theo parrish s/d

Does it? Can't A win B over to A's point of view. or vice versa. They could hold the same subjective view

Or why not send a text?

if everyone's opinion is equally valid about everything then why bother listening to anyone's opinion

i guess lots of people don't!

And isn't person A saying actually this Mingus record is a lot better than that Kenny Larkin record!

anyway, i agree with what you're saying, obviously. i don't know if anyone on this thread, pipecock aside, really thinks like Person B though.

Everyone opinion is equally valid! But i trust your opinion more than many other peoples! perhaps as much as 40% more!

that is the issue, max.

My argument from above about Hieroglyphic Being, for example-- one could criticize his music for being TOO rhytmically complex for dancing music, or one could jam out to it all night. It is still rhytmically complex.

One could argue that Tiesto's swells are superbly placed within a track, or one could argue that Tiesto's swells are much too obvious and uninteresting. They are still swells.

Get my drift?

comparatively

Opinions about the objective elements within music can and in fact SHOULD differ from person to person, but that doesn't change that those objective elements exist.

On the train on the way home i stood with a tall person.

As we went past the basketball court later, I thought perhaps he wasn't tall really. It may well have been a trick of the light

person A: "I really like this mingus record"
person B: "I never got into it, i thought it had toooo many horns, which we know objectively are often loud!"
person A: "did u know??? horns have a long history in jazz music, and i enjoy their use texturally because [long tim finney-style explanation omitted]."
person B: "I see why you appreciate this now! I'm not sure I agree, but..." OR "Wow, I think I am starting to enjoy this."

thats how people can often exchange ideas about music when they arent treating music like its a fucking prop for their ego

Is a 65 minute piece long? objectively?

cats around here sure like to jam lately

God this argument has degenerated a bit I think - surely the point of what Ronan is saying should really be beyond discussion. How many threads have we had on rockism and subjectivity etc. at this stage?

Tricky when you say a golden ear is like an olympic swimmer (paraphrase), the problem is that you're implying some sort of measurable objective standard to get your argument across the line. It's really the measurability (i.e. the empirically proven) part rather than the objectivity part which is the issue here, because it's that which does the rhetorical heavy lifting. If we couldn't measure (in a universally agreed manner) which swimmer was better than the other, we'd spend all our time arguing which was objectively better and never be able to prove anything finally, which would make Olympic selection a nightmare.

It'd be like, "Oh, X swimmer has great form", "well, Y swimmer has been training very hard", "but Z swimmer has really perfected a combination of muscularity and leanness" etc. etc.

Instead we just use our stopwatches and say "okay, A's going to the Olympics".

It's not invalid to say "if you disagree with the existence of something that can't be proved empirically than i just feel sorry for you."

But where does this get us? About as far as debates regarding the existence of God. Christians feel that "objectively" God exists, and atheists feel just as strongly that this is a "subjective" fantasy. Now it may be one or the other but we can never say finally which one it is, at least not without openly buying into a leap of faith w/r/t God's existence. Hence the intelligent design movement and it's quest to pile up enough empirical, erm, suggestions to lend weight to the notion of God's existence independent of faith. This is the kernel of the argument made by proponents of intelligent design that it ought to be taught in science classes rather than religion classes - they say that all they're doing is looking at what kind of conclusions the empirical data is necessitating, rather than importing their prejudices (other scientists disagree of course).

I think intelligent design provides us with an interesting model w/r/t how many of us try to grapple with notions of soul, genius, "the golden ear" - stuff that we have difficulty actually describing.

In theories of intelligent design, it's like the writers are tracing around the edges of the subject matter (e.g. the need for some kind of rational planning of biogenetics given it's complexity and interdependence) by pointing out stuff that can't be explained fully otherwise. ID scientists will say, "oh look at the human eye, it's too sophisticated and elegant, it can't be explained as an accidental development of natural selection, there's a void in the explanation (which God can fill)".

The common structure w/r/t debates on creationism vs evolutionism and debates about music is how the creationists/"objectivists" use God or supposedly objective notions of good or bad to fill the voids in their argument, the sections that they cannot explain. Intelligent design is the most sophisticated example of this plastering approach, and it derives whatever legitimacy it currently has from the acknowledgment that religion begins where science ends - rather than having religion instead of science (e.g. Creationism). Whether ID is right or wrong, historically it looks like it's fighting a losing battle: a rearguard action to defend the last vestiges of faith-based speculation after science has progressively eaten away at so many of Christianity's fundamental tenets. But the important thing to note here is that to some extent science and religion are actually on the same side: both are effectively "quasi-science" (or, to view it oppositely, myth) used to understand and control the outside world: science does it by measurement, religion fills in the gaps to cover anything that cannot be measured. But the implied standard in either case is measurement - both are attempting to account for the empirical world. Whether we say that rain is caused by moisture in the air or by the Gods, both statements can be "empirical".

Where the analogy with music breaks down is that musical judgment is aesthetic, and by definition cannot be measured. Oh, certainly we can measure chord changes and time signatures, and an understanding of form can tell us a lot about how/why certain music works in certain circumstances, but it only forms part of the question of the music's success - the other part of that question is how that form then intersects with taste, which changes over time, develops unevenly, and is governed by a host of inconsistent, largely unmeasurable factors. My taxonomy of the factors that shape gatekeeper militancy is a good example of this: there is no scientific procedure by which those factors can be applied; meaning develops erratically and interdependently, and it differs from person to person. Better to say that it functions, not like science, but like language: sure, we can communicate, but that doesn't mean that there is some independent "objective" truth of the statements we utter. Meaning exists only in the minds of the participants, and it differs for each person.

In music appreciation, there is not one empirical world to be accounted for; rather there are as many musical worlds as there are listeners. Because when we try to account for music appreciation, we're really trying to account for our own reactions. "There's no accounting for taste": all discussions of taste are ultimately propositional and rhetorical, a statement "I think...". We can try to explain why we like or dislike something as precisely and persuasively as possible, but that doesn't make that explanation "empirical" in some universally applicable, measurable way - else Mike Taylor wouldn't be left scratching his head when he reads my enthusiastic writing on music he doesn't like. Analysis of form in this context is much like linguistics: it can tell us a lot about what we're discussing and how we're discussing it, but it can't finally guarantee the truth or untruth of propositional statements.

Whereas in science/religion we can talk about that which can be measured empirically and that which (currently) can't, there is no such dividing line when it comes to writing about taste, since it functions more like a language than a science. It's an illegitimate rhetorical maneuver to draw a line around a couple of ideas like "the golden ear" and say "these phenomena just are, they can't be described or examined," intelligent-design-style. These are propositions to be debated just like any other.

Only rampant generalisation and deliberate blindspots create the notion of real consensus or "objectivity" - this is the whole point of Ronan's complaint about Theo Parrish making reference to a handful of great white european artists in dance music. As Ronan points out, by not specifying the artists, Theo allows everyone to think he is speaking for them, and then they mentally insert their white european exceptions. But of course everyone inserts different names. What Theo is doing is using a discursive device to generate consensus, he's not making a factual statement.

Well put.

Ps ID is a load of BS

^^^^ radical subjectivism

More simply, and ronan's already kinda made this point: what remains forever and always annoying about these critiques of "radical subjectivism" (which is not really applicable btw, it's not like we're talking about ethics or metaphysics ffs!) is that pretty much no-one is ever prepared to place themselves on the losing side of the debate. How convenient that objectivity is always on the side of the speaker.

Or prove me wrong: someone say "Subjectively I think Theo Parrish (or Ricardo Villalobos) is a genius, but if someone were to make a convincing argument that objectively he is not, I will accept that." (and mean it, rather than just say it is a zing).

But that would be the equivalent of a Catholic priest saying "subjectively I believe in the Christian God, but I'm prepared to accept that objectively Hinduism is correct."

We don't say these things because in these discussions a pretense at objectivity is always used as a rhetorical device to shore up the validity of opinions you cannot establish to the satisfaction of all participants.

"Ps ID is a load of BS"

Completely! I forgot to put that disclaimer in.

i don't really care, deej. get back to freestyling over wearemonster

-- resolved, Wednesday, July 23, 2008 6:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

did this happen? i don't know if it sounds like a good thing, but i really want to hear it!!

ID confused absence of evidence with evidence of absence

That's a really nice and succinct explanation actually vahid. I'm totally gonna say that to people and pass it off as my own pithy insight.

i don't really care, deej. get back to freestyling over wearemonster

-- resolved, Wednesday, July 23, 2008 6:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

did this happen? i don't know if it sounds like a good thing, but i really want to hear it!!

-- elan, Wednesday, July 23, 2008 6:40 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i think thats just a joke about me liking rap and being a techno new jack or something. i never liked wearemonster and much preferred rest

okay. i liked both but i heard wearemonster first. they are so different. i guess i would be a new jack too then.

yah thats part of the lols to me, im pretty sure a number of techno thread regulars got into this kinda stuff after i did, not that it should mean anything one way or the other

newb.

I love how this thread went completely batshit for like 2 hours this afternoon. It was giving me serious lolz while I fixed computers this afternoon.

ILX dance regulars are a totally disfunctional family.

i wasn't really thinking in terms of empirical qualities when i made the swimmer analogy. i meant it more in terms of a quality that is ultimately not empirically measurable which goes without saying i suppose. i see now how the analogy is flawed.

it is very bracing and weird being on the other side of the debate. typically i would be the first to argue that all taste is completely subjective, but sometimes (and not just because of this thread) i am not so sure in other things that could be deemed subjective (hence golden ear). i am going to fuck up in explaining this, but to me it is deeply ironic that this discussion in couched in the rhetoric of discourse because even though music is a language and language is one of things that is supposed to make things comprehensible, it feels inadequate in these cases. in linguistics there is the "belief context" which basically states that belief has an unknown truth value; you can believe lies are true. if subjectivity is something you believe in then, it follows that it has the same problems as the objective viewpoint. now tell me why i'm wrong.

ha - xpost tricky. I seriously wrote the following just before your post:

One thing I'd like to salvage from tricky's discussion of the "golden ear" is the notion of intuition. When he talks about producers wanting to work with the "hot" engineer who can hear certain potentialities in the sound of a track and tease those out. It's what I might call the "right"-ness of sound - all those minor subtle differences and inflections that might result in a world of (subjective) qualitative difference between two otherwise similar tracks.

A lot of this stuff is hard to pin down or describe, but producers and listeners can nonetheless make the intuitive leap and pick up on distinctions. The mistake at this point is to assume that the difficulty in describing this stuff makes it somehow transcendental ("soul" etc.) when really it's just difficult to describe.

What is interesting about the impulse towards transcendentalism is that most people (even pipecock) are happy to categorize that stuff which can be described as being a property of the track, but when they run into difficulties in describing what their ears are hearing, those elusive properties then becomes a property of the creator - "soul", for example, impliedly or explicitly imports assumptions about the personality and the life of the creator in a way that technique does not.

I suppose that this fallacy is a direct result of trying to apply the science/religion model - again there is a pretense at objectivity ("technique") whose void is shored up by a deus ex machina (god/soul etc.)

But when we intuitively hear such distinction (either in the process of creation, as producers/engineers etc, or in the process of reception, as listeners) it's not necessarily us responding to something other than techniques. More likely the "technique" at work is too subtle or complex for us to follow easily.

A good analogy is advertising: you can instinctively or intuitively pass judgment on an a particular commercial w/r/t whether it's good or bad ad, whether it "works". And then someone in marketing can come in and give a detailed explanation of why it works or not that replaces your pre-critical judgment with a post-critical judgment. If you agree with the marketing expert, it's probably because the kinds of factors they're offering already exist in your head, they just haven't been articulated. It's not replacing with religion with science: really what is happening is that you as a consumer have rules in your head w/r/t what counts as good or bad advertising, but you may not be able to articulate what those rules are; the advertiser has made a study of those rules. They're still "rules" though - i.e. arbitrary, contingent, made by humans and existing largely for the purpose of successful communication. Their status as "fact" is about the same as the "fact" that you shouldn't split your infinitives (my biggest grammatical failing, incidentally). Lots of people observe good grammar without knowing why; if they study linguistics all they do is replace their intuitive grasp of language with a self-understanding one.

Replacing intuition with self-understanding is (or should be) the model of good criticism: the compliment I most enjoy being paid as a writer is "thank you, I was sorta thinking/feeling the same thing but I couldn't put it into words."

" in linguistics there is the "belief context" which basically states that belief has an unknown truth value; you can believe lies are true. if subjectivity is something you believe in then, it follows that it has the same problems as the objective viewpoint. now tell me why i'm wrong."

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at tricky, but surely we should distinguish between factual statements and qualitative judgments.

If someone says "this theo parrish track was inspired by Count Basie" and that's not in fact true, then they're wrong, no matter how much they believe it.

If someone says "this theo parrish track sounds to me like Count Basie", it's not a factual statement that can be proven or disproven. You can maybe change that person's mind about the relationship by coming up with a better fit ("don't you think it actually sounds more like...") or by complicating their understanding of the resemblance ("well theo does this thing here but count basie would never do that..."). But you can't disprove the initial statement.

The question perhaps for you tricky is "what counts as a lie?"

i suppose so. i think what i am getting at (although at this point i am not even sure) is that both sides here seem quasi-religious. your previous post nailed it..

i mean i guess we did a big circle right back to the intial spark of this discusssion.

I think the subjectivist side would be religious if it said "whatever you can't describe doesn't exist."

I would never claim that, but I would say "what you're describing as soul is not in fact soul and is something else."

Or "I don't think you can just make those connections in the way you're making them."

The obvious example is what you might call the metaphysical blindfold test: Pipecock effectively claims that he can tell the difference between a "real Detroit techno" and a false one by virtue of the soul that inheres in the former.

I disagree with this proposition but I don't doubt that he would probably pass any such blindfold test by and large. What I would argue is that the connections he's hearing b/w the circumstances of the product's creation and the sound of the music cannot be short-circuited via transcendentalism, and can be better explained via a more careful consideration of technique, technology, aesthetic choices etc. Pipecock is intuitively processing that stuff, but the conclusions he comes to about what causes this intuitive leap are all wrong.

And furthermore, the fact that he can make that intuitive leap, the fact of his "golden ear", doesn't make him right about music per se. It makes him reliable as a source of music recommendations among a circle or people who share his musical prejudices (e.g. Mike).

Another "golden ear" might be able to pick up on all the slight distinctions that make Axwell better or worse than D Ramirez, and find the collected works of Omar-S to be boring as hell.

I think that what Ronan is getting at - and what other people are decrying as "radical subjectivism" - is that there are so many notions of what counts as "good" in dance music (or any music!), and all of these notions are based on different criteria. Simply assuming that one golden ear has the monopoly on rightness is not offensive because it assumes objectivity, but because it's just so myopic. It assumes that everyone should choose to live the life that you lead.

"real Detroit techno" track, I mean.

was trying hard to figure out an analogy that matched the ideas in this thread to the ideas of intelligent design but it doesn't really work.

i believe there's objective standards in music. like, when daniel wang says that an early disco track is more melodically or harmonically complex than masters at work's "deep inside", i believe him. of course, i don't think that makes it any better or more enjoyable or more interesting, and there are thousands of threads on ILX that give better explanations why.

if i had to try to do it in a sentence, i'd say that musical experience can be (and should be) transformative for the individual without necessarily representing the pinnacle of the form. i'd bet if you took theo parrish records around to academic music authorities they'd react more or less the same way that winston marsalis reacted to public enemy: "oh, this is ... interesting. it's not really in any key ... and it doesn't have melody or harmony. it does have rhythm, and energy. it's definitely an interesting attempt at music".

i imagine that a PhD might look at my chemistry students (they're 15-16) and say the same thing. "wow, it certainly looks like they're doing chemistry. although they're not making any discoveries, per se. and they certainly make a lot of mistakes." but still, i think their experiences can be important, deeply meaningful even, despite the fact that probably only 1 in 20 will go on to any sort of technical career or physical science career, despite the fact that their efforts are amateur, half-baked, etc.

and let's face it: if we put theo parrish up for review by the past champions of the marginal music (harry smith? stanley crouch? lester bangs?), they'd hate it!

"what you're describing as soul is not in fact soul and is something else."

the danger here is that it reads like you are co-opting language. the word soul has a very strong socio-historical lineage. using the word soul places the music within a type of continuum that means something to people. this is what i mean by the problem of discourse and belief contexts. it makes the whole subjectivist argument seem simultaneously politically correct ("cleaning up" language) and totally arrogant (overgeneralizing about culture) even if that is not the intent. what do you say to a musician who describes her music as soulful? or to the black girl on the south side of chicago with her hand up in your face? she reads this and says, "talk to the hand motherfucker you don't know shit about soul and don't even try to tell me what i know about it."

that hypothetical is a bit of a set-up? most outrageous strawman ever, eh?

"suppose moodymann had a gun to your head, ronan ..."

"what do you say to a musician who describes her music as soulful?"

It depends on what she means. If she is saying that her music has some spiritual quality that other similar sounding music does not, I'd say she's the arrogant one. If she's saying her music has musical qualities that are associated with the use of the world "soul" then it's a totally different story - we're back to questions about technique, aesthetic choice etc.

At any rate, at what point does personal experience take precedence over good argument?

What about the person who's grown up in a religious community who responds the same way regarding questions of science vs religion? "talk to the hand motherfucker you don't know shit about the creation of the world and don't even try to tell me what i know about it."

What about two people who have deep-seated but conflicting notions of soul? What about two black girls from the south side of chicago, each telling the other they don't know shit about soul because one of them likes deep house and the other likes rap?

Who is "co-opting language" at this point? It may be true that "the word soul has a very strong socio-historical lineage", but a component of that lineage is that no-one can agree on what it means! It's entire history is a history of co-option.

I think if you were going to try to distinguish between good co-option and bad co-option (or legitimate and illegitimate co-option) the question then becomes my status as a speaker - to what extent can I as a white middle-class Australian presume to involve myself in discussions about a musical quality bound up in notions of black working-class urban American community.

But this comes back to the point you made about gatekeeper militancy originally - ultimately what's "at stake" is not the quality of the music but broader cultural or even socio-political concerns. But let's be honest about that.

xpost

the premise of your examples is like this: i'm saying something about soul in response to a musician who describes their music as soulful. or to a black girl who's already mad at me. so whether or not i'm right about soul being a rhetorical construction, i'm already committing a faux pas by applying the strong language of ILX to a face-to-face conversation with a musician about their music. that's a little bit like "oh, so you oppose the war on terror? TELL THAT TO THIS LITTLE BOY WHO LOST HIS DADDY ON 9/11".

the question then becomes my status as a speaker - to what extent can I as a white middle-class Australian presume to involve myself in discussions about a musical quality bound up in notions of black working-class urban American community.

-- Tim F

coming from a white person, i love it. love it love it love it.

-- pipecock

yes, it was deliberately over the top. xposts..

"But this comes back to the point you made about gatekeeper militancy originally - ultimately what's "at stake" is not the quality of the music but broader cultural or even socio-political concerns. But let's be honest about that."

yes, exactly!

my point is that it is difficult to separate the music from everything else.

Again, I don't want to claim that the experience-of-music of a black girl from south side Chicago is invalid, but that doesn't mean that the way she chooses to describe that experience is "right" in an objective sense. But I will say that if she wants to convince me she will have to phrase her experience in a way that accords with my standards of reasonable communicability.

But if she believes in "soul" in that strong sense, she won't want to have that conversation with me - the terms of engagement already set out that I do not, will not and cannot "get it." Soul at this point is by definition non-communicable to people outside the community.

Since one of the terms of the hypothetical conversation is that a conversation as such cannot happen, what is at stake is not the existence and nature of soul, but the identity of the participants in the conversation, and whether they both belong to a community that believe in "soul" in the strong sense.

x-post Of course it is, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a certain intellectual dishonesty involved in saying something like "white european techno has no soul, with some exceptions that I will not name". If the speaker really means "I am politically and culturally invested in promoting the interests of musicians from Detroit" then they have the option of just saying that. Pretending that it's "all about the music" is a strategic deception.

Or prove me wrong: someone say "Subjectively I think Theo Parrish (or Ricardo Villalobos) is a genius, but if someone were to make a convincing argument that objectively he is not, I will accept that."

I do this all the time. I know next to nothing about jazz, therefore if I walk into the house of someone with 10,000 jazz records, I won't pick out 'Kind of Blue' and insist we listen to it from beginning to end; I'd let them put the record on. If they've got 10,000 jazz records, and I've got 5, they've obviously got something to teach me. There are objective facets to jazz that I've simply never been exposed to.

This is the same attitude the scientist takes: being open to persuasion. Room for doubt. I think what I think, but if you dig up the right bones, you've got the chance to prove me wrong.

This is why we have experts. This is why we have DJs/proper critics. Because they (should) have the bones, so to speak.

The problem with the radically subjective argument is that it's inheriently non-humble. It's not open to persuasion. It can even come across as a cover for ignorance: "I think what I think, and no matter how many records you play, or how well you explain why you like them, it's not going to change my mind one iota." In that sense, it's like religion.

Yes, music is a language more than a science. And the subjectivists will counter my example with "Yes, but the guy's 10,000 records might be all turn out to all rubbish." Well, that strikes me as a bit arrogant - a bit like "my subjective taste is the only thing that matters". As if they're somehow immune to the memes. I reckon the language analogy is a good one I think: Even if you don't like any of his records, you'll have learned a bit more of the language. And when you listen to 'Kind of Blue' again, it might sound different. More in context. Better or worse. This happens all the time.

The problem with the radically subjective argument is that it's inheriently non-humble. It's not open to persuasion. It can even come across as a cover for ignorance: "I think what I think, and no matter how many records you play, or how well you explain why you like them, it's not going to change my mind one iota." In that sense, it's like religion.

except that this isnt really the 'radically subjective' argument

Example: I used to give credit to Bjork for having a unique voice, until I heard 'Typical Girl' by The Slits!

on this thread, it seems like the "subjectivists" are more open to persuasion than vice-versa. or at least, they're not the ones complaining about the narrow range of worthwhile techno.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/ce/Straw_dogs_movie_poster.jpg/418px-Straw_dogs_movie_poster.jpg