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Regular Non obscure music
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Sin Agog
Sin Agog
2253 posts

Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:57
Re: Regular Non obscure music
Oct 04, 2013, 12:36
IanB wrote:

Interesting that people chose to ignore the point about technological innovation being a driver. I guess it's too much of a myth buster.


It's actually just another line of a myth. The myth that on the first day the Lord gave us Classical and after an aeon-long interim there was Blues, then Blues begat Rock, then---uh. The music industry has no story. There's no three-act structure. Instruments and innovations and zeitgeists can make seismic waves, but the sea never dries up. You don't have to see everything in terms of how it relates to a greater culture. And even if you do that, is the Uruguayan music scene perfectly in line with ours? These music stories people tell to each other get awfully hazy when you get beyond the provincial nature of English and American rock.

You will have to learn to individualise your tastes if you want to accept the way music works these days. Just enjoy a good song for what it is. You don't need to worry about how many others are or aren't listening to it, or if they were drawing influences from so and so. Let their passion sway you- as passion is what's at the root of all good art. I'm not saying don't think; thinking's wrong. Art does carry traces of its environment. I just don't think you're interpreting it very soundly. You're imposing your own ennui onto the music. Is it not even a minor possibility that you're recoiling from your own aging body by saying it's the culture itself that's decaying?

IanB wrote:
Similarly the culture of championing the obscure for the reflected glory and status of being a cultural prospector of outsider art is nonsensical as it rates music, at least initially, on the basis of its inability to reach the market.


Also, this is classic "I will label all my enemies a certain way so I can deal with them collectively rather than individually".

It's not the obscurity itself that attracts people. "Oh, come to me my beautiful obscurity. Let me nestle beside you and we together will make that nasty world with its nasty people pay for what they've done to us!" Whenever someone doesn't like something, they assume that other people are just...pretending. It never occurs to them that they might just like it for the thing itself. Perhaps a lot of people just gravitate to certain musical aesthetics which, by their very nature, don't sway the general public. Like most Industrial, Punk Messthetics, Free Folk, Hardcore Techno etc. etc. I'm not surprised that some dingy American No Wave film or Hungarian psychedelic animation I love isn't popular. It's the visceral energy of the former and the otherwordliness of the latter that attracted me to them- specific qualities- not how many people have seen them. Believe it or not, not all other people appraise things by where they exist in the grand scheme of things. Personally, I don't think there is any grand scheme.
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