theo parrish s/d

Was ron hardy playing by the 'rules' of the community when he dropped nirvana in the middle of a set? fuck "the decision"

that was armando. ron hardy might have already been dead when it came out. (nirvana arrived and hardy departed in 1991)

I think participation in the culture from which the soulful music is made and consumed is the best way for it to be found by people who dont get it instinctively ... it is simply an intuitive understanding from the music community in which I participate ... I may not be the perfect person to be the critic, but I speak from the proper position in the community and I try my best to keep the ideas that that community holds in the general discussion.

what is so terrible about this position is that it is so hegemonic and counter-revolutionary. music listenership in general (ILM, even) could be a thousand flowers blooming, instead you'd want to make it like an arboretum: look, but don't touch. ignore the wildflowers, weeds, succulents, etc. forget the scraggly-looking patch in your backyard, the one that you've cultivated tirelessly all year, even though you live on a coastal mesa with sandstone, salt and crushed shells instead of soil. that thing that you've fruitlessly squandered your love and attention on for months, forget that tiny little defiant 3'x3' patch of green and gold and pink. over here's the prize rosebush, certified by the appropriate experts and elected officials.

ok, i'm sure to many people this analogy seems ass-backward. after all, tiesto with his major endorsements and screaming crowd of thousands probably seems like the royal horticultural society and omar s like the backyard garden. but again, what's important here isn't tiesto or omar s, but rather the listener and what animates their reaction to the music. i am sure there are tiesto fans who take their roles and their relationship to the DJ every bit as seriously as mancuso's acolytes, whose ecstatic experience of tiesto is every bit as powerful as a dancer at the paradise garage would have felt. i can't say that i feel confident that i'll ever have that experience of tiesto ... at best i can suppress the sense of tedium enough to make it through a track or two ...

but i think we can find an easier illustration of why this attitude is so unhelpful. look at the modern jazz neoconservatives (the talking heads from the ken burns program). they would all agree that sun ra has little to say about the jazz tradition, that he's virtually not a part of that tradition (i am listening to "holiday for soul dance" as i read this, and there's a discussion of in the liners, by szwed, i think) and they'd be right. if you compare his career arc to, say, eric dolphy or lee morgan (i'm just naming a couple of people at random) you'd see he did little of the dues-paying and session-playing that other leaders had done by that point. he wasn't a part of the community that made the fertile atlantic / blue note / impulse! / etc scene of the 60s possible. and, in turn, he was more or less rejected by that community, and embraced by europeans, hippies and black american weirdos like henry dumas and amiri baraka.

the thing is, wynton marsalis (i think i called him winston about five times on this thread) fulfills all those conditions you mention. he is a "participant in the community" (i note that you don't explain what that community is), who certainly speaks from a privileged position. and yet, i don't see the value in listening to his dismissal of sun ra. how could it be powerful or transformative to do so? better yet, what would someone *unlike* me, who doesn't like sun ra, have to gain from it? a sense of satisfaction? self-righteousness? the warm glow of having your biases and prejudices confirmed by another?

this is why i think theo's statement (from the end of the interview) is so sad and lame, why i share ronan's sense of sadness and sickness about it (and the triumphalist reaction from some quarters: "see, theo agrees with us!")

i like hearing things from artists about the music they make. i was powerfully affected when i heard that sun ra had come up with the phrase "the magic city" from looking out his window at night and seeing a big neon sign at the outskirts of birmingham that said the same. i used to look out my window at night as a kid and dream about space, too. it gave me a sense of connection to sun ra (to another human being) that deepened my aesthetic appreciation of his music. and i liked hearing bits and pieces from omar-s and theo parrish about their import car racing hobby. it's funny, i haven't really contextualized it yet. i have a lot of friends into import car racing, and they listen to the worst shit ever, like blue man group and current d'n'b and japanese pop-techno anime soundtracks. but i look forward to the day when they explain their fandom of that music as eloquently as tim and ronan explain theirs: i'm sure it will be a powerful human moment, and maybe it will widen my field of meaningful aesthetic experience too, so that i won't be gritting my teeth when i ride in their cars but enjoying the vibe with them.

but when theo says what he says: what does that really accomplish? how does that broaden me? how does it deepen me? do we grow as people when we think things like that, or is it just a self-congratulatory pat on the back? i could spread out all of my theo parrish and moodyman CDs on the ground in front of me (it'd be 30 or so), i'm sure i'd feel a rather hollow sense of accomplishment for having such good taste. what can theo's statement about european tech-house do for me, other than making that hollow sense even stronger?

"Tim F seems to think that if you analyze it enough you can find some objective technique that can make something "soulful", I couldnt disagree more. I think every person's soul music will be different in notes and scales used, techniques, etc. I think participation in the culture from which the soulful music is made and consumed is the best way for it to be found by people who dont get it instinctively."

No "objective technique" - but the "soul" can either be material or mystical, and if it's material it's a combination of sounds brought to the table by the creator and associations brought to the table by the listener. Of course what people call soul will differ markedly from cultural product to cultural product, not to mention that no two people will agree completely on which records are soulful and which aren't - this is one of the reasons that from a critical perspective I find the term's use limited. I don't object to its use, I just object to its use in isolation as some sort of tie-breaker, as if merely declaring the presence of soul turned any debate into a closed case.

It's a bit like saying "the difference is between X record and Y record is that X record has groove, and if you don't understand that you are deaf." The word "soul" or "groove" in this context act as a conclusion rather than an argument.

My immediate response is "what constitutes the good groove in X record?" And yes, the groove might be difficult to describe, but it can be described. Likewise, there is no bilderverbot in force that prevents us from articulating what the "soul" quality of a particular record is.

You wrote the following a while back in the Burial thread when we had the exact same argument:

"i mean, i do love me some lo-fi type shit, i cant lie about that. but being lo-fi is nothing in and of itself. the brilliance is that if you can make something sound beautiful and captivating without regard to the sound quality, you have something very special on your hands. it is about stripping away everything except that which is most important in music: expression, emotion, soul.

...but it is not about sound, thats why! these artists just go straight for the unquantifiables in their music, everything else is secondary. im sure there are people who are just into lo-fi sound, but thats a whole other area of distorted thought that may as well the same as people who are only into hi-fi sound.

the basic idea is that Burial has transcended his genre of music by stripping away the backwards thought that has driven the creativity in two genres of music that i have loved for a long time into the ground. people quit caring about music and started caring about nonsense, he took it back to the music alone and some people hate on him for that! how crazy. when making beautiful soulful music is the exception and it causes people to dismiss you, something is terribly wrong with the standards!

...there is nothing to add to it, though. his music has soul means IT SOUNDS LIKE HIS EXPRESSION. that's all. can you disagree with someone's expression of something? it might not be your taste, but whatever. when the criticism is comparing it to music that has nearly no room for expression in it, that comparison makes almost no sense. but dubstep and jungle were once expressive, diverse sounding music. not now. which is why burial has more to do with 2-step in 99 and jungle in 95 than anything that any offshoot of those genres is doing today."

On the basis of this argument, "soul" acts as this entirely content-devoid abstract category that gets awarded like a ribbon to whichever records you happen to like. But a descriptive term with no determinate content is not a descriptive term at all.

I think Teedra Moses has one of the most "soulful" voices in R&B (the fact that I'm using her as an example shouldn't be taken to mean I think the word has no application outside this genre). I get disproportionately emotional listening to it. I think some of that the aspects of her vocals that cause this effect on me are:
- her timing: the way she sort of lazily follows the beat at times rather than stay on it compulsively, which suggests a kind of instinctive grace.
- her very judicious use of melisma (usually just a quiver on the very last word of any line), which suggests a combination of strength and vulnerability-through-openness, rather than fragility per se.
- the way her Southern accent colours her vocals without becoming the focus of them - which (for me at least, and perhaps totally illegitimately) impliedly suggests the continuation of a tradition of wisdom and home truth rather than a scholarly explication of same (this is a really dodgy assumption but my mind has been shaped somewhat by cultural presentations of the South).
- ... and then the way all these things intersect with her lyrics, her melodies, the production...

All these things contribute to the sense of "soul" in Teedra's music, which simultaneously adds up to something that is felt to be more than the sum of its parts - I feel emotionally attached to Teedra as a person because the persona that her music creates (largely through her "soulfulness") feels so real and so... I don't want to use the word "inspirational" which sounds a bit extreme and hackneyed. But something along those lines.

Basically what I'm saying is that "soul" may not be able to be objectively measured but it can be subjectively described. What it's not is a mystical property of genius musicians that is beyond our powers of understanding, even though I can see how it can appear that way.

It's a bit like a good film (and this returns to my slash fiction point): some films feature characters so real, so moving, so likable, that you feel like you know them in real life. Your relationship to that character does not feel like it can be completely "reduced" to a technical discussion of the script, of direction decisions, of choice of actor etc. And yet undeniably all of those things contribute towards your relationship of the character - they combine to create something that seems to be more than the sum of its parts. But this is a function of good art or expression and it can be thought about just like anything else.

P.S I misspelled 'bildeverbot' there which is punishment for using it in the first place - I'm referring to a religious ban on images of God, heaven etc.

if we had more posts where people explained why they liked particular things from a personal context then we wouldn't need threads like this.

for me, the music I like is boosted massively by the fact that over the years it's reached a point where almost all of my friends like it too, or at least like to go out and hear it.

sometimes these threads frustrate me hugely because of the vast brush strokes used to describe people or their music taste. it's silly. people can't be categorised based on what music they like, and if they could I'd expect a better attempt than some of those that go on in techno.

I mean, the reason I cite Europe sometimes is because I really think if some people grew up in or eventually grew into a circle of friends (and enemies!) who all liked dance music, the generalisations would just seem so fucking stupid.

Some people don't define their entire personality by the music they listen to. Most people probably don't. It's not a crime.

People are completely different, no two are the same and this second guessing is horrible misanthropy. Saying "this person is a moron cos they like this". It's so childish and stupid, I can remember arguing in favour of objectivity at 14 when I liked indie rock music cos it made me feel like a smart person. How dumb it was.

And what about people who don't like any music in particular, who shock horror, are decent people? Intelligent people like ALL sorts of things, and have all sorts of opinions, people are a tapestry of opinions and ideas and if you force yourself not to think so then something has broken in you.

As I said, nobody ever cites objectivity in a neutral way, or as a passive analysis. For example when does somebody say "this record and that record are objectively AS GOOD AS each other, exactly as good as each other". never. yet somehow once "better" or "worse" are added in it makes sense? ludicrous.

the reason clubs are important is that they create an illusion of unity or of a united purpose, and it's vaguely true, people are there to hear a certain type of music, maybe to see a certain DJ, to have fun. but they do it in their own way and nobody controls why or how they do it, how they dance, what they take, whether they own 10000 records or none.

it just seems quite crazy that so many people dismiss people and an entire scene because they don't like the records, and then go on to tell you how vital and important a scene and a community is in whatever genre they do like.

if people fought ignorance consistently that'd be fine, but objectivity on an ILM dance thread just says "oh how can people ignore this and this, in favour of that unmitigated deplorable bullshit", "how can people furiously hate this when they have only heard that absolute fucking nonsense", "how can people be so blind to real music when all they listen to is fake crap?"

objectivity never seems unselfish or outward looking does it? or if it does, yet again, I want to read it, probably in academia somewhere it might.

and yeah I know I can be an asshole about music, anyone can, but christ just saying "this is good, that is bad", that's just GIVING UP.

the hour of the bevilderbot

Vahid, I like your story, and I especially like how your wife is also a Sun Ra fan, because it makes it a conspiracy of more than one. If it’s shared, then it exists. For myself, my standpoint is derived from coming from a background of playing music, and hearing music live, and hearing dance music at the clubs, or even sharing enthusiasm for records with friends, and somehow that interaction (the church if you will) has always been innately a part of the whole pleasure. It’s not enough to collect a bunch of records ore make a track and listen to on my lonesome. It’s also about the shared enthusiasm.

It’s luddite, but maybe the access to stuff like Sun Ra that we gain through technology means we also lose something as well: people used to have to go somewhere to listen, but wax cylinders created a whole new thing, and now the net is taking this separation & atomization to its logical conclusion, eliminating the physical thing, the physical place, the need for other people, and just plugging your right into the sound itself for you to take however you like. This is what I was saying about comedy: who wants to listen to a Richard Pryor record by themselves? Half of the fun in the other laughter in the room…

"i cannot hang out on this thread all day again today, but i actually woke up this morning thinking about it and i think i know what i mean when i say that the "subjectivist" side of this debate is also quasi-religious: it's the implied dogmatism behind believing that anything can be explained and the refusal to acknowledge that some types of explaining are destructive or endlessly recursive."

Tricky, I can guess where this is going but I'm not sure. Are you saying that some kinds of explaining destroy the "mystery" of music listening (we should feel rather than think)? Or that some fictions are too precious/productive to be held up to the light of reasoned analysis - that irrationalism ought to be protected if it's culturally significant?

There's probably quite a good argument to made on that basis. The difficulty is that you can't make it without acknowledging the irrationality, which results in the very destruction you're trying to ward off.

"i think the answer to "b" is that you say that you accept all views, but you really don't which is similar to the thing you accuse the other side of. except in this case the other side has no argument and you have your endless discourse to dodge all bullets with so you de facto win. it is very very clever."

What I would acknowledge is that no person, however open to accepting the views of others they claim to be, is free of prejudices and assumptions that they choose not to critically examine or open up to debate (if they are even aware of them). Yes, there is an in-built partiality or one-sidedness to any use of "reason". Inevitably my arguments support my own ecumenical musical tastes wherein I reserve the right to like many different things for many different reasons and not tie them together in some master theory about soul or community. But insofar as I do have reasons, I am also a "gatekeeper", and I'm trying to shape the standards of musical acceptability through debate on here, and my use of reasonable argument is funneled through my own gatekeeper persona.

Once we're viewed as being on the same argumentative level (both partial), the next step is to ask on what criteria either side of the argument might be considered more persuasive than the other. On my side there is reasoned argumentation. On pipecock's there is "come and live in detroit and join this community and you will understand."

If I "de facto win" this is why.

If as you say the devious quality of the reasonable participants is that "the other side has no argument", that's not a de facto win but a win outright. It's not my cleverness that determines the quality of the argument anyone else brings to the table.

It’s not enough to collect a bunch of records ore make a track and listen to on my lonesome

see, even this i would disagree with. there are plenty of musicians who worked at some point in isolation. brian wilson and lee perry in the isolation of mental illness made some of their most incredible music. on the other side, the solo guitar work of mystics like john fahey or roy montgomery. eno by himself in his hospital bed, composing "broken head". moondogg by himself on the street, blind and homeless, composing duets for flute & tugboat or hand drum & seagull choir. basic channel, 3000 miles (and how much gulf of culture) divorced from their chicago inspirations.

actually, i imagine that loneliness (of the individual, of the musician sitting down to practice, of the record-collector, etc) is one of the most powerful motivators for great music, because it's an emotional state we all have access to, regardless of experience or background. one time i put on some chain reaction (ridis "foto", and "octaedre" IIRC) for my mom, who loathes all electronic music and she said "wow, this sounds sad, and lonely, and far away. turn it off". so she gets it, too.

and anyway didn't carl craig and richie hawtin make all of their early music under the influence of taking lonely late-nite drives around the city together, listening to electrifyin' mojo? don't tell me it's about being part of a club like the paradise garage or something ...

Which chimes in with the fact that pretty much whatever can be ascribed as good in music or good for music can also be proved in the reverse.

Community or exile; soulful or soulless. These are factors and their significance and meaning depends on the constellation in which they appear.

that was armando. ron hardy might have already been dead when it came out. (nirvana arrived and hardy departed in 1991)

-- elan, Thursday, July 24, 2008 6:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

ha yah my bad i misspoke obv, im the one that posted the story about armando!

the objectivity thing is also very western to me.....surely there are ways to consume music that I can't conceive of, to conceive western music that I can't conceive of, in different countries all around the world.

vahid u on fire on this thread, those are some great posts

yes i find them very 'soulful'

yeah, vahid, wow. best of ILM, easily...

moonship journey to baja for president

yes we can

u should write a graphic novel abt ur childhood i bet u could win some award

surely there are ways to consume music that I can't conceive of, to conceive western music that I can't conceive of, in different countries all around the world.

Once I was in Sumatra and this local girl took me to this shack in the middle of nowhere. And there were drummers, and flute-kinda things, and about 70 people dancing to that trad Indo music in this smelly old shack, including all the old ladies from the village. Especially the old ladies actually. And the music peaked & intensified and people starting having fits, dancing like they were possessed, rolling round out the floor. Proper trance musically, basically, and I’d never heard anything like it.

I got a lot out of it.

The question is: if I’d made a recording of it, and someone bought it on Aquarius Records, and fell in love with it and constructed a whole fantasy world about how they’d always wanted to ride on elephants in India, and this record reminded them of the Jungle Book, which was a book which they always loved as a kid because it was adventurous, etc, etc – the question is do these points of view have equal legitimacy?

I think not.

so what makes yours more legitimate

what power does your memory have that the other person's doesn't? what does it do for you that it doesn't for the other person? what do you have that they don't? what can you do that they can't? how does it benefit you while not benefiting them?

furthermore, do you want an award for going to sumatra?

so what makes yours more legitimate

Because it actually exists outside of my head

wowww you are truly a legitimate music listener

or how about i win the argument by paying you a compliment: even though i've never been to sumatra, i got something out of your story, a momentary sense of transportation to another place, a rich and fascinating and compelling place. you did that from four sentences, and possibly also by being lucky enough that something about the details in your story matched my memories of similar experiences among persians and maybe also parties in dirt lots in san diego and partly also hours that i've spent watching films about india and looking closely at henri-cartier bresson's black and white photos of indonesia.

now, to turn your argument back on you: do you want to argue that your three or four sentences that had this transcendent effect on me had no power? that you are powerless to communicate your lived experience, and that it was of no benefit to me to try? that my second-hand sense of your experience (in which i breathed life into your hollow sentences through my memories and dreams) had no power? please, don't diss me and you and your sentences like that.

should the less legitimate people abstain from music because of their unworthiness?

"proper" trance blecch

"Tricky, I can guess where this is going but I'm not sure. Are you saying that some kinds of explaining destroy the "mystery" of music listening (we should feel rather than think)?"

yes, but it's not an either/or. sometimes language gets claustrophobic.

"Or that some fictions are too precious/productive to be held up to the light of reasoned analysis - that irrationalism ought to be protected if it's culturally significant?

There's probably quite a good argument to made on that basis. The difficulty is that you can't make it without acknowledging the irrationality, which results in the very destruction you're trying to ward off."

that's not what i was saying, but it's interesting. i would say that myth-making might fall into this category. what if we just accepted the irrationality instead of bringing it to the clinic?

"If as you say the devious quality of the reasonable participants is that "the other side has no argument", that's not a de facto win but a win outright. It's not my cleverness that determines the quality of the argument anyone else brings to the table."

nice. my reasoning behind the original comment was that the "other side" doesn't have an argument because no argument could possibly be discursive enough satisfy the evil subjective monster.

i think we have done this one to death eh?

also, i think it should be clear to anybody that your memory of your trip to sumatra, your experience of that hut, actually doesn't exist outside of your head. i mean, sumatra exists. and you've been there. and maybe other people have too.

but what are you getting at? that people who haven't been to sumatra have no right to listen to sumatran music? that your "listening" of sumatran music is more important than my "listening" of sumatran music? well, i hardly see how that benefits anybody to entertain the notion. that you can probably tell me something i don't know about sumatra? sure, but probably i could tell you something you don't know about sumatra too, even though you've been there and i haven't.

i guess maybe what you're getting at is that if i said that this sumatran music was *awful*, based on my experience of it through a CD sold at aquarius records, you'd tell me maybe i have something to learn by going to sumatra. and i'll agree on that point, too.

but that's not really what i see happening in this thread w/r/t pipecock, ronan and theo.

this is sort of the equivalent of ronan saying "damn i love this euro-sumatran gamelan fusion" and theo saying "that euro-sumatran music ain't shit, because i am from sumatra and i say so" and ronan says "that's a damn shame, i am perfectly happy liking this euro-sumatran fusion music" and pipecock says "i have been to sumatra, and actually know some sumatrans"

i mean, imagine if we took theo parrish up on his fela kuti fandom. what is this fela kuti shit? how come he doesn't respect the essentials? ever noticed that most afrobeat fans aren't even nigerian? did anybody ask king sunny ade what he thinks of afrobeat? has theo even been to nigeria?

do you want to argue that your three or four sentences that had this transcendent effect on me had no power? that you are powerless to communicate your lived experience, and that it was of no benefit to me to try? that my second-hand sense of your experience (in which i breathed life into your hollow sentences through my memories and dreams) had no power?

Yes, language has power. But language is just a representation of the world: the world directly has the real power. I’d say the more levels you are removed from the thing itself, the less powerful your perspective is to other people. A murder is powerful, a retelling of the murder to the police less powerful, the summary of that account in the newspaper less powerful again. Pretty soon, people are at the watercooler, filling in the facts. Making up myths about the killer. Making up myths about Detroit, etc. This is the Achille’s heel of subjectivism: all accounts are equally legit only if the thing under discussion has no objective reality. And music, in fact, does.

My favourite Pipecock post on ISM was the one about Detroit record stores ;)

yes, music has objective reality, but in what way is a record like a murder? i certainly hope nobody is at the watercooler discussing theo parrish records they haven't heard. and i'm pretty sure i don't spend much time discussing detroit record stores.

i hope you wouldn't have to have gone to a detroit record store to understand detroit techno: otherwise it'd be pretty shitty music. can you imagine if you'd have to have gone to india to understand a salman rushdie book? if so, i'm pretty sure we'd rule that salman rushdie was a pretty awful writer.

that's precisely the power of art (writing, music, sculpture, etc): access to states we can't inhabit ourselves, the interior states of others, the shared states of group listening and the personal state of ecstasy that is above the everyday experience of the world.

Well, not Salman Rushie, but I read The Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes (a book analyzing Japanese society specifically written after only having visited Japan for a week or so) and I thought it was amazing. Really opened my eyes.

Then I lived in the damn place for a decade (No, I don't want a medal). My impression: it was a terrible book.

so why did you decide only that it was a terrible book? the logical conclusion should have been that pre-japan good dog was a terrible reader. anyway, i don't really see the connection here. you're essentially saying that you though "empire of signs" was factually wrong. how can you be factually wrong about a theo parrish song? i wasn't even aware that theo's music presented an analysis ...

anyway, your post has so many logical problems that i'm not even sure where to begin

1) language is not a representation of the world in the sense that you mean. my condo actually has windows that look out onto the ocean (jealous?). that doesn't mean i wouldn't trade that for hokusai's "the wave", or that i know something that you don't when we look at it together.

2) re: levels and "less powerful your perspective ..." i don't even understand what you're trying to say. there's a rather violent discourse at work here. the point of perspectives is not that we wield them like weapons, or use them to arm-wrestle each other over music. i thought the point of perspective was communication? if i should want to understand another person, why should i worry about whose perspective is better or more powerful?

3) re: the watercooler. do you distrust people? do you distrust the power of art? should people be allowed to make up their own minds about art, or should they be told what to think?

If I show you a room full of dancing people and say "see? this record is good because it's danceable", they can counter "well, I dance in a different way" or "not important to me. I just prefer to listen on my little white earbuds."

A room full of dancers is totally an objective fact!

-- good dog

^^ what happens when i show you a room full of country line-dancers?

what happens when you want to discuss "empire of signs" with a japanese person that likes it?

I hope that you answer me someday, because is really difficult find in spain people who love and understand theo parrish concept, as a dj as a producer.

Enjoy da good fucking shit.

-- poe, Thursday, April 10, 2003

also how come you didn't step up and break the bad news to poe?

;_;

I keep forgetting to cosign all the compliments heading Vahid's way.

"nice. my reasoning behind the original comment was that the "other side" doesn't have an argument because no argument could possibly be discursive enough satisfy the evil subjective monster."

At the risk of annoying you tricky by extending the argument - I agree with this (except that it's not "subjectivity" that demands discursiveness, I don't think - perhaps a better term would be "the evil dialogue monster"). This is kinda what I meant earlier when I said my construction of the relationship between each side is unfairly weighted in my favour because it still imports a standard of reasonableness to weigh the claims of each.

This may well be a deadlock as you say. The myth that nourishes the gatekeeper militancy cannot survive if it has to explicate itself according standards of reasonableness, but I agree that it seems a bit unfair that it therefore should perish, since it is bound up in the experiences of a community and their cultural production.

Which is fine. The difficulty only begins then when an agent of the community seeks to assert to people outside the community that the community's myth also governs them.

If we do wish to protect the right of "the community" to say that their music is soulful, does that protection extend to supporting their claims to other communities that their music isn't soulful? How far does this suspension-of-reasonableness-zone extend?

Pipecock is always hypocritical on these issues anyway. He will happily slag off dubstep, but then admit that according to his beliefs he wouldn't be able to understand it as much as a person living in Croydon and going to local club nights, but then still maintain that 90% of dubstep is awful and soulless.

If he were consistent he would refrain from passing negative comment on any music belonging to a community that is so far from his own. As I recall his defence at this point was that he had been able to understand early jungle and 2-step through their (ab)use of American stylistic idioms - as if jungle was just sped-up funk. Which is precisely the kind of filtered, distorted understanding of someone "outside the community" that he otherwise decries.

And this is the ultimate problem with assuming that this proximity-to-community argument works in any reliable way: hardly anyone who uses it is prepared to sacrifice their opinions on music outside their zone of proximity.

In fact when pipecock slags off dubstep he is merely doing what so many people do all the time: he's using his ears and he's making a judgment about the music without any special knowledge of the community that has created the music.

Is the opinion of someone who does live in croydon going to have something to tell him that he can probably learn from? Yes, most likely. Does that make him "wrong" and the person from croydon "right"?

how can you be factually wrong about a theo parrish song?

It's like you said upthread, give the jazz dude 5 amazing techno records and he says "machines, boom boom boom, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." He's listening for jazz values in the wrong place. A category mistake. Like the guy who dissed trance back a few posts ago: I could give him my perspective, play him X, Y and Z, ideally transport back in time to 2000 and take him out, and with luck he'd get it. Because there was something to get there, which was different from other stuff. As it stands, (I'm assuming) he's relying on secondhand and thirdhand info. The myth.

should people be allowed to make up their own minds about art, or should they be told what to think?

Yes, they should. But they should also be correctly where appropriate (gently though)

"t's like you said upthread, give the jazz dude 5 amazing techno records and he says "machines, boom boom boom, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." He's listening for jazz values in the wrong place. A category mistake."

This assumes that it's always clear which category applies, which values to refer to.

Should we judge Theo by "house" values, "techno" values, "jazz" values, "soul" values, "funk" values... what?

You can't just chop up music like that. Most music is an articulation which ties together different ideas from different places. Even if a track is pretty squarely in a particular tradition, it will often resonate with music from outside that tradition in unexpected ways.

And so often "getting it wrong" becomes "getting it right" - according to Derrick May, UK hardcore techno was an abomination, a devolution of original detroit techno. And from one perspective it is exactly that, but from another perspective it is so much more, exciting music in and of itself and also the seeds of so much that was to come. Who is right? Who is wrong? Whose "getting it" or "not getting it" are we supposed to privilege?

The complaint so many people had about trance - people who were there - is that the creators and listeners didn't "get" techno.

Conversely, the people who disliked your Digweed review claimed that you don't "get" prog.

How are we to determine who gets to sit on the bench and make these decisions?

i slept on sumatra's couch once

i know, tim: we'll let "the community" decide

barring that, we'll ask the narrator from "losing my edge".

"take him out, and with luck he'd get it. Because there was something to get there, which was different from other stuff. "

Is the "something to get there" something that exists independently of the listeners who are there doing the getting?

I mean, a "genre" as such does not really exist as a concrete thing. It's a mental exercise whereby we group disparate records together under the one heading. The fact that many of us basically agree about what a genre is (at least, we know it when we hear it) and so have specialist record stores, DJs, club nights etc. - all that doesn't change the fact that the notion of genre exists in our heads. We choose to see commonality between two trance records and call them trance. We could chop up the music in different ways if we want to (e.g. "I'm really into 135 bpm music").

So the "something to get there" is as much the shared understanding of other people on the dancefloor as it is the music. You need both sides of it. This is the kernel of truth in your Sumatra example: of course someone participating in the dance feels more of the dance than someone merely hearing about it. But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

So when you say "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" Sumatran music", what you mean to say is "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" the way in which Sumatran music is used by Sumatrans".

That's still a very important statement that's worth thinking about, but it's a different statement entirely.

I think perhaps good dog you're confusing subjectivity with shallowness or obstinate ignorance.

Like, if a school kid says "I don't care about what other people say Wuthering Heights is about, in a subjective world my interpretation is the only one that matters to me" - well that's a stupid way to approach learning about literature. I saw a kid make this exact complaint on TV as part of a special on how literature teachers were "indoctrinating" kids by pointing out gender or class-politics issues in texts.

The mistake she makes is not to assume that her experience of the text is valid (it is), but that her opinion is static, that nothing ever could change her mind, that she already has all the information that might influence her understanding of the book.

But that doesn't make her teacher right if they claim that Wuthering Heights is *really* about Heathcliff as the a symbol of the working class. The "meaning" of the book is a matter of contention among many literary scholars all of whom are very smart and have read a lot.

So, similarly, the guy with the five jazz CDs who obstinately claims that they're the best 5 jazz albums in the world is a bit of a dick, and the guy with 20,000 has every right to think so.

But that doesn't mean that, if the guy with 20,000 jazz CDs thinks that one of the other guy's 5 albums is shit, he is right and the other guy is wrong.

Because there's probably another guy with 20,000 Jazz CDs who disagrees with his fellow collector and thinks it's a great album.

But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

What hath technology wrought? It is those shared values which gives the music it’s meaning in the first place. Roy Montgomery takes the Flying Nun sound and its genre values and does X, Y and Z with it, then releases records which people find “lonely” and therefore impute various associations (the lone genius, etc) from that. That’s fine, people can take things however they want, but it’s perfectly legit for a Pin Group fan from Christchurch to turn around and say “You’ve got it wrong. I was there. Roy is a beermonster, and that record was just him mucking about. Let me explain” etc.

So to answer the question of who you are to believe, who is right and who is wrong: you take those two POVs, and then you listen to the record again, and you see what you can hear differently. You can make up your own mind of course, and most of us do that directly from the music, using our understanding of its shared values it is trying to express (genre, etc), using the music we’ve heard before and the pleasure zones we’ve developed in our brains through that. But then if you were to make a list of things that came after that – and after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words and about how to convince people to your POV: I say that objective information trumps subjective fantasy every time.

after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words

quite rong

But that doesn't make her teacher right...

If she has better info or a better grasp of the story, etc, does it make her more right than the school kid? Does relativism have a sliding scale of correctness or are there as many answers as there are people?

let's just give all kids 100% on their English exams

don't start.

can you imagine though, if everyone got 100% on their english exams, how horrible the world would be.

i actually gave all of my kids 100% on their final exam last year.