Post a controversial music opinion

so insensitive to all the frou-frou foxes that perished in the midsummer fires

it's like you don't care at all about those who suffer from sugar hiccups

Heaven or Las Vegas, diddy bom da bom da bom ba doo wah

I lick ya boom-boom down

My wife and I used to have a lot of overlap in our musical tastes, but lately very much not; and as someone who has a hard time being told (by someone whose opinion I highly value) that my taste sucks, it is a source of recent unhappiness for me. So, I guess as a contrary pov, alignment of taste w/a partner is better than misalignment in my experience.

― Not Dork Yet (alternate toke) (morrisp), Tuesday, 1 March 2022 19:43 (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh dear. What sort of 'very much not' are we talking?

Well, to be clear, she's usually very tolerant and cool with me going to concerts, listening to what I listen to, etc... we just happened to have an uncomfortable (for me) conversation a few months back that she's probably forgotten about, but I haven't quite gotten over (she can be very frank, and I can be sensitive, blah blah).

brutal

she told you ska sucks didnt she

Lol

Ha ha (imago, you hit the nail on the head, inadvertently or not)

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/olivia-sour-1621618459.jpg

"I'm sorry, but I have to put my foot down, it's Anal Stabwound, or ME!"

Understandable; he's even younger than Rodrigo

It's strange because I've grown to NEED a human voice in music for it to feel complete and hold my attention (obv there's some purely instrumental music I enjoy but it's rare), yet it doesn't matter if I can understand the words. In fact I find myself drawn to music with foreign-language vocals that I can't understand; when the same music is paired with English language vocals, the magic is lost (recently it was the English half of Sun-El's double album that evinced this). If all English language acts sung a la Cocteau Twins I'd love it. That being said I'm pretty good at ignoring "bad" lyrics; like I've never once winced at a Jim Morrison lyric or had it lessen my enjoyment of a Doors song.

Natural splits sunburn jets pride marks smart bets
Strikers luck pitch backs heap tips pit slacks
Dressed pints demon shrinks bread drunk dead drinks
Stretch clubs models box draw skin black shocks

Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun

Flag stunt rock stone dole axe crash dive
Breath thrift take speed double take weekends
Skull row drugs hall colour bars sex calls
Sparkle finds rented rings pretty things clipped wings

Gold street spy fleet scandal food poor treat
Fire run club gun rule mob burn some
Bomb time pop crime stock frame steady climb
Fresh name donor game fair meat all the same

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 1, 2022 10:44 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Could be Dylan or Prynne.

Granny Dainger, I enjoy vocal music in languages I don't understand, but have very little patience for most English language music, perhaps excepting choral music, weirdly enough.

My partner and i have somewhat overlapping tastes but I think our biggest problem is that he'll find something that he likes and I'll have known about it for months or years because I'm much more serious about following music.

Movies are what is hard for us-- my man cannot stand art films of almost any kind. We mostly watch documentaries and sci Fi action crap.

My wife and I have completely different music backgrounds, but we find a lot of common ground. Our point of greatest agreement is, fittingly enough, Leonard Cohen.

I think the only time I get annoyed with my husband re: music is when he goes into geek mode. He took a digital music production class last year to fill out a gened requirement (he is working on his BA, and no he is not a Twink, he's 36) and for a few months afterwards, anytime any remotely electronic stuff would come on he would be picking it apart technically while not paying attention to the vibes at all. It was like dude yr missing the point! But he has slowed his roll on that front.

I've never dated anybody that was into metal or punk and had it last more than ten minutes

Sounds like you need to date prog rock fans

lol

xp Sounds like going on a movie date with a film student.

I mean my husband and I did hook up for the first time at a queer industrial goth party, so I knew some aspect of our tastes would have to align.

At the risk of stating the fairly obvious, listening to instrumental music vs. wordless vocals vs. lyrics in a foreign language you don’t understand are *completely different*

There are different sides to Stevie Wonder, which the posts about him are cumulatively getting at. The unimpeachable genius Stevie is undeniably one of these, but just one. There is also, yeah, the Pharmacy and Supermarket PA System Stevie, and the Wedding Reception Slow Dance Stevie- and there are parallels to Paul McCartney along these lines. The sentiments in his songs, gooey or not, make me wince a lot more often than they genuinely emote. He pulls the most miraculous wordless riffs and motifs from the ether, truly godlike- and bridges them together with elements that can either be brilliantly crafty, or almost throwaway, relying entirely on his compelling performance to sustain my interest.

The thing is, his music has never demanded of me that I accept all of that equally, and there is no amount of Hallmark card bullshit I won’t tolerate for those moments of Godlike unimpeachable genius. Besides, his combination of blues harmony and frigid keyboard textures from the 70’s is a personal weakness of mine.

I think the idea that influence = bands that sound like another band is the most basic shallow way to look at influence
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

Absolutely, and the Velvets’ most enduring influence has been an unwavering eye and a sympathy for the anti-hero that transcends the medium of music. I detect a lot of Lou Reed in Nan Goldin or Larry Clark, for example. There’s a traceable lineage more substantive and more satisfying than the opium-drone of Spacemen 3, or whoever.

Pink Floyd’s influence came from the scope of their sound and atmosphere and textures and how they used the studio, they may not “sound” like them but a lot of classic albums from the 80’s owe a lot to Pink Floyd.

Sure, that’s one part of where their influence falls. Tangerine Dream or The Orb are often placed in a Floydian lineage. Probably the most cited lineage from PF is the epic dirge, andante, artists who gravitate towards a certain tempo. Meh. I’m not totally convinced that universally crediting PF as an origin point of the soundscape is a “good idea” either, but it’s kind of interesting how ‘Planetarium Laser Show Pink Floyd’ fosters two distinct impulses: Toward the New Age yoga/meditation tapes of artists like Emerald Web on the one hand, and cosmic Eurodisco or Italo Disco on the other, with the Discoballs album making the connection in a heavy-handed fashion. And it says a lot about the scope of their influence that artists like Lindstrom & Prins Thomas retain a Floydian sensibility.

More importantly, they’ve been an example of how bands with much greater ambition than talent can gradually develop their own idiom. Bands often sound like Pink Floyd to me when they sound like they’re sweating blood.

To sound like Pink Floyd you needed expensive equipment and studio that most bands don’t have access to.

So obviously, I don’t agree with this. But I love the way ‘Automatic for the People’ calls back to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in its use of negative space, the setting of sound against a black backdrop, the purest and most bottomless void between the instruments. It sounds amazing, and certainly very expensive. This is obviously more a feat of audio engineering than a similarity in musical style. But it’s something very few records have achieved, DSotM being possibly the first and easily the most ubiquitous.

I liked Alfred’s post about the initial impact of Bob Dylan as a whiny, sarcastic sound.

I like that post, Deflatormouse!

I think maybe I have to look harder for these godlike moments of SW, thank you too for acknowledging my allergy to the inescapable "Hallmark card bullshit" instead of telling me I'm "kinda weird" or that I "need SSRIs"

i feel like this is pretty godlike tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE

there's also just *that voice* my god, one of the clearest things i've ever heard

otm

I like Alfred’s post about the initial impact of Bob Dylan as a whiny, sarcastic sound.

Anyway this thread is full of interesting stuff but tl;dr for me because of time constraints right now. Feel like the discussion of the role of common tastes in a relationship almost deserves its own thread but I don’t feel like starting it myself.

here's my challop: if people can't handle different music tastes in a relationship then they need to grow tf up. if different tastes lead to discussion about core values and there are some discrepancies there, then that's a different story.

I honestly kinda prefer it when we don't have perfect overlap. sharing each other's music was one of my favorite things about the most healthy relationship I had.

(I should say, sharing the music we liked with each other, not that we both enjoyed the same artists).

My wife and I had different music tastes starting out, but we both enjoyed a steady diet of Top 40 pop in the beginning. In the past couple years though, she started getting really into metalcore and honestly I count it as a strike against her.

My wife’s love of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac (along with other factors) made FM one of my favorite bands.

I told my girlfriend if Devil Wears Prada made it into our household, we were through.

It never did. Of course this is largely because the girlfriend didn't actually exist and I was apparently talking to a handpainted King Diamond figurine.

I got into John Mayer through one of my exes. you may judge me accordingly. I still like him.

Who, John Mayer or your ex?

My wife and I have very different, but complementary, musical tastes. We are embarked on separate journeys of discovery and share what we find. It's been that way for 30 years and I don't see it stopping.

John Mayer IS the ex

kept on waiting for his relationship status to change

I love Stevie Wonder's 70s run of albums and disagree with most of the controps about him upthread, but the calcification of this opinion into conventional wisdom is starting to provoke the contrarian in me:

Let the debate begin! Has any recording artist in popular music ever matched or bested Stevie Wonder's 1972-1976 run?https://t.co/tXdqZ9fuFq

— Phil Harrell (@PhilHarrellNPR) March 2, 2022

Tbf, Abdurraqib's answers are mostly fine/interesting* in that piece, but the interviewer says deranged things like: "Music of My Mind was the first stand-out album from this period. He then went on a run not rivaled in almost any field of life and work that anyone has ever seen."

* though as much as I like her, picking Gal Costa out of the available options in Brazilian music is p bizarre, allowing that it would be easy to fumble this question in a live interview

Putting aside counter-examples, why does endorsing this idea appeal so much? I know we have a thread on this exact topic, but iirc it was more about identifying other impressive runs rather than enshrining Stevie's as truly unique.

i mean miles davis from i dunno 1955 through 1976 comes to mind

I was only sporadically aware of good music before meeting my wife. Like, I think I kinda admired some decent stuff (mostly by accident).

But engaging with my the musical taste of my friends, my bandmates, my wife, and my daughter has sharpened my own taste in a way I can't quite describe. It's not about agreement or overlap (for us). It's about having a baseline level of engagement with art. My beloved can hate the music I like (and vice versa) but just simply not caring about music, or not being interested in why music is good? That would make it hard to find common ground.

I feel that connoisseurship doesn't happen in a vacuum; it's unavoidably social. That is what draws people to ILM and Pitchfork and Rolling Stone or whatever.

You could just go have opinions in isolation. You could simply like what you like, dislike what you dislike; fine. But if you never bump into a different person's aesthetic - and engage with them where they are - you will have a tough time understanding how complicated and nuanced artistic taste can be.

No one here is an island. Most of us come here at least once a day to take sides, pick only five, defend the indefensible, vote in a poll, or whatever.

Why? Couldn't you just go have your opinions in private? No. We all want to bounce our opinions off of others, to agree or disagree, to discuss at length the awesomeness or suckiness of a song from 40 years ago that almost everyone else - including the original artists - has probably forgotten and moved on from.

Tl;dr: taste is a social construct and it's totally understandable if it plays a role in your relationships

the most foolish take is that having similar taste in music means compatibility in ANY other way -- it's a point of shared enthusiasm, and that is all imo.

i was that fool and speak from experience :)

I hate the majority of metalheads I meet

and that's always been the case, often my progressive politics aggravate most of them and their regressive dumb ones piss me off, once we get off of the topic of the music we like.

at least now they're less likely to try to fight me over it as I'm bigger than I was in my 20s (not that I would ever fight anybody - haven't been in one since high school).

I have an old friend who is female, Black, and a metalhead...and also a bodybuilder. She's had to lay some assholes flat before.