, the more I started seeing people posting hip-hop albums in the "What album are you listening to?" thread, and the more it started to bleed into other forms of conversation. It wasn't that long ago that about 40% of this site's threads were about Radiohead or The Beatles. It is to everybody's credit that threads about these bands are now a welcome anomaly. So yeah, instead of going around and implying that people are racist because they don't have x amount of African American albums in their chart, or because they're more excited about the upcoming Arcade Fire album than they are about the new Jay-Z one, just continue trying to have conversations here about the music you like. People will join in. I now cringe reading some of my posts in which I would implied that people were racist because they refused to listen to hip-hop, or because they voted for Kim Deal over Aretha Franklin in a tournament one time. It's a silly assumption - the vast majority of users here are extremely open-minded, and that is to be celebrated.
Now I've banged on for long enough, and most of this probably comes across like the pious ramblings of a born-again Christian, but whatever. I've strayed pretty fucking far from the topic at hand, and probably said far more than I ever needed to. But yeah, for me cultural diversity is a criterion for chart quality. That said, it's a long way from the most important criterion, and there are plenty of charts I love that don't contain much of any cultural diversity at all. Peace.
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denmarkman
Gender: Male
Age: 30
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- #38
- Posted: 08/27/2014 15:52
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| Necharsian wrote: | | I suppose I dont get this weird "well id rather it be an honest boring chart than a fake diverse" thing. Who's chart isnt honest?? |
I mean, I doubt there are many users who take the "I'll put only cool albums on my chart so people think I'm educated and shit" approach to chart-making, but I imagine there are a lot of users who are at least somewhat influenced by what other people will think when making their charts. I wouldn't name names, obviously, since it's pretty much impossible to know just by looking, but I don't think it's out of the question that someone might feel somewhat differently about an album or band (either consciously or subconsciously) based on its perceived "cool" factor.
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Revolution909
Age: 29
Location: Galway, Ireland's 4th City
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- #39
- Posted: 08/27/2014 16:10
- Post subject:
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I think this happens to be a very interesting topic that can not really be answered or addressed very easily. I can see some valid points on both sides of the argument.
Lets get numerical.
Out of curiosity, I decided to add up how many albums by "non-white" (as opposed to the term Caucasian, which would/could include people from places like India, Sri Lanka, Somalia etc.) artists/groups are in my Greatest Albums Chart. For arguments sake, I will be considering a group to be non-white if 50% or more of it's members are non-white.
The results;
Total number of albums: 80
Albums by a non-white artist/group: 23 (28.75%)
Albums by a White artist/group: 57 (71.25%)
For the nationalities of the artists on my chart, see my chart.
So as you can see, there is cultural diversity there. Among the non-white artists/groups, they were mostly African American, though there were some of non-American African and Southern Asian descent. Whether or not it's diverse enough might prove to be highly debatable. When is such a list diverse enough? 20%? 30%? 50%? Enough so that it seems you haven't added some token diversity in order to avoid criticism?
Is this even a fair question worth asking?
I live in a highly ethnically homogeneous country (the population of non-white people here is 5.7%). Could it be fair to assume that someone living in such a country may not be exposed to music from people of other races/ethnic groups? Might their tastes and preferences be too "white", too "black", too "Asian" or whatever the case may be?
Time to put my neck on the line.
I think that the majority of people (especially amongst the sub-set of people who are fortunate enough to have access to and make use of the Internet*) are not consciously racist. Therefore, if a chart has little diversity, it is more than likely due to the fact that these albums are their genuine preferences. If a chart has very little to absolutely no diversity of race (in all senses, not just an all-white scenario), perhaps that person should sincerely ask themselves is there something inside them causing them not to listen to ethnically diverse artists.
However, it is nice to see diversity in people's charts. It often means that the person has been exposed to a variety of different genres (such as disco, funk, soul, hip-hop etc.). I like charts that are diverse in genre, so I guess one could extrapolate that to mean that I like an ethnically diverse chart too, I guess.
Personally, race or ethnicity does not come to mind when I listen to music. In fact, I felt a little uncomfortable categorising my chart by ethnicity/race like that.
Music is music and it should be colour-blind. **
*meaning that these people probably are younger (thus may tend to be more liberal than the previous generation), have reached a certain level of fiscal (have a computer and Internet access) and educational (intelligent enough to use a computer, access the Internet, make an album list etc.) attainment and have a certain amount of exposure to other cultures (through the great exposer-to-things-new that is the Internet).
This is by no means concrete, just a very mild generalisation that works more in a macro sense. Of course I know that there are wealthy right-winger Internet users who are racist and that here are people living in third-world countries who are not racist.
** EDIT: A clarification.
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Last edited by Revolution909 on 08/27/2014 17:04; edited 2 times in total
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Skinny
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- #40
- Posted: 08/27/2014 16:28
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| Revolution909 wrote: | Personally, race or ethnicity does not come to mind when I listen to music.
Music is music and it should be colour-blind. |
satiemaniac made this point earlier, but what about when you're listening to Public Enemy? Or Fela Kuti? Or Irish rebel songs? Or Marvin Gaye? Or Curtis Mayfield? Or any of the thousands of artists whose music has been inspired by racial issues? This music is so powerful because of the artists' respective backgrounds, and this idea that music "should be colour-blind" is absolute nonsense. I'm not saying your own personal enjoyment of an artist's music should be dictated by race (it definitely shouldn't), but to turn a blind eye and pretend that race isn't a major factor in popular music is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
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