oid wrote: ↑Tue Sep 18, 2018 12:23 am
I will yield to John Cage now.
"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."
I mean why put yourself through that, I've barely got the time to listen to the stuff i like without trying to find something in stuff I hate. John Cage probably just needed to buy some more records.
I also wonder if that's just meant to apply to music or does Sex and the City 2, 50 Shades of Grey and Fast and Furious 50 only start of make sense in the last 5 minutes. Or perhaps the novels of Katie Price only give up their special insight into the human condition 200 pages in.
I think music you dislike can have the exact opposite of the ASMR goosebumps thing music you do like causes. For example; the sound of shred guitar, a Gallagher brother or similar shaved ape, rawk barbarian spew or yodelling melisma just disrupts me at a cellular level. This is why I'd prefer supermarkets and the like cut out the fucking music altogether lest I run amok with a rustic baguette after having Good Day Sunshine forced upon me while I'm just trying to buy some pet food.
I also think we probably need to avoid getting bogged down in some notion of 'popular' music being bad and obscure music being good. IMO often the only real difference is marketing, or novelty or some celebrity angle or insertion in a film or something or even death because nothing brings int he fans like a death.
I remember post Drive someone asking me if I liked the Chromatics who they'd just discovered and me telling them; 'for a long time and enough to buy you their first album for Christmas (which they clearly never played)s' or bringing it up to date, me believing that Confidence Man should probably be totally massive because they have all the things that should make them massive bar a parade of PR tanks. For me promotion is as important a facet as the music, perhaps even more so when lots of records I buy don't even have a video to hook more casual browsers.
I was talking to a label boss the other day about an act they signed and I was telling them that her first album was going on my favourite the other year and that I was sad it hadn't caught on. We talked about her old label (which is one of the best) just not doing promotion, just putting out the music in limited numbers and moving on to the next one, not in a critical way merely as way of explaining things. This model is fine for me, probably not fine for any artist trying to eke a living but definitely not great for more casual late adopting music fans or folk who need music precooled by committee.
D