"So bad, it's good" vs "If it provokes a reaction, it must be worthwhile"

This is a bit of a ramble, a thinking-out-loud post made up of a few thoughts I've had recently. But are these two attitudes related or linked in any way?

I haven't heard anyone use the 'so bad it's good' defence in a very long time. It reminds me of my uni days when students would watch bad films or dance to trashy music for ironic reasons. Not sure if this was a symptom of the time or just something students generally like to do... Do students still organise 'cheesy tunes' nights? Seemed to be about 3 a week when i went.

This is likely down to a weakening of socio-musical barriers and gatekeepers between genres as there might once have been. Listening to Phil Collins or the Carpenters or ABBA or radio pop or power ballads or even outlier genres like black metal doesn't quite come with the stigma or guilt factor it might once have. Maybe it's just me and my 'grown-up' perspective, but does the idea of revelling in a 'guilty pleasure' seem quaint now? Feels like if someone's going to listen to Coldplay or Magic or even something like 'Hey QT' or 'Gangnam Style', it's because they genuinely like the music, not because it's 'so bad it's good'. Similarly, if something's genuinely terrible, it feels less likely that people would listen to it for ironic purposes.

But while all this is arguably true, I'm reminded of a more recent logicism in my own music listening - the idea that if something provokes a reaction in me, then it must be worthwhile. I often find myself analyising music on this level; especially when it comes to leftfield and experimental music which isn't always a pleasure to listen to in the traditional sense, but is at least interesting on a conceptual level.

When I posted up a video of Ornette Coleman on Facebook last night, the reaction was incredibly divisive, ranging from 'this is amazing' to 'this is a horrible excruciating mess' to 'well, it's a bit of both'. Somehow the extreme responses to this bit of music made me appreciate it more. But I'm always painfully aware when I'm listening to noise or free jazz or other kinds of avantgarde music, that it's not for everyone. Indeed to many people within earshot of my stereo, it might not even register as music.

And then I feel a kind of 'guilt' that I'm being perceived either as a maniac who murders wild animals in his bedroom or a pseud who listens to confrontational music for pretentious reasons. And then I start to question the reasons I'm listening to this stuff. Like, I know I like Scott Walker or Jason Lescalleet or Coltrane's 'Ascension', but appreciating these took some effort, a cross between mental rewiring and acquisition of taste. I feel I often justify listening to music that is abstruse or atonal because it provokes some sort of visceral or mental reaction in me; and that if it has the power to do this, then it is validated as art - something I find increasingly more important than music that is pleasant but boring. Sometimes though, I feel I risk succumbing to an 'emperor's new clothes' effect where I can't work out if something's actually 'good' or if it's just nonsense. I guess this is the eternal argument applied to much of modern art - 'my five year old could have done that', 'it's just a load of scribbles/noise' etc...

I sometimes question whether I like some of the music I do for 'honest' reasons. Is there a shared disingenuity between the kids who used to do silly dance moves to Steps and Toploader - who found pleasure in their own displeasure and the theatre that comes with ironic appreciation of music - and avantgarde music listeners who take pleasure in traditionally unpleasant sounds?

http://i.imgur.com/NjBQkim.jpg

aw

<3

The whole "guilty pleasure" thing, it seems to me, is highly performative—it's a way for people who are very conscious of and worried about what their peers think of them to listen to things they're not sure are 100% peer-group-approved. Once you get too old to give a fuck what anybody else thinks, the whole "guilty pleasure" mental construct collapses and drifts away and you're left listening to whatever the hell you want.

I also believe there's no such thing as "so bad it's good"—there's good, and bad. But those are defined in highly personal ways by each person.

Lately, I've found my own tastes shifting away from the noisy, harsh, skronky stuff I loved for years. Most "extreme" metal is very boring to me; I'm now looking for stuff with choruses and big screaming guitar solos. And I don't listen to nearly as much free jazz as I once did—instead, I listen to very bluesy, swinging hard bop and more melodic stuff. I'm even softening my position on piano trios (which I've always hated) and digging deep into the catalogs of, like, Red Garland and Ahmad Jamal.

Do I think I was pretending to like, for example, Borbetomagus all those years? No; I still like them, particularly live. But I don't feel the need to Brillo my ears as often as I once did.

Is there a musical equivalent of The Room?

Friday - Rebecca Black

let's hope this quickly descends into people telling us how terrible something they don't like is

too slow

lol

stick to the sitcoms

"there are no guilty pleasures" seems like the default position of both smart clued-in critics and regular people today which seems reasonable and reflects the way people actually experience media

but ultimately it's a kind of boring way of looking at the world because everything is so low stakes and aesthetics and ideas aren't worth fighting about because we accept that everything's kind of subjective and you can just click on something else anyway

yeah i find my enjoyment of music really diluted by not fighting over other people's taste

I don't think "so bad it's good" has ever applied to music for me. When I was younger I suppose I framed certain things as "guilty pleasures" in order to square my wayward tastes with a more carefully curated sense of the "cool", but the pleasure I took in embarrassingly uncool music was utterly genuine. Therefore, I understood that the music in question must really be quite good after all, my foolish shame notwithstanding.

Watching unambiguously bad movies and taking pleasure in their obvious failings is a different sort of aesthetic exercise, one based on the comedy value of seeing others get everything so terribly wrong at the most basic level that a kind of otherwordly absurdity is achieved. I suppose people do something similar when enjoying the music of "outsider" artists like Daniel Johnson and Tiny Tim, and even to some degree with that of more (apparently) self-aware pranksters like The Frogs and Ariel Pink. I remember playing Pussy Galore's Right Now for some musically sophisticated but not terribly punk-savvy friends back in the mid 90s, and they thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. They loved it, but appreciated it as an Ed Wood-style, "so bad it's good" catastrophe, where I saw it as comically discombobulated - but still convincingly kick-ass - rock & roll. Not sure my take was any truer to the music than theirs.

While I tend to think that we respond in music most strongly to that which we most genuinely and instinctively enjoy - meaning that no one ever really likes what they see as truly bad (i.e., unappealing) in music - I suspect that appreciators of deliberately "extreme" musical styles do sometimes approach such art on a purely intellectual level, putting aside the more profound urgings of what I'd call "deep taste". I'm sometimes suspicious of those who claim to genuinely, musically appreciate pure, uncut noisemusik, but at the same time, I'm aware that the extreme metal I've acquired a strong taste for in recent decades would at one time have struck me as no less intrinsically unpleasant a racket.

so many contrarians on ilm it's probably more necessary (nb this does not mean it is actually necessary) to argue that something is "so bad it's bad"

we've got a thread for that

look in fairness I said it wasn't necessary in fairness

i meant for contrarianity but either way, for a board called I Love Music there's a lot of people like to talk about hating music

http://scenearoundthebloc.ahomina.com/files/2012/07/2011-febru%C3%A1r-paris.jpg

more music needs hating than liking

like everything else

being against some cultural object in 2015 is really the emptiest of gestures

I know I know but the days are as long in 2015 as in any other year n'est pas

well theyre not yet but its expected that it will average out to be so

denying the "so bad it's good" is in a way denying the achievement of breaking through a cultural/taste barrier by pretending it's not there. some pleasures you should feel guilty about!

i find it's easier for me to appreciate film or television in a "camp" or "ironic" way than it is for me to appreciate music in that way. something like "round and round" by ratt, regardless of the perceived "cheese" of the idiom, is straightforwardly enjoyable in a way that, say, "ninja final duel" isn't.

where do you put van halen on the camp/cheese continuum? (I was trying to think of what "round and round" sounded like but keep hearing "panama" instead)

being against some cultural object in 2015 is really the emptiest of gestures

― english fatuus (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 18, 2015 10:16 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is maybe the most OTM thing I've read all year. Not only in terms of "so bad it's good," but also all of the think-piece-y "here's what's problematic with this piece of pop culture" stuff (see Boyhood = Birth of a Nation for a ridiculous example).

Is there a shared disingenuity between the kids who used to do silly Is there a shared disingenuity between the kids who used to do silly dance moves to Steps and Toploader - who found pleasure in their own displeasure and the theatre that comes with ironic appreciation of music - and avantgarde music listeners who take pleasure in traditionally unpleasant sounds?

no

I feel I often justify listening to music that is abstruse or atonal because it provokes some sort of visceral or mental reaction in me

what purpose does music serve besides to provoke some sort of visceral or mental reaction? please don't get all robert hilburn all me.

re: van halen- i only really know "jump", which reminds me of "the final countdown"... the thing is, cultural signifiers for camp are in some way ephemeral the same way highbrow comedy is. in 1988 or whenever you can look at "the final countdown" or "every rose has its thorn" or whatever and appreciate it an ironic or camp sense, because there's a cultural context to that music. 25+ years later, the original cultural context is no longer meaningful and all that's left is the musical content. following from that i suppose it would be possible to "ironically" appreciate modern music, but the problem is i don't know of any music these days that has the level of cultural clout that van halen did. in other words, there's no music left that's mainstream enough to engender ironic readings.

are there people who "ironically" appreciate "50 shades of gray"?

The Room was mentioned upthread. There are plenty of films that people appreciate for camp value.

There's probably a fair bit of music that people appreciate for camp value as well, or at least to a certain extent. Novelty hits, particularly older ones, stuff like 'Kung Fu Fighting' etc but I think we reached peak ironic appropriation-of-the-past a while back now. It was fashionable to look back on the past and revel in the cheesier aspects of it. But the music of last decade mined so many eighties tropes it's become almost impossible to assail them - even the more ridiculous eighties tropes got co-opted by credible, straight-browed contemporaneous acts.

https://lh3.ggpht.com/-K--w45xSoIswxM5LQBXkteBOMkWDazpzJ1gPUv-Hskn31nq_9G6rwTpxW3yXqfYNXk=w300

nice!

I mean, sit down, and have a long think about which of these two scenarios is the most likely:

"People no longer ironically appreciate things due to collapsing socio-musical barriers and fewer gatekeepers between genres"

OR

"I, Dog Latin, now in my mid-30s, no longer go to student discos and have minimal contact with anyone who does, and therefore I have no clue whether anything's actually changed".

or maybe Matt DC could bring himself to read the actual post and realise that A: I have acknowledged exactly this and B: that's not what's being discussed here anyway

There's probably a fair bit of music that people appreciate for camp value as well, or at least to a certain extent. Novelty hits, particularly older ones, stuff like 'Kung Fu Fighting' etc but I think we reached peak ironic appropriation-of-the-past a while back now. It was fashionable to look back on the past and revel in the cheesier aspects of it. But the music of last decade mined so many eighties tropes it's become almost impossible to assail them - even the more ridiculous eighties tropes got co-opted by credible, straight-browed contemporaneous acts.

It looks like that is almost exactly what is being discussed here, with some cobblers about 'confrontational' music tacked on elsewhere.

That was in answer to the other people ITT who were interested in discussing what music and films people like for ironic reasons.
Look, I know you just can't resist the urge to make me out as some sort of fuddy duddy struggling with 'the youth of today', but if you read my posts rather than making your mind up after glancing over the first sentence, you'll see that that's not what this thread is about.

Would take "Kung Fu Fighting" over Ornette Coleman any day of the week tbh.

Fun to think of Dog Latin's internal monologue beginning "I, Dog Latin," anyway

NDN

FWIW, and I'll grant the initial post was pretty scattered as I was typing outloud; I'm less interested in what students get up to at the Thursday Jump Club, or whether Masonna's 'Eat Maggot' is better than the 'Final Countdown'. People like what they like, of course, but I'm interested to know if there could be such a thing as listening or liking music for 'the wrong reasons'. Is it possible? Is liking something because 'it's fucking awful' a genuine or 'honest' reason? And is there anything intrinsically wrong with doing this? At the other end of the spectrum, could it be that listening to 'difficult' music (i.e. stuff that is actively atonal, sonically aggressive or just plain hard on the ears) a similar permutation of this, where the listener is only really enjoying it on either an academic or deliberately antisocial level?

I think the music critics (objective) would be able to put a 'bad' piece of music into some kind of context, which they might then be able to appreciate.

I don't think the music lovers (subjective) would ever question their taste

re: van halen- i only really know "jump", which reminds me of "the final countdown"... the thing is, cultural signifiers for camp are in some way ephemeral the same way highbrow comedy is. in 1988 or whenever you can look at "the final countdown" or "every rose has its thorn" or whatever and appreciate it an ironic or camp sense, because there's a cultural context to that music. 25+ years later, the original cultural context is no longer meaningful and all that's left is the musical content. following from that i suppose it would be possible to "ironically" appreciate modern music, but the problem is i don't know of any music these days that has the level of cultural clout that van halen did. in other words, there's no music left that's mainstream enough to engender ironic readings.

― rushomancy, Thursday, February 19, 2015 3:19 AM (2 hours ago)

i think it's a little more complex than that. "jump" seemed obviously and knowingly camp in its moment. david lee roth is a living embodiment of the concept and cultivates a smirking self-awareness about his role as a rock frontman. he's knows the whole thing is a joke and is all too eager to let you in on it. "the final countdown" is less clear in its ambitions. it's pure kitsch, cheesy as hell, but absent a broadly winking frontman like roth, its much harder to discern the band's level of self-awareness. in their moment, both songs were appreciated, for the most part, in the spirit in which they were delivered: the former as campy rock & roll fun, the latter as kitschy mock-heroic uplift, both with killer hooks. iirc.

the passage of time has done little to "jump". while obviously dated, it could hardly be more campy now than it was then. "the final countdown", however, now absolutely wallows in period kitsch. though it's still a catchy pop tune, it seems appreciated in the present moment only for its inadvertent (?) comedy value (like, say, billy squier's "rock me tonite" video). despite their differences, both songs have become pop shorthand for the cheezy excesses of a specific pop era. they are enjoyed now not as pure musical content divorced from its original cultural context, but rather as durably dated emblems of that culture.

DL I feel like I can't participate here because your definitions of "difficult music" are so wide-ranging. Your OP has a clause that contains "Scott Walker or Jason Lescaleet or Coltrane" and these kinds of music, not to mention "actively atonal, sonically aggressive or just plain hard on the ears", are so disparate in intention that I feel a little lost. "Actively atonal" is Boulez and Webern and thus some of the most placid music out there, "just plain hard on the ears" could include some super-pop and extremely tonal music like I dunno A Sunny Day In Glasgow. Not to mention "Gangnam Style" and "Hey QT", I dunno.

My listening experience always includes some degree of guilt, I feel guilt when R Kelly comes on, in advance of switching it off. More like guilty displeasure. I feel guilt when it's Bobby Shmurda because it's beautiful music but I have to wear a foil hat to enjoy relics of gun culture. Same goes for any time there's a "faggot". I feel actual guilt that I cannot participate in the enjoyment of this clearly extremely well-made music because I can't take a "faggot". I feel guilt when I don't enjoy bad music made by good people. Guilt abounds! but it has nothing to do with

where the listener is only really enjoying it on either an academic or deliberately antisocial level?

Because this never happens to me or anybody I know. There is that one Aphex Twin track "Ventolin" where I do think that people who enjoy it are pretending, but that's really the extent of my experience with doublethink listening.

Um I mean I guess I listen to some things with camp in mind but at this point I think camp's position is so firm in our collective brain-phalanx that I don't feel I need to explain why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RvMSRvzN_M is good

Is there a musical equivalent of The Room?

The Pitch a while back suggested 'Rebirth': http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/453-my-decade-in-music-so-far-zoe-camp/

many years ago i spent one long, stressed-to-breaking working morning vibing with "Ventolin" on headphones and i can assure you the pleasure of that track was all real, visceral as it may've been

but this is a fundamental quirk of thinking that all kinds of music work on the same pleasure centres i guess - humans experience different kinds of pleasure that aren't very reducible to one another

I can't believe it! I can't get through "Ventolin" at any volume without feeling like I'm losing my hearing. I am convinced that other people have some remix of it or something. Or I have some remix. I am impressed that it was even made it is so unlistenable

on a continuum of aggressive noisiness i don't think it's as out there as swathes of Whitehouse, TG, Merzbow etc

NB your ears are probly considerably more nuanced than mine!

Ventolin is great!

Hey FGTI, I hear what you're saying. It's a weird idea to suggest that people don't enjoy the music they listen to. Of course they enjoy it. But Ventolin is an example, a poppy one at that, of a track that has been designed expressly to be unpleasant to listen to, but people enjoy listening to all the same (perhaps for the exact reason that it's unpleasant to listen to).

shifts in upper frequencies are like the aural equivalent of briget riley paintings ime, i'm thinking of toshimaru nakamura with that statement. "ventolin" is more high pressure drone crunch, agree that it's very cathartic. these kinds of dog latin livejournal threads are only fun for the zing cru shooting the shit aspect.

when i worked in an off licence my friend and i played Ventolin over the speakers in the shop during peak hour. that was a kind of guilty pleasure (or a guilty lol) in a way, just watching confused people shopping for wine on a Friday evening.

just spun "ventolin". lol, it's pretty accessible, imo. certainly not a brain drill on the level of new york eye and ear control or most merzbow. high-pitched whine did give the cats some bother.

It's that particular unceasing high-pitched drone/whine, though. It just feels physically painful in a way that New York Eye and Ear Control never does.

"sonically aggressive or just plain hard on the ears"

ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2014

different people find different sounds irritating

reactions provoked, did not find worthwhile

The cultural contexts that produced Europe vs. Van Halen need to be taken into account, I think. Europe (the band that did "The Final Countdown") were a Swedish band, therefore not singing/performing in their native language and consciously competing for a pan-European (and American) audience ("The Final Countdown" came from their third album, their first outside of Sweden, their first for Epic, and on which they worked with Journey's producer). Van Halen, meanwhile, were a self-contained unit basically immune to label pressures due to a fairly consistent track record of success - every one of their first six albums was done with the same producer, an album a year, bang bang bang. And yeah, Roth's persona was Hollywood/showbiz from top to bottom - he's a combination of Robert Plant and Jimmy Durante, in a way. (With a bit of Black Oak Arkansas's Jim Dandy Mangrum thrown in.)

flambo how do u feel about drane by autechre

Yes saer and I think a lot of that is down to what functions one ascribes to music - as a social lubricant, as a relaxing backdrop to passive activities or as a piece of art to be examined and drawn from. I think most music fans enjoy it on all three levels to varying degrees but I also know people who would prefer to see music as operating on just one of these levels.

there are a few of these 90s glitchy tracks with high pitched drones, ventolin is a bit of an extreme case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYBrEShzsLY

Yeah I always found that track hard to listen to.

and yet ventolin I get because the intention is very deliberate. It's very punk in that it's supposed to be confrontational. but I dont think thats what the Autechre track is going for.

[Yes saer and I think a lot of that is down to what functions one ascribes to music - as a social lubricant, as a relaxing backdrop to passive activities or as a piece of art to be examined and drawn from..

none of those, only to drown out the whirling tumult with genial sounds that contribute towards mental wellbeing

I picked "Ventolin" not because it was the most annoying track I could think of, but because it is getting constantly repped as "one of the great AFX tracks" and I've always been like really? that's when I turn that album off and switch back to SAW :/

"Drane" is awesome, one of my first and favourite Autechre tracks. Maybe my ears just aren't as sensitive to those frequencies? I dunno

Yeah, I also find "Drane" completely pleasant and pleasurable. I like high-pitched electronic sounds but there is something grating about the frequencies in "Ventolin".

Part of the appeal of ventolin is that it takes an annoying sound and turns it into something beautiful

I enjoy it much in the same way I enjoy guitar playing with a lot of feedback. Those high pitched sounds add some punchiness to the sound.

You take something unpleasant by itself in order to augment the appeal of something that would be blander otherwise.

Basically, it's the musical equivalent of sriracha sauce.

Ventolin was supposed to be an aural representation of what it's like to have an asthma attack, according to an Aphex interview I read a hundred years ago.

The opening post is a rather confusing unironic mashup of "guilty pleasures" and "do people really enjoy avant-garde music?" which are two of the oldest chestnuts there are on this board.

The question of "does it matter if pleasure is the sole intention of the music?" (answer = no) is and should be separate to "can music have merits that are largely unconnected to listening pleasure?" (answer = yes).

A lot of the 'confrontational' or 'difficult' music in this thread is not really interested in provoking a reaction purely for the sake of provoking a reaction. Later Schoenberg and Webern and earlier Boulez have systemic and compositional intentions and merits that do not really revolve around enjoyment for the listener, but they're not about making a dissonant noise purely for the sake of it either. I know next to nothing about jazz but my guess is that the same is true for Ornette Coleman and Coltrane. At the same time I find the music of Boulez or Berg considerably more moving and emotionally involving than Delius or Walton, I don't doubt that the love people have for the former set of composers is entirely genuine.

This breaks down a bit with newer musics, a lot of what is termed as "art-rock" is spiritually closer to Rihanna than it is to Stockhausen.

foghorn fenty is all about making dissonant noises for the sake of it

dog latin - can you stop thinking out loud so much man. You are young, a whole lifetime to shape these thoughts into something really substantial that we can all enjoy.

Matt - could you give an example or two?

Do I think I was pretending to like, for example, Borbetomagus all those years? No; I still like them, particularly live. But I don't feel the need to Brillo my ears as often as I once did.

Well well what a lack of commitment to the cause!!

How do people read the ILM Farrah Abraham love? The music seemed to me transcendentally inept, but people were evidently sincerely enjoying it.

As one of Farrah Abraham's strongest defenders here (I wrote this, though the sentence "Yes, I'm being sarcastic" was added by my editor out of fear/caution), I will say that my enjoyment of her music was 100% sincere, and that listening to it now, it's every bit as whacked and awesome as I remember.

that's how a lot of fans feel about The Room as well

i liked the farrah abraham album. sort of a cross between celebrity pop, vocal techno and outsider music. There was def an element of 'whoa, what the hell is this?'

Without having heard Farrah I thought it was interesting to compare with the love/hate for Laurel Halo's 'Quarantine' around the same time.

there's a correlation there, but they seem to be coming from opposite sides of a naive/deliberate spectrum. strange that there are sonic similarities though