Best Ever Albums

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

cestuneblague — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 21:24:04 GMT

Author: cestuneblague

Posted: 02/13/2016 02:24

I donno, the simplest way I can put it is a seed is planted to grow a tomato. The consumer can eat and enjoy the tomato, he doesn't need to find out everything about the seed in order to do so- although it can be useful in understanding exactly what helped grow the tomato you're enjoying right now, it also doesn't define exactly what you enjoyed personally (not just nutritionally) about this tomato. However, you still are in a way "consuming the seed" and what it grew, just as you are (indirectly) having a relationship with an artist when you're consuming their work. So yes there is a relationship with the artist, but it's not necessary to end up enjoying their work- just as what you get out personally from their art may be different from what they themselves intended. It's also wrong to eat a tomato and say you're eating a vegetable. Or a banana.

Now applerill is probably going to be the one that is always going to give many forum members fits, but in how he came up with his assemement of, in this case, Brokencyde's Im Not a Fan, if he absorbed everything he heard on the album, processing it all and coming to his conclusion about what he thinks this album is ultimately trying to say, than that's more than fine the result he came up with. If he's intentionally looking for that particular message beforehand and disregards everything in the work that may contradict that, then there's something a bit questionable in his methods. Given I have had talks with Applerill before about certain works where he gave an incredibly detailed anaylsis only to later admit he's never actually seen the work or heard the album, so I do unfortunately question Applerill's sincerity at times- but for the most part I believe he is being truthful in what he thinks Im Not a Fan is ultimately about, what it's trying to say. And yes though some more detailed explanations and conclusions would always help make it feel a bit more geniune and truthful in the end. Same goes for any sort of thoughtful artistic critique.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:54:29 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 14:54

I think interviews with artists count more as context around the work. I consider the text to be the art object itself. That can be defined in different ways, I guess, and maybe a performance artist like Lou Reed or David Bowie would need their interviews taken into account as part of the art, but I generally say that the recorded sound is the text as far as music goes. Context, for me, is historical epoch it was released in, anything regarding the artist (while making the album or in general), etc. The point here being that it's possible to recover a cassette tape with no markings or indications of who made it and still analyze it as text. The more context you can have, the better your interpretation, but for all but the upper sliver of pop acts who even get to the point of having published interviews (granted, a lower threshold in the days of the Internet), this context is usually impossible.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Applerill — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:48:13 GMT

Author: Applerill

Posted: 02/11/2016 14:48

Hmm, I'm still trying to figure out how much this (really great) advice is in regards to my "pop" reviews. The original reason I got into pop criticism in middle school was because I couldn't find anyone else writing about it, and in that sense it really did seem like everything was from the text. But that also meant that it was really hard to verify whether any of my thoughts (whether they be through intuition or deep contemplation) held any merit. of course, I could use primary sources like interviews to assume things (as I did in a piece on Vanessa Carlton, where I suggested that her early music was influenced by depression. I still don't know what to think of that decision), but that only goes so far.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:37:18 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 14:37

Exactly. The interpretation process, whether you're interpreting data or more qualitative things like art, is a creative process of its own, open to subjectivity and relatively boundless if you just say it's up to individual intuition. I say that that's a positive thing, but for us to then continue to the level of dialogue or criticism (which I think is inherently discursive) and move out of our own minds, we have to demonstrate what parts of something made us come to that interpretation. In that Hamlet example, you can have myriad correct and conflicting interpretations of what Hamlet's character is thinking/doing/desiring/whatever. These perspectives can all be valid, but they all require an assessment of the text itself in order to actually come to an argument. It's not a 1:1 linear process of argumentation, and it's not a simple description of a work's formal elements. I also hasten to add that artistic interpretation is not a scientific process where you're (attempting to be) deriving an ultimate truth at the end, you're just substantiating and grounding your opinion. But it incorporates such things to make it where you aren't essentially, like I said, writing diary entries under the pretense of analyzing or interpreting art. Things like theory and context also come in at other levels to help frame our criticisms further and put them in dialogue with other opinions even more directly.

Let's take Pentagonal's assessment of the Not Waving album in the ALC this week. I don't buy his interpretation of the album at all, but he provided examples of where the music turned in certain ways and gave his impression of what that represented. Because music is a much more abstract medium than, say, literature, where there's a general consensus on what signifiers mean, these more imaginative interpretations are all the easier to arrive at. I disagree with Pentagonal's assessment, but I find it valid because he gave examples in the music that clarified his interpretation. I don't think he's convinced that's "the ultimate true meaning," and I'm not either, but that's not the point because it's art where there's no such thing.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

meccalecca — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:31:28 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/11/2016 14:31

Satie wrote:

I'm really not trying to come off as irritated or pissy, but I'm just getting frustrated because I feel like I'm answering the same question time and again in as many ways as I know how. Maybe someone else can phrase it in a way that's more useful.

I was honestly having a tough time getting what you were saying as well. I think this time around I'm much closer to understanding thanks to your Shakespeare example. I guess what you're saying is that interpretation needs grounding. If a critic is stating that a song is, for example, an "anti-feministic ballad", then it's imperative that the critic be able to provide reasoning based around the more indisputable characteristics of the song [lyrics, elements of the songwriting, history, etc]. We need to be provided some understanding of how critics arrive at less than obvious theories/perceptions like that of Applerill regarding Brokencyde.

If this is what you're saying at all, I agree. A good critic doesn't just make claims but provides logical reasoning regarding how they were led to believe those claims. Otherwise, why should we believe them.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RockyRaccoon — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:20:08 GMT

Author: RockyRaccoon

Posted: 02/11/2016 14:20

Satie wrote:

If I want to claim Hamlet has an Oedipus complex, I find lines in the play that hint at that and make an argument. My point is that I don't just feel it out, say I think Hamlet is a unicorn on a quest to find the Holy Grail, and call it my personal conviction. There's no arriving at a solid truth, but I would make the contention that certain things can be demonstrated as "more true" interpretations of a work.

I think this is a great analogy and exactly how I feel, just communicated a lot better than I could.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Applerill — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 07:30:20 GMT

Author: Applerill

Posted: 02/11/2016 12:30

I hope I don't sound too anti-intellectual when saying this, but the casual nature of this site makes it easy for me to completely disregard these conversations. Often I want to be unpretentious at the same time I'm being pseudo-academic, so if I hear an EAI album I love, I try to channel my hero Neil Weaver and say something like "this stuff's dope". Satie's points are completely valid, though.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RoundTheBend — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 01:24:09 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 02/11/2016 06:24

I think we are having a huge misunderstanding and I think I'll just leave it at that. I wrote a big thing and then realized it probably won't be understood and frustrate you more, so we'll just leave it at that.

Formalism for me = focuses on evidence. I thought you said: I'm not advocating formalism unless every single "evidence-based" (lack of a better term) literary criticism approach is somehow encapsulated in formalism.. Which I interpreted as you focus on evidence.

I probably am over simplifying things and therefore miscommunicating what I mean.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:50:55 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 05:50

No, I am not part of the formalist camp, and there is no empiricism besides that notes and lyrics empirically exist I guess as my point of departure. I have not implied anything close to your characterization of my perspective a single time. I have just said that individual interpretations, subjective interpretations, which are the centerpieces of useful art criticism, need to be constrained by the reality of a text, its context, and the body of theory applicable to that subject field. In other words, the way that the western academy has worked for centuries and centuries, through dialogue between perspectives restrained more or less by accepted frameworks of interpretation and individual objects of interpretation.

In other words, if I want to know what a Shakespeare play is about, I should be drawing on specific passages from the text and the academic historical literature to understand the context in which Shakespeare was writing. If I want to claim Hamlet has an Oedipus complex, I find lines in the play that hint at that and make an argument. My point is that I don't just feel it out, say I think Hamlet is a unicorn on a quest to find the Holy Grail, and call it my personal conviction. There's no arriving at a solid truth, but I would make the contention that certain things can be demonstrated as "more true" interpretations of a work. Think of it as the western legal system or statistics, where we are always approaching conclusions but never arrive at 100% certainty. Granted, in these cases, there's a binary resolution in the former case and a quantitative base in the latter, but I think you can follow what I'm saying here without too much stretching.

No, that case is not formalism. Your stated definition says formalism disregards, among other things, content. I am not interested in the form of music except as a point of departure for interpretation. Alone, that is a specific, dry, descriptive practice. I am interested in artistic interpretation. I really think you are intentionally misreading my posts or else thinking there's some fundamental binary between reader response theory and formalism and no other approaches to artistic criticism. You've been hung up on your own analytical schema, neither of which is particularly useful in my opinion, and ignoring what I've been trying to explain by just trying to apply your own framework to it. As I've stated for a couple pages now, I think complete solipsism is useless in the context of having a discourse about a song. If that's how you approach music, more power to you, I don't care, but it's not art criticism. It's art consumption. Reader response theory I guess is roughly this, but I've never read academic literary criticism that was essentially a diary entry about reading Shakespeare, so I have no frame of reference for what this would even look like in a more rigorous context. I also think complete myopic inspection of the form of language or music or materials in archaeological contexts is useful for description but not much else.

I'm really not trying to come off as irritated or pissy, but I'm just getting frustrated because I feel like I'm answering the same question time and again in as many ways as I know how. Maybe someone else can phrase it in a way that's more useful.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RoundTheBend — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:38:38 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 02/11/2016 05:38

Satie wrote:

I detailed this in a very, very long post, but to iterate for the final time, because I really would rather not keep repeating myself, the evidence I mean to draw from includes the text itself, demonstrable contexts, and bodies of theory around similar texts. I see these as the three fundamental levels of analysis for a given piece of art or for material culture in archaeological contexts. In a serious piece of artistic criticism, one's subjective response to the art should be privileged, but it should also be constrained by these levels of what I'm calling "evidence." I use the term evidence because I feel these three things root us more firmly than vague psychological prescriptions or entirely solipsistic meanderings. You're going to have to rephrase that example because it's a mess to read and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. I'm not interested in running correlation studies for a population's 1-5 survey response to a piece of art, if that's what you're asking. Nor am I trying to develop a predictive model for how certain kinds of art make audiences respond.

Right I see you mentioned: In other words, we have a text in the form of objects, a context that surrounds them, and analytic devices to ascertain signal from noise in these contexts. We also have a much higher level of analysis that involves things like heuristic devices...

But I'll be honest I have no idea what you actually meant by this starting at analytic devices and heuristic devices, so that's why I asked for further understanding. Your overall post I enjoyed thoroughly and feel I got the overall message you were conveying, but some specifics I was not clear on.

I think you answered it by stating: I'm not interested in running correlation studies for a population's 1-5 survey response to a piece of art, if that's what you're asking. Nor am I trying to develop a predictive model for how certain kinds of art make audiences respond.

I'm pretty sure what I'm hearing from you is that you are more or less part of the Formalism camp, so long as all "evidence based" methods are exhausted? Is everything about music then empirical?

I have a use case for these ideas:

My sister loves the song Until the End of the World by U2. The song is about Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus as understood from the actual text. My sister has a different interpretation of the song about her boyfriend in high school (she had association of listening it to it at the time, and the kiss of betrayal actually was a kiss of love, and it happened in a garden as the song says). The first is Formalism and the latter reader response.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:05:50 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 05:05

sethmadsen wrote:

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RoundTheBend — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:57:31 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 02/11/2016 04:57

Applerill wrote:

Hmm, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I have just as many musical/"aesthetic" convictions in my internal interpretations as anyone else, but that I'm too lazy to articulate them well. It's like when JMan was describing Star Wars Episode I as having "good angling" when he meant cinematography (I actually heard a girl the other day use that phrase BTW).

Or maybe Meaghan Garvey has brainwashed me :(

Hahahaha.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RoundTheBend — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:54:53 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 02/11/2016 04:54

Satie wrote:

I'm not advocating formalism unless every single "evidence-based" (lack of a better term) literary criticism approach is somehow encapsulated in formalism. It isn't a huge intellectual puzzle to me that full-on reader response theory without the balance of having to be anchored to the text itself is just solipsistic nonsense.

Just out of curiosity, does "evidence-based" include almost a social science approach of how surveys work? So for example... I listened to this and it made me feel like this/think this, etc. even if the lyrics/musical mechanics didn't actually say or do something to CAUSE, not correlate, but scientifically shown causation for that response?

Reader Response Theory

For those that care to know a little more about the two theories from Wikipedia:
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the US and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Important predecessors were I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings; Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work"; and C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.

Formalism
Almost an empirical scientific approach:
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects (or sometimes simply "brackets," i.e., ignores for the purpose of analysis) notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.

If you are even more interested in these topics... read about Rationalism vs Empiricism, and then read Kant. Kant synthesized the thoughts together and thus we get:

Kant in his critical phase sought to 'reverse' the orientation of pre-critical philosophy by showing how the traditional problems of metaphysics can be overcome by supposing that the agreement between reality and the concepts we use to conceive it arises not because our mental concepts have come to passively mirror reality, but because reality must conform to the human mind's active concepts to be conceivable and at all possible for us to experience. Kant thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the transcendental "condition of possibility" for any experience.6+

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Applerill — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:42:46 GMT

Author: Applerill

Posted: 02/11/2016 04:42

Hmm, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I have just as many musical/"aesthetic" convictions in my internal interpretations as anyone else, but that I'm too lazy to articulate them well. It's like when JMan was describing Star Wars Episode I as having "good angling" when he meant cinematography (I actually heard a girl the other day use that phrase BTW).

Or maybe Meaghan Garvey has brainwashed me 🙁

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:31:29 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 04:31

I'm not advocating formalism unless every single "evidence-based" (lack of a better term) literary criticism approach is somehow encapsulated in formalism. It isn't a huge intellectual puzzle to me that full-on reader response theory without the balance of having to be anchored to the text itself is just solipsistic nonsense.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

RoundTheBend — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:29:13 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 02/11/2016 04:29

Wow... too much happened while I was gone. Too little time to respectfully respond. Ha!

1. Reader Response Theory: this is a literary theory that suggests it doesn't matter what the artist intended or what was even written/created, it's how it is interpreted that is important. (Kinda harks back to the whole Sign, Signifier, Signified thing [Structuralism]). So in a way this means that music doesn't even exist until it is received and interpreted by the person listening to it.

2. Formalism/Literalism: Basically the idea that, as Satie suggests, we can only really quote the lyrics and mechanics of music to critique the music. Everything else is opinion and therefore not important... or at least less valid/helpful/scientific/(insert something descriptive here) as good critique.

I think what CryingGameDahlin was suggesting is that both of these are valid and we can accept both Formalism and Reader Response theory as valid critiques and judgements? Maybe I misunderstood, but I think both are valid forms of critiquing art. When I was a German Lit major I learned it is better to see the world from all sides and not only in binary oppositions. So I happen to agree with that point of view. Having said that I liked the analogy that if any scientist had "proven" their work through art, it wouldn't have been taken as seriously... which is kinda sad really. Truth is truth is truth.

As for other objects of discussion, how do you think classic conditioning plays a role in your "staying power" of an album? Because you have been "conditioned" to have certain responses (Making different fart noises and recording them isn't a social norm, so the average person or even the against the grain person still wouldn't honestly argue that farting noises is truly more beautiful or artistic or (insert descriptive bullshit here) than say Vivaldi's Four Seasons), do you then develop a taste that prejudges what you like and don't like? Does that then build over time and make "staying power" what it is for you. Do you have this almost classic conditioning response of what is pleasurable and what is not? How do you keep your palate clean and approach things as unbiased as possible? Is that even important?

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 22:42:33 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/11/2016 03:42

CryingGameDahlin wrote:

Just to point it out, when we post on BEA we obviously make a purposeful presentation of different words & ideas, is that like saying our personal voice should be disregarded when other posters see it?

I would throw my hat in with Pentagonal and say that direct communication serves a very different and often more specific function than artistic expression. Frankly, if artistic expression is as straightforward as day-to-day conversation, I say keep it in your pants. Still, I think this brings up another example of why artistic expression requires audience interpretation to be privileged to an extent. In regular conversation, if I say something that you don't understand because I phrased it poorly (something that happens in basically every conversation of any length at some point), we have a clarifying discussion in most cases to sort it out. My intention behind crafting my initial statement doesn't change the fact that that statement was crafted poorly and needed clarification. With art, this problem is magnified and multiplied exponentially. There are so many different moving parts that unless someone makes their expression very mechanical and specific, it's unlikely that every single part of their intention actually made it into the art unscathed. Sure, you might have the leisure of clarifying with an artist what they meant to say, but when you go back and listen to the album, it seems to me that you're distorting your perception to match an interpretation that you've already gone in with, which returns us to Skinny's idea of just reading a damn synopsis and not bothering with art at all.

meccalecca wrote:

From my perspective, the bulk of criticism towards Applerill's praise for Brokencyde comes from Applerill's indirect relationship with the music. His love for the album comes from a seemingly arbitrary, unintentional interpretation of their music. He's voiced very little about the actual aesthetic traits of the music that please him, or any specific meaning intended by the artist. His love of it is essentially conceptual, and therefore seems like it could be applied to a variety of works, depending on circumstances. It's ultimately less about the listening experience than it is about a result of the listening experience.

But does that make his appreciation of Brokencyde disingenuous? No. Not necessarily. I'd argue it's only disingenuous if he doesn't actually perceive their music as he states, which is impossible to know for sure, but he likely deserves the benefit of the doubt

I think this is where a certain degree of the objectivity of what Brokencyde presents to us needs to be considered and where we return to the idea of a dialogue of people surrounding a text. Sure, there can be multiple interpretations, and maybe Charlie's novel takes shed light, but these takes also require textual evidence, or else they're complete conjurings that could be applied to any piece of art and defended as "just his opinion." This is where I think the idea of an album impacting you a particular way or having a certain quality level remains subjective but interpretation of its contents, place in history, and ultimate "meaning" can be objective insofar as it can be argued that without reference to the album itself, you're not really saying anything about art, but a bunch about yourself. Often, I think Charlie's seemingly outlandish perspectives are somewhere in the art (his most outlandish claims usually revolve around albums and films I've only encountered once if ever and haven't bothered poring over to see if his perspectives on them hold up to scrutiny). I don't doubt Charlie's authentic conviction in his interpretations, but I think that if I were to listen to a Brokencyde album and not hear what he tells me he hears, it would be totally within my rights to challenge him to show me what specific aesthetic features bring up these ideas. This is an interesting question, though, of what exactly an album entails in an era of mass media multi-platform consumption. Can just the notes and lyrics exist as the piece of art, as I contend, or do we need to also factor in, say, album art or public personas of artists as that primary source text?

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 18:52:16 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/10/2016 23:52

CryingGameDahlin wrote:

Just to point it out, when we post on BEA we obviously make a purposeful presentation of different words & ideas (except maybe when we're totally intoxicated, but that may have it's own funny logic), is that like saying our personal voice should be disregarded when other posters see it? I think it's just as valid to understand where we're coming from just as acknowledging that some posters may have a different take on what we have to say. It's not either/or, the view of the artist and those who see & interpret what they have to see can be a harmonious one- even if they often seem to diverge.

The problem I have with this equivalency is that conversations and statements of fact, while sometimes fuzzy, are a far, far more precise form of communication than art. In fact, I think it's the breakdown of the above equivalency that necessitates the distinction between arts and sciences. When Darwin released the results of his studies to the world, it was important to understand what he was trying to say. Had he instead chosen to express himself in the form long, abstract poem, I think we're forced to approach it in a different way, because there's no way to definitively distinguish between opposing interpretations. The result might have been the same, inducing people to see the origin of species in a different way, but it would have been a poor contribution to science, as he would leave his work to the mercy of the ignorant masses or whoever was most influential in pushing their viewpoint.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

meccalecca — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 18:40:27 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/10/2016 23:40

Applerill wrote:

(Sorry for making this thread about me; it's just hard to know whether points here are directed at me or a lot of other people)

Don't you worry. It's not about you. You're just an example that has helped give the discussion a certain reference point and focus.

Re: Point of Discussion: Album Staying Power

meccalecca — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 18:38:36 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/10/2016 23:38

In an attempt to once and for all settle the ongoing Brokencycde query.

From my perspective, the bulk of criticism towards Applerill's praise for Brokencyde comes from Applerill's indirect relationship with the music. His love for the album comes from a seemingly arbitrary, unintentional interpretation of their music. He's voiced very little about the actual aesthetic traits of the music that please him, or any specific meaning intended by the artist. His love of it is essentially conceptual, and therefore seems like it could be applied to a variety of works, depending on circumstances. It's ultimately less about the listening experience than it is about a result of the listening experience.

But does that make his appreciation of Brokencyde disingenuous? No. Not necessarily. I'd argue it's only disingenuous if he doesn't actually perceive their music as he states, which is impossible to know for sure, but he likely deserves the benefit of the doubt