The concept of a 'Taste Vocabulary'

Work doesn't necessarily mean an emotional or intellectual investment, though! I mean, I don't think scott was kept up at night because he couldn't enjoy polka. Maybe he was, and the sound of accordions puzzled him to insomnia. It sounds like it was more about time and context, than anything, and people may not want or have the time to really try things.

Kind of reminds me, I have this natural aversion to raw tomato. It's crazy, if I have it with other things that throw the flavor profile (or pH, not sure) off, I can eat it. Salsa's great. But I think it turns my stomach in some way, or maybe I have a tomato digestion issue that is signaling my brain that it's not for me. Regardless, I try a bloody mary about once every year or two. I get what people like about them, and I love all the stuff you can put in one. But I can never drink more than about a third before I start feeling queasy.

Owen will sneak repping for Shosty in wherever he can, you have to watch him

he's a violinist, it's kind of a thing

Shostakovich can be very CRASH BANG NOISE! which I suspect appeals to kids quite a lot. Also a load of film soundtracks use Shostakovich as a reference point.

metal itself is only tangential to this discussion, but...

Like someone with a limited linguistic lexicon, he has a limited way of understanding things like heavy metal, hearing it indiscriminately as "angry" music, whereas I (as someone who was indoctrinated into that church several years ago) rarely hear "anger" in that music necessarily. Sure the music can be "raw", "visceral", "fantastical", "majestic", "technical", "nuanced" in many ways - but I only know this because I'm accustomed to the various styles, bands, themes and subtle variations within them, instead of hearing this default burst of uncontrolled rage as does my friend.

― Hey you look great, have you been working out asshole? (dog latin), Wednesday, August 15, 2012 2:28 AM (5 hours ago)

i'd say the same of punk, especially hardcore, and i'm comfortably familiar (at the very least) with all these genres. it's a cliche to say that angry, violent music allows an acceptable release for negative thoughts and emotions, but i think there's probably some merit in the idea. the visceral evocation of wrathful destruction is a big part of what what makes nile so thrilling. the catharsis one experiences after being dragged through extremes of anguish and brutality is what makes makes neurosis work.

anyway, perhaps this is a case where overfamiliarity blinds one to the essential and obvious character of something. screaming in a certain manner communicates anger. every child knows this. massive volume and battering sonics not only communicate or emulate violence, they actually are violent. not all metal is built on these things, but a lot of it is, and your friend is in no way wrong to notice this.

contenderizer contendin'

I don't even really think of Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden as angry though, although Sabbath was definitely angsty. Violent maybe.

I am a big metal fan and I think there's a lot more to metal than angry/violent - it is common to the genre but not essential imo

steely dan was kind of this for me

screaming in a certain manner communicates anger. every child knows this. massive volume and battering sonics not only communicate or emulate violence

Warhol's paintings communicated or emulated soup

the royal trux too, for the most part, but something made me want to stick with them and I feel like the experience of coming around to both was rewarding

i'd say the same of punk,

those angry, violent ramones

And, like, with contemporary black and doom metal I listen to, say, Corrupted or Krallice or Caina, I don't think anger is what I get out of it. Angry music is, like, Bruce Cockburn or something.

xposts to self

"Beat on the Bat" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" are kind of violent though.

steely dan was kind of this for me

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, 15 August 2012 16:38 (14 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am still not 'there' w/steely dan, so only have a vague idea of what those records sound like - they're super sheeny, nice sounding soft & country-tinged, right? - but it's funny & super useful to remember that some of the things one might work at are immediate pop things rather than abstruse noise records. i really like the fleetwood mac records i bought in the last couple of years, & that was def a process of shrugging off an aesthetic distaste for breezy fm production, separating from half-remembered-childhood-car-journey singalongability, listening to them anew, yielding to their melody, &c.

Wouldn't describe Steely Dan as country-tinged. Jazz-tinged maybe.

the royal trux too, for the most part, but something made me want to stick with them and I feel like the experience of coming around to both was rewarding

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, 15 August 2012 16:39 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

royal trux are always the thing that i enthuse to people about but have absolutely zero idea of where to recommend people start from; it is like you just have to already-be-used-to how their records sound

xp ty sund4r, i should probably youtube or something

3rd album w/ "Blood Blowers" is a good intro imo, its freak folk!

those angry, violent ramones

this is precisely why i've always been bemused by the ramones being called punk!

the ramones were plenty angry and violent, wtf.

xp Well there are two RTX fans, right? People who fuck with Accelerator and people who fuck with Twin Infinitives. (I refer people to that kid's song "Hero Zero" re: the former, US Maple warmup re: the latter)

Like three of these aren't angry and/or violent

1. "Blitzkrieg Bop" Tommy Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone Mickey Leigh 2:12 [14]
[49][72]
2. "Beat on the Brat" Joey Ramone — 2:30
3. "Judy Is a Punk" Leigh, Tommy Ramone 1:30
4. "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" Tommy Ramone Leigh, Rob Freeman 2:24
5. "Chain Saw" Joey Ramone Tommy Ramone 1:55
6. "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" Dee Dee Ramone — 1:34
7. "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement" Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Ramone — 2:35
Side B
8. "Loudmouth" Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Ramone — 2:14 [14]
[49][72]
9. "Havana Affair" — 2:00
10. "Listen to My Heart" Dee Dee Ramone — 1:56
11. "53rd & 3rd" — 2:19
12. "Let's Dance" Jim Lee — 1:51
13. "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You" Dee Dee Ramone Tommy Ramone 1:43
14. "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World" — 2:09

the catharsis one experiences after being dragged through extremes of anguish and brutality is what makes makes neurosis work.

See, even this doesn't necessarily seem related to anger to me.

emil.y OTM with this: The difficulty isn't in the music, it's in personal history and context. Talking about how long it took to 'get polka', that's not talking about the worthiness of difficult music, that's talking about a personal journey into a style of music. One of the most difficult-to-get genres for me for a long time was country.

I am a big metal fan and I think there's a lot more to metal than angry/violent - it is common to the genre but not essential imo

what are the essential aspects, if any? i guess i mean from a sonic perspective. isn't it what is most common within it that really defines genre? or rather what it has so much in relation to other genres? or maybe more what it doesn't have? e.g. what is happy metal? by the same token what is happy techno (while still being energetic and driven in the ways techno is typically thought of as being)?

it definitely seems unfair and problematic to link an emotion to a specific genre in this way and metal seems to me (wrongly maybe) to have attracted it more than anything else.

xp Well there are two RTX fans, right? People who fuck with Accelerator and people who fuck with Twin Infinitives. (I refer people to that kid's song "Hero Zero" re: the former, US Maple warmup re: the latter)

― Ówen P., Wednesday, 15 August 2012 16:48 (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i think it's p diffuse, i think there is maybe an ILM thread w/totally varied favourites. accelerator doesn't totally encompass the messier - ie 3 song ep/you're gonna lose - or the tighter, funner stuff, like granny grunt, to me, & part of their appeal's in being in further-out territory. although it has stevie so sure just tell someone to go listen to stevie.

"it's rewarding not understanding metal, or w/e, & then 'getting it', not because you earn your metal badge & can thrust it in everyones' faces but because it's exemplary of how things change & connect & how there can be a rewarding unspent charge dormant in things that you hadn't expected."

this! and by "work" i didn't MEAN a boring slog or some epic amount of homework and drudgery. i meant fun work! but it does entail EFFORT. maybe i should have said a lot of people don't want to put in the EFFORT to understand things better. pop, rap, metal, opera, or anything. its just not worth it for them. and its easier to be dismissive of things. it really is.

but i thought i was talking to music fanatics and musicians and music writers here and not normal people? sorry for being so uh whatever i was.

i learn something new EVERY day about music. and i don't think i'm elitist or better than anyone. it makes me a better person though. of this i'm sure. art is my church and art's wonders are endless. so i'm endlessly curious.

i finally "got" exile on main street two years ago. i heard it for the first time, i dunno, 25 years ago? i would play it once or twice a year for over two decades. it never clicked. then it did! i could have just said: eh, its not my favorite stones record and ignored it forever. but i knew there was something there...i just had to be 40 to hear it! maybe i'm crazy. SO SUE ME.

another way to look at this:

we're all "right" in how we hear music and about what we perceive in it. it really does seem to us the way that it seems to seem. this echoes something tim f said upthread:

...these ideas often are founded on this idea that what the music is - in all its nuanced glory - is always objectively present, and it's just a question of whether the listener sees/hears that clearly (i.e. has the right vocabulary to decode the sounds).

But listening, like reading, is not "innocent" - I think the process also involves an encoding of the sounds via ideas, associations, parallels, presumptions about purpose or use etc. etc. Music is spongey in this regard, soaking all this stuff up.

with that in mind, while some musics are obviously more generally accessible than others, every given listener gets to discover for themselves what's immediately appealing and what takes more time. some people like extreme metal and/or avante-garde composers right off the bat, while others have to work their way in to an appreciation of such things. other others won't ever get there, lack the reason, the desire and perhaps even the capacity to do so.

i believe that we do have a moral obligation to interrogate and even fight our social prejudices, but while social prejudice can inform and distort artistic taste, they aren't the same thing. we don't have a moral obligation to push our artistic taste ever outward. broad taste is not a virtue; it's just a reflection of certain proclivities. while it's taken me a lot longer to understand some musics than others, and i would generally agree that what you get out of initially incomprehensible art forms is roughly proportional to what you put in, i would hope that we could say such things without suggesting to anyone that they ought to listen to music they don't like.

the catharsis one experiences after being dragged through extremes of anguish and brutality is what makes makes neurosis work.

See, even this doesn't necessarily seem related to anger to me.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Wednesday, August 15, 2012 8:50 AM (17 minutes ago)

i get you, but "anger" strikes me as a sensible shorthand for a knot of related ideas and emotions that metal is often built around: fury, violence, contempt, angst, suffering, negation, etc. negative states and thoughts. of course, not all metal draws equally from these wells, or at all. hair metal was often often no more than snarlingly cocksure, more flirtatiously petulant than furious. power metal tends towards joyful, anthemic uplift, and the proggy stuff is often more bewildering than brutal. nevertheless, i perfectly understand why non-fans would call metal or punk "angry music", and i don't think they're really wrong to feel that way.

when there is so much music that immediately works for you throughout life, definitely see why people wouldn't want to work for it. many will feel that liking lots of different types of music (and i mean more than most people, in their own experience)...or i should say types of track, because the idea of having to get into a genre feels more like a thing to do just so you can say you like that genre, as opposed to identifying the things associated with it you like best via specific tracks and just being able to say you love those tracks...never really felt like effort despite the time and energy they may have put into it.

people have told me that they hate rap because they feel like they are being shouted at. one person left my store when i was playing rap because he said he felt like he was being "aurally raped". all valid racist reasons to not enjoy a form of music. hahaha!

maybe it was el p tho.

oh but i do enjoy aerosmith's beach boys thing for some reason. the idea that someone is being tortured by their beachy harmonies. hahaha! that's why i never push the dylan thing with people who can't take dylan's voice. i get it. it can be a love it or hate it kinda thing.

i get you, but "anger" strikes me as a sensible shorthand for a knot of related ideas and emotions that metal is often built around: fury, violence, contempt, angst, suffering, negation, etc. negative states and thoughts. of course, not all metal draws equally from these wells, or at all. hair metal was often often no more than snarlingly cocksure, more flirtatiously petulant than furious. power metal tends towards joyful, anthemic uplift, and the proggy stuff is often more bewildering than brutal.

Anger is a specific, limited emotion. You've described a much wider emotional range than "all I hear is anger; it's just angry music."

^^^ but that's what shorthand is! Some, but not all, rap does feel like being shouted at to me too. And "aurally raped" is not racist. That's my perception of cookie monster metal vocals.

I think the vocabulary concept is totally valid. But it's separate from taste. And I think people are overanalyzing the emotional side of things (anger, etc) when it's mostly an aural and strictly musical issue. For example with metal, someone who understands the vocabulary should be able to distinguish different bands or different subgenres from each other while somebody without that vocabulary might think it all sounds the same.

A while back I was talking to a guy who dismissed the Zombies Odysey and Oracle by saying that it all sounded like the Beatles "Flying". Which made absolutely no sense to me on so many levels, but most importantly the two bands just don't sound anything alike to me. But I also remember when I was a kid, I thought that every song I heard on the radio with an english accent was the Beatles.

Maybe vocabulary is the wrong linguistic parallel though. It's more like how there are certain sounds in chinese that english speakers can't even distinguish. What's the word for that?

Phonology, right?

I guess. It probably still makes more sense to call it "musical vocabulary" though even if the comparison isn't strictly accurate.

I think the vocabulary concept is totally valid. But it's separate from taste. And I think people are overanalyzing the emotional side of things (anger, etc) when it's mostly an aural and strictly musical issue.

Yeah, fwiw, in music theory, "vocabulary" mostly refers to the sorts of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic resources used in a sort of music whereas "syntax" refers to how they are combined and organized. And I do think that understanding these things is key to understanding a type of music.

i do sort of like the idea of a "taste vocabulary" (which mostly seemed to have been rejected upthread?), as it helps explain the acquisition of reference points and contextual comprehensions. the more we hear and understand, the more we can hear and understand. where criticism is concerned, there's nothing more dispiriting than reading/hearing someone trash a recording or artist simply because they don't like, respect or know anything about the genre from which it arises. and distaste is far less offensive than ignorance. rockism is simply the insistent, misguided application of one rather limited taste vocabulary to a much larger musical world. see also lex's participation in indie threads.

Yeah, I think there has to be a distinction between the musical vocabulary that a musician uses to create music, and the vocabulary that a listener needs to understand it, which I still think boils down to making distinctions between different voices and sounds. For example the person who thinks hip hop is a bunch of talking on top of beats, vs. somebody who can identify different MCs and producers when they hear a track they've never heard before.

I guess it's kind of like how audiences needed to become fluent in the visual language of film to understand what was happening when there's a cut. Which is different from the technical vocabulary that the filmmakers need to understand to make the film.

xp

always thought of it as being akin to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect
ie the less experience you have with a subcategory, the harder it is to discern the (to you verrrry) subtle differences within it

i never push the dylan thing with people who can't take dylan's voice.

See Dylan is a great example of an artist who I really, really tried to get into, given his importance to dozens of artists I love, and just couldn't, and no amount of "you should really listen to X album" or an expansion of my vocabulary is going to get me there. Neil Young, too.

I think that you can't develop the taste for a form without first having developed the vocabulary to understand it. But you can have the vocabulary to understand a style of music and still not have a taste for it, or have bad taste. Some people are extremely knowledgeable about certain subgenres of music that they're passionately interested in but they still have shitty taste.

Does the concept of a vocabulary work for individual artists though, or just for different forms and genres of music? I'm not sure.

I think there has to be a distinction between the musical vocabulary that a musician uses to create music, and the vocabulary that a listener needs to understand it

But I think the sort of vocabulary and syntax that I mentioned are important for listeners. It's not that important to know what the clarinettist is doing with his tongue when listening to the first movement of a symphony but I do think that it makes a difference to e.g. hear the sections of sonata form, to be aware of the key relationships between the different themes, even to recognize dominant-tonic resolution.

Does the concept of a vocabulary work for individual artists though, or just for different forms and genres of music? I'm not sure.

i think it probably works for everything. "artist" and "genre" are just among the most obvious categories to which we might apply it.

But I think the sort of vocabulary and syntax that I mentioned are important for listeners. It's not that important to know what the clarinettist is doing with his tongue when listening to the first movement of a symphony but I do think that it makes a difference to e.g. hear the sections of sonata form, to be aware of the key relationships between the different themes, even to recognize dominant-tonic resolution.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Wednesday, August 15, 2012 9:55 AM (1 minute ago)

i want to draw a clear line between "vocabulary of taste" and the sort of technical vocabulary you're talking about, sund4r. informed taste can be developed simply by listening, independent of any non-experiential education in musical terminology and form. therefore, maybe the term "vocabulary" is mistaken? i say that because it's not necessarily formalized or even linguistic. it can consist of things as simple as "i like it when the bass does that."

But I think the sort of vocabulary and syntax that I mentioned are important for listeners. It's not that important to know what the clarinettist is doing with his tongue when listening to the first movement of a symphony but I do think that it makes a difference to e.g. hear the sections of sonata form, to be aware of the key relationships between the different themes, even to recognize dominant-tonic resolution.

I don't know, I think that's an entirely different can of worms. But maybe it's safe to say that sometimes it's important and sometimes it's not?

I totally get off on the fact 'Ignition Remix' or 'Hey Ya' have unorthodox time signatures, in fact i might say it's these songs that helped to gain me a better appreciation of pop-r'n'b, but I totally get that most people like these songs because they're fucking cool catchy tunes.