Capnverb wrote:

as long as somebody likes all different kinds of music, then they have good taste in music.
someone might like the same rap or metal or whatever i like, but if all they listen to is exclusively metal or rap or rock, then their taste in music sucks.

i used to define myself by what music i thought was cool, as a lot of folks do. as my curiosity expanded, so did my tastes. it really bothers me when people say country sucks, or rap sucks, or classical sucks. to me it just shows laziness.

I don't believe it's lazyness. One can not afford to know the whole history of music!!!! It would also be quiete impossible.
Is someone ignorant because he's never heard of Henry Flint, Prince Paul,
Robbie Basho, Carlo Gesualdo or Assif Tsahar?

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT KNOW VERY LITTLE 'ABOUT' MUSIC, YET SUCCEED IN MAKING GREAT MUSIC THEMSELVES!!!
so
DO WHAT YOU WANT (NOT WHAT YOU KNOW).

There are many things to be learned from history ; mainly that it's not something you need to follow blindly.
It also consists of a canon; we are led to believe that history is a fact, when it is not! There are plenty of great musicians wich didn't make it to your history book.

cheers,


cstof

Its very similar to a food critic that only eats at mcdonalds. Unless that reviewer is only comparing mcdonalds, he's not a good critic.

alex wrote:Have you ever heard "Makeshift Swahili" by This Heat? It is a song from the disco genre. You can do that pointed finger John Travolta dance to it.

Not everyone would agree that all music of the late 70's belongs to the disco genre, especially no the one you pointed at. I can hardly imagine John Travolta crippled dance to this song.

Franjo.

first of all thanks to steve for hopefully bring campreverb back down to earth. it's daft to think that you can have any authority on such a broad subject as music, and i am glad that most people seem to realise this.

it's the people that refuse to believe they are wrong, or that there is another side to the coin that cause the tiresome friction which holds the rest of the people up. life is short.

Its very similar to a food critic that only eats at mcdonalds. Unless that reviewer is only comparing mcdonalds, he's not a good critic.

mcdonald's is crap

even people who eat at mcdonald's know this

listening strictly to rock or jazz or blues isn't the same thing at all

you can have a completely rich life sticking to one kind of music, and you can be a great critic writing about one kind of music

i could spend the rest of my life listening to rock music made between 1967 and 1976, learn an awful lot, and be completely happy

none of us on here know anywhere near as much as we think we do

Franz wrote:Not everyone would agree that all music of the late 70's belongs to the disco genre

Least of all I.

tmidgett wrote:the real action in 'free music' is in the struggle of the practitioner to break through whatever borders his instrument and ability have put up

This is too much like a sports analogy. While there are innumerable appealing effects and transformations that could come about by conflating sports and music and by bringing the respective principles for critiquing each to bear upon the other--certainly it would deflate the pomposity of 99% of free music "aficionados"--at the end of the day I think music has to do different things than sports.

tmidgett wrote:the real action in 'free music' is in the struggle of the practitioner to break through whatever borders his instrument and ability have put up

alex wrote:This is too much like a sports analogy.

Does this (it being like a sports analogy) mean the statement doesn't apply in this case? I'm not sure what you're saying - do you think that free music is not a struggle to break through borders, as tmidgett said?

Listening to notable musicians playing "free music" I often get the feeling they're trying to push themselves, their instrument, and their fellow musicians into places beyond where they've been before. The description seems reasonable to me, sports analogy or no.

spoot wrote:do you think that free music is not a struggle to break through borders, as tmidgett said?

Insofar as these "borders" amount to "instrument and ability" maybe the musician would be better off trying to top the home run record is what I'm positing. I was in total sympathy with the actual descriptions both of you gave of the insufferability of "free music" at its worst and if I could name a single common denominator of all good music, free or unfree, I would probably say that it fucks with borders of some sort. But "instrument and ability" is a reductive definition of the true expanse of all the borders involved. Of course the "musical correctness calculator" suggests some other ones, so...

alex wrote:"instrument and ability" is a reductive definition of the true expanse of all the borders involved

Now I am understanding you.