Best Ever Albums

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

louisjwyatt — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:54:09 GMT

Author: louisjwyatt

Posted: 09/30/2015 23:54

HoldenM wrote:

As maligned as it is by critics, and "serious" music listeners, I absolutely adore Panic! at the Disco's debut, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. I think it's an ambitious debut with a ton of personality, a lot of energy, and a ton of seen-through ambition. Conceptually, it's pretty strong. It's quite literate. It's crazy diverse. I think that it's really easy to overlook, but it's solid from top to bottom.

Couldn't agree more. I was in 6th grade when it came out and I loved it (though I was too much of a metalhead to admit it). But it's great from beginning to end, and I think it was incredibly unique at the time and still is.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Necharsian — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 18:37:02 GMT

Author: Necharsian

Posted: 09/30/2015 22:37

meccalecca wrote:

a good point was made that the definition of avant-garde has changed immensely, so when i said earlier that some may be too eager to accept avant-garde music as "music" it was in regards to those who really test the limits of how we define music and not just some drone/noise producer making a record that goes against the grain of the mainstream.

Yeah I think I get what you mean.

Consequently here are two albums that I like listening to but might stretch what "music" really is.

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Recordings Of Shortwave Numbers Stations by The Conet Project

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I Am Sitting In A Room by Alvin Lucier

Both are interesting projects to me as is, but I genuinely like listening to both (though ok Ive only listened to the entire The Conet Project in one sitting once). But I might recommend people read about it first rather than actual listen to it, just because I might be a lunatic for actually wanting to hear them.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

PsychologistHD — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 14:04:24 GMT

Author: PsychologistHD

Posted: 09/30/2015 18:04

alelsupreme wrote:

i am the obscure music man and when i hear anything thats sold more than 2000 copies i scream wordlessly and painfully until someone changes it.

*immediately favorites all charts*

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

meccalecca — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 10:38:18 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 09/30/2015 14:38

permafrost wrote:

there's no right way to skin a cat, so to speak. :)

Totally agree with all you said. And I want to clarify that context is a vague term that I intentionally left vague. What I mean by this is the context can simply be listening history of various music. Such as, if you never heard any jazz before Ornette then your experience of Shape of Jazz to Come would be vastly different than someone who listened to jazz for a decade before he dropped that record. Both listeners are fully capable of enjoying but you could imagine those experiences varying pretty greatly.

a good point was made that the definition of avant-garde has changed immensely, so when i said earlier that some may be too eager to accept avant-garde music as "music" it was in regards to those who really test the limits of how we define music and not just some drone/noise producer making a record that goes against the grain of the mainstream.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

JOSweetHeart — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 22:50:35 GMT

Author: JOSweetHeart

Posted: 09/30/2015 02:50

What drew me to James Otto was his voice. To me, no one sings with more heart than him. 😄 😄 😄

Link

Link

Link

God bless you and James always!!! 😄 😄 😄

Holly

P.S. The second song here is the one that sealed the deal for me. The third song is his newest. 😄 😄 😄

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

AAL2014 — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 21:18:51 GMT

Author: AAL2014

Posted: 09/30/2015 01:18

To go back to the Coltrane quote briefly, I think with an emotional reaction comes an individual's context of the art presented to them. The emotional reaction can lead to analysis in ones own way.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

mickilennial — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:34:49 GMT

Author: mickilennial

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:34

I can't really fault you for liking early Train when the following are still very nostalgic to me:

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Link

Link

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

benpaco — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:31:03 GMT

Author: benpaco

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:31

ECUpirate wrote:

I will continue to enjoy the music I enjoy and I don't care if it's popular or something a little more obscure.

Awesome. All I mean is this really, but you shouldn't shape your tastes or expect that others would shape their tastes to fit in.

Gowi wrote:

Quote:

What are other's thoughts on the band Train?

My thoughts are pretty much:

Link

All of this actually made me crack up for the most part, but "viral" I actually thought was vaguely clever, not that it was internet viral, but instead that it was a virus (see: a flu not a malware) that he had caught. Not unique or original, but that that was what he was going for.

I like Monahan's voice, I like the silly lyrics for the most part, and wasn't huge on Drive By. In fact, and I probably should've mentioned this, I really wasn't big on anything post-Save Me, San Francisco but for "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" (talk about unoriginal), "Sing Together", "When The Fog Rolls In" (if I'm in an especially cheesey mood), and "The Bridge". I really like their first two and Save Me, and then the 3rd and 4th are alright with some very good songs. Ever since Save Me, it's been mediocre at best with the exception of a few singles.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:19:59 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:19

meccalecca wrote:

I agree, but simultaneously, some art which falls further into the conceptual spectrum requires a certain amount of context to really be appreciated, so I can be difficult to rely too heavy on only emotional experience.

Context can help us see and hear things in new light.

I completely agree with all of this, of course, but I think what's murky is that the things "we" as music nerds on the Internet have described as "avant-garde" is a very fast and loose definition that transcends previous academic boundaries, which were themselves highly contentious through the 20th century, as you and many here know. For those who aren't up to speed, a very reductionist view of one central conflict in academic music in the 20th century was the struggle between neo-classicists following Stravinsky and descendents of atonality following the Second Viennese School. Time has proven that these two schools were more talking past each other and getting heated (like most people engaging in academic debate on topics as broad as "what is/isn't music" "what is the function of music" etc.), as evidenced by Schoenberg, for example, in his later age teaching classes where he specifically said that he embraced tonal music despite just not being into it himself.

Sorry, tangent. Okay, so like I was saying, our definition of avant-garde has come to include things like noise, "experimental rock," free jazz, sometimes even just punk or progressive rock, two things that, as we all know, consider themselves polar opposites (see the "talking past each other" bit in the above paragraph). I think this is more a projection from a center, a "mainstream." We've roughly socially negotiated in the west that tonal lightly beat-based (until hip hop comes along, then more-than-lightly) music is our standard for mainstream music, and everything else is peripheral to varying degrees. I would argue that not everything outside the mainstream requires a conceptual understanding or even sociological understanding to enjoy its emotional contact, and I would even go so far as to say that a certain kind of appreciation or emotional reaction can be brought forward by just about anything due to the incredible variety of human experience. This is kind of a settled issue that I think Nech and secretdad are trying to allude to - we've universalized "sound," not even "organized sound" necessarily, as our criterion for "music" as a whole, in other words. I think conceptual understanding is a way to appreciate this music, but I'm still enough of a post-modernist to not say that it is inherently superior or more enlightened to digest music in this fashion, though, full disclosure, I do engage with academic music on its terms and try to understand theory as best as I can as a layperson or at least conceptual narrative when it's available before/during/after listening depending on my disposition. I think one confounding variable here is jazz music, where highly complex and academically "approved" forms have come into existence from an initially non-theory-based approach. Even in the height of avant-garde and free jazz, you had people like Coltrane emphatically stating that emotional resonance was his chief goal. I don't think that parsing each individual artist's intention is incredibly fruitful to my own appreciation of various pieces. But that brings us back to EAI and Onkyo, which I would argue, as largely improvised formats in a lot of contexts, take a lot from jazz and essentially take from the academic music world only John Cage's notion of all sound is music. Keep in mind too that Cage was probably the last human who would ever pull some Boulez shit and say that there was one form to music or one way to appreciate it, so it's somewhat bizarre that you use 4'33" as an example of a piece that requires conceptual understanding - part of the pleasure Cage got from performances of the piece was delimiting what we call musical appreciation - people's anger/indignation/eye-rolling is just as valid a response as a multi-page forum thread about the piece.

To take an approach to noise music, you have plenty of interviews with people (one particular one with Merzbow that is easily Googled but that I can provide by request comes to mind) who started out with this conceptual "anti-art" approach, real punk rock type shit, who came around to the idea of noise as a visceral, even danceable, experience. I think that transformation can serve as a microcosmic conceptual framework to evaluate the "avant-garde" in, however loosely or strictly we define it.

Just some musings. Like I said, I agree with you and definitely approach avant-garde music the way you indicate, but I always do it with my tongue in my cheek to an extent since I know that the great innovators who shaped our musical landscape like Cage and Coltrane would think it unnecessary to do such. I also think that immediately constructing academic music in any form, avant-garde or even baroque or medieval, is terrible practice for attracting diverse listeners to it. One of my introductory forays into EAI was marred incredibly by a feeling of not "getting it" and it being "2deep4u," so I messaged a very well-known critic of EAI music (critic in the sense of "writes music criticism about it," not "critical of it as a movement,") and his advice was to take it as subjective experience instead of trying to adorn it in intellectualism. It really helped me to get to where I am today knowing that there's no right way to skin a cat, so to speak. 😄

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Anti — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:11:24 GMT

Author: Anti

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:11

benpaco wrote:

Not upset if popular music is happening, but at the same time, "it'd be good to be able to relate to people who may not be into underground music" has just never been a problem for me. I don't really keep up with pop music at all and can still have conversations and make friends via music. And hell, my roommate doesn't listen to music. At all. And he does fine. He's a great guy who finds other things to talk about and that's fine.

I don't think that is what he means...

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Anti — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:09:51 GMT

Author: Anti

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:09

benpaco wrote:

What kind of party is that? lol. The parties I go to blast Fetty, Drake, Bobby Shmurda, OG Maco, Future, Travi$ Scott, and the like. Also throw in some Bruno Mars and ish like that.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

alelsupreme — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:04:29 GMT

Author: alelsupreme

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:04

i am the obscure music man and when i hear anything thats sold more than 2000 copies i scream wordlessly and painfully until someone changes it.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:03:36 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:03

ECUpirate wrote:

I will continue to enjoy the music I enjoy and I don't care if it's popular or something a little more obscure.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

travelful — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:02:01 GMT

Author: travelful

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:02

benpaco wrote:

Well I guess our environments are just a lot different at our Universities. It's irrelevant though, I enjoy music from a lot of mainstream artists like J. Cole, Childish, Kid Cudi, Logic, Big Sean, etc. I think they make good music and have a rightful place in hip-hop. Kanye is relatively popular anywhere of course. I've never been successful playing a Run The Jewels track without people wondering what the hell I am playing, which is fine. I will continue to enjoy the music I enjoy and I don't care if it's popular or something a little more obscure.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

mickilennial — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:00:06 GMT

Author: mickilennial

Posted: 09/30/2015 00:00

Quote:

What are other's thoughts on the band Train?

My thoughts are pretty much:

Link

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:58:46 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 09/29/2015 23:58

ECUpirate wrote:

I like to party a lot... So I consistently hear and discuss artists with others (whatever is playing, usually mainstream hip-hop). I also have beer pong tournaments or small parties on the regular where I live. Playing music many wouldn't like (despite it being hip-hop) such as Run The Jewels wouldn't be the best environment for everybody to enjoy themselves. I thoroughly enjoy a lot of mainstream artists, so I would rather bump to artists like J. Cole or Gambino in certain situations. Just something generally everybody will enjoy.

I have a killer beer pong shot and regularly attend and throw parties, and the social scene I'm a part of has never played J. Cole or Gambino, and many in that scene would insist on changing the music should those come on. You make social connections based on shared interests, so I get what you're saying that having an intensely atomized taste and imposing it on everybody won't win you friends, and there are better bets than others, but there's no moral or social imperative to spend your free individual time listening to such music. I've declined the aux cord in various situations, and in others, I've just played what I wanted and adapted to what people like. I have a broad enough taste that I can usually tailor my picks in small group settings. One of my favorite activities freshman year was getting some alcohol and chilling on the porch discussing politics and philosophy and playing chess. The aux cord rotated based on DJ and audience desire. Plenty of girls, plenty of fun, conversations were tailored, and so was music taste. No, I didn't play Antoine Beuger or Polly Bradfield in mixed company, but '77 Live put plenty of people on the porch in a trance, we made it through all of Song Cycle without vocal complaining, and I sat through plenty of Brittney Spears and Vampire Weekend that I didn't feel like hearing because, shocker, people with a taste for the experimental aren't all socially maladjusted troglodytes who assume everyone else lacks the ability to breathe through their nose. Stop fucking projecting, my man.

tl;dr: People have different interests, and humans are surprisingly adaptive social animals. It's not hard to find commonalities, even in the obscure. In fact, life is a lot more fun when you fish out commonalities instead of just assuming what everyone's preferences will be before the fact.

EDIT: Sorry to add to the dogpile. I started drafting this before benpaco and Applerill posted.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

Applerill — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:56:26 GMT

Author: Applerill

Posted: 09/29/2015 23:56

I dunno how people don't have musical contacts at university (or even out of it). Over the past two years at my middle-class community college, I've talked to girls about Kendrick, Hannah Diamond, John Cage, Terry Riley, Wagner, Chance the Rapper, D'Angelo, Death Grips, f(x), Violent Femmes, Slint, IceAge, and The Moldy Peaches. We act like our tastes are so obscure because they're not on the radio, but they almost always are more common than we'd expect.

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

benpaco — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:53:40 GMT

Author: benpaco

Posted: 09/29/2015 23:53

ECUpirate wrote:

Playing music many wouldn't like (despite it being hip-hop) such as Run The Jewels wouldn't be the best environment for everybody to enjoy themselves. I thoroughly enjoy a lot of mainstream artists, so I would rather bump to artists like J. Cole or Gambino in certain situations. Just something generally everybody will enjoy.

I don't party a lot, by any means, I've been to 1 real party since coming here, and Lie, Cheat, Steal was played. Everything from Kanye to Atlas Genius to Will Smith to a ska song (I think it was Streetlight Manifesto? I can't actually recall I just started talking to someone about ska when it came on) was played, and people liked it.

Anyways, let's try to underail this thread.

I really like Train. Like a lot. Their songs are catchy, lyrically clever (not genius, but stuff like "Flat like an Idol Singer" is witty enough to get a smile on the first listen), they're talented musicians, and I think it's unfair that they're not better appreciated here. What are other's thoughts on the band Train?

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

travelful — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:41:01 GMT

Author: travelful

Posted: 09/29/2015 23:41

benpaco wrote:

Re: Defend The Hated Music You Love

PsychologistHD — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:35:15 GMT

Author: PsychologistHD

Posted: 09/29/2015 23:35

Quote:

its good to be able to relate to people who may not be into all the underground music we are and I not be upset when somebody is playing music that's popular.

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