Post a controversial music opinion

circle of fifths vs moving the crowd FITE

DJs understand music better than musicians

― ogmor, Friday, November 2, 2018 8:30 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my problem this is the assumption that there's one way to understand music or better or worse ways to understand it

Only DJ kids will get this!

xp

do you think you understand music now any better than when you were born?

DJs have greater flexibility to understand music in different ways than a musician

i sorta appreciate the sentiment but as someone who's tried being both dj and musician i was more struck by their similarities than their differences re: understanding music / dj/musician is a false binary

I agree it's not a true binary and I got to this thought by thinking about the DJish qualities of certain musicians

do you think you understand music now any better than when you were born?

― ogmor, Friday, November 2, 2018 9:16 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's an interesting question! maybe? i *know* a lot more about music but i don't know if i understand really what the core of what makes it special is any more than i did, and maybe the knowledge gets in the way of understanding sometimes, or just reacting to it in a more real way

yeah, I think there's a Nietzschean point about understanding being overrated/in some ways a hindrance, but I also don't know if the inverse innocence/ineffability is the greatest ideal. it's not very flexible for one. I've definitely developed more modes of listening over time, and I think that's due to different types of understanding that inform each other.

but still, sometimes an album just seems like a DJ set where you are limited to tracks you've made yourself

eh I dunno just seems like the reverse of the older rockist idea that DJs aren't "real" musicians and a musicians understanding of theory etc gives them a bitter idea of how music works, i'm not sure if much is gained by turning that on its head and arguing the opposite, rather than just seeing them as two different ways of understanding music (curation/assemblage vs. theory/scales/circle of 5ths etc) that can inform each other

Yeah, I also think it understates the technical or rather technological dimension of DJ-ing, i.e. the fact that DJs are always working with recordings. Or is all painting ultimately photographic and/or cinematic?

what I'm thinking about is the relationship to the sound. it's more about the difference between how you relate as you play something and how you relate listening back afterwards. the difference between getting caught up in the intimate details of producing sound, which is both kind of subjective and also kind of selfless, and detaching yourself from it as your hear it as material.

I think it also represents a general long term shift in how ppl think about & relate to music. even the idea of having taste in music is quite modern and really depends on having recordings. my grandparents had a v different way of relating to music that was more limited

DJs have greater flexibility to understand music in different ways than a musician

I don't think it's greater flexibility so much as a different flexibility and I don't know why someone would understate the flexibility of musicians to actually put notes and sounds in different places to create music.

So DJs have a more 'critical' relationship with music than musicians? That doesn't sound right either.

djs understanding of music is still very context-specific though. i wanna say that like old-style session musicians = the gold standard of understanding music. djs who have regularly played a lot of different settings / are talented / have a lot of experience might be getting there, i think? musicians and bands can get to that level of understanding by exposing themselves to a lot of different live situations. i think this boils down to gaining a profound openness and level of technical proficiency that comes from being exposed to the social act of making music make meaning as much as possible.

Few famous session players made good songwriters or producers so their musical powers appear to be somewhat limited too.

i think part of the argument being made here is that songwriting and producing are too heavily weighted as indicators of musical powers in the first place.

Not a controversial music opinion: there are many different ways to "understand music" and none of them is the best one.

enjoying chewing this over.

I guess what I'm thinking about is that the more editorial ways of making music afforded by technology make it much easier to develop the detachment and distance necessary to have a sense of music as material, to be able to step outside of something and cast the same thing different ways. I think you can get it through composition, and if you have a high level of mastery of your instrument your performance of material can have that reflexive or ironic quality, gesturing outside itself, but you get this altering/slippage/transcendence of meaning all the time in DJ sets, everything is constantly in dialogue. some of my very favourite instrumentalists have that relational or materialist sense to their music as well, and I don't think it's a 'higher' or essential value, but I think it's only possible with a broad or flexible understanding and sympathy to different sorts of music, or different ways of hearing the same thing. it makes me think of hegel's idea of modern art as opposed to classical art but I don't want to read hegel again to confirm

I don't think there's a best way of listening or that all ways of listening are equal

"We've had 70 years of making records. Now, we sample them." = Mixmaster Morris

my problem this is the assumption that there's one way to understand music or better or worse ways to understand it

― Greta Van Fleek (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

otm

That assumption underlies a shitton of posts in this thread

what's the argt that all ways of listening to and understanding music are equal

music is for the people

ogmor, I often get the sense from your posts that you listen with a sociologically-tuned ear, by which I mean that you're primarily interested in the sociopolitical contexts that each and every fragment of raw sound necessarily betokens, so I'm inclined to read your hyperbolic praise of DJ-ing as an extension of this general understanding of aesthetics. The critical doubling or 'lag' that is a necessary feature of reflexion, whether of self or other, whether in art or beyond it, is indeed heightened by recording technology, and I do think there is a difference of more than just degree between this method of playing/listening and more traditional musicianship, perhaps because DJ-ing allows for a greater and more readily available gamut of contextualising and decontextualising gestures than other approaches to sound, but the implication that this somehow produces a higher understanding of music strikes me as moot, although you could no doubt say the same thing about my own 'selftaste' (I love this word by Gerard Manley Hopkins, it always springs to mind when I'm baffled by certain musical opinions here). Incidentally, if memory serves, Hegel argues that art is a thing of the past, i.e. that there is a sense in which modern art is simply an oxymoron divorced from the immediacy of yore, hence the seemingly more widespread, exact opposite argument: art begins where the sacred ends, which also makes for a more sociologically-compatible position.

well I'd say I'm primarily interested in meaning and emotion, which are social in some important senses, but I think they go beyond what we normally talk about when we talk about the sociopolitical. as I say, I don't think this ability to shift contexts and perspectives is a higher understanding so much as a more broader one.

my faded memory of hegel is that he thinks there's an analagous difference between modern and classical religion. in both cases it's a perfectly self-contained pure expression vs a gesture outside itself to something transcendent.

Free your booty on the dance flo and your Nietzschean dialectic will follow

My apologies if I misrepresented your position, ogmor. Either way, I agree with DJ-ing's potential for greater variety (only too rarely lived up to, however, at least in my experience, as it tends to favour certain materials more than others, largely due to its conventional ties to the club). As for Hegel, it's almost as if, for him, art and religion were one and the same, which subverts his own claim to some extent: when he's bemoaning the passing of art, he's really talking about pure religion and vice versa, which ironically does a disservice to both.

Schopenhauer spot on WRT Hegel.

Post a controversial philosophical opinion

when musical discussion turns to philosophers, i know it's time for me to leave
that is not a controversial opinion but it is generally true

Why is that, LL?

first, i have no idea what anyone is talking about -- that is probably the main thing. second, it is no longer a discussion about music, and talking about philosophers isn't an activity i enjoy engaging in (see first point)

That's too bad. I think we're always engaging with music philosophically when we talk about it, even if it's only in an impressionistic manner. The lexicon can be a drag, though, I agree.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Tc4mXodrI

adorno was in fact taught composition by zemlinsky and berg -- but i think he and FN are the only two?

(i wondered about bloch but while ernst bloch the philosopher wrote about music, the composer ernest bloch is someone else)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld7XDELDnto

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, incidentally.)

basically all goths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH2gqTVXzZ0

(down with schopenhauer)

I think hegel's ability to see analogues in different areas is one of his strong points, and am inclined to assume continuity between these overlapping areas without evidence to the contrary

the idea that adding philosophy to a discussion about a topic stops it being about the topic is what we call in philosophy a 'hot turd'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__f6czarnA

Arcade Fire are a good band

Arcade Fire are a good *live* band

The first album bangs. Each of the subsequent ones had at least one incredible track. Thematically they can be corny but my generation is only self conscious about that because of the nefarious influence of music critic and internet personality chris weingarten

Bruce Springsteen is lame

agreed. Corny too

'State Trooper' is a good song though.

also playing gigs for 4 hours is not a virtue in and of itself