Post a controversial music opinion

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.

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

That was the first thing that popped to mind.

I feel very lucky that my wife and I share at least a few go-to music choices we each love equally and wholeheartedly: reggae and the entire reggae family (ska, dub, rocksteady), Fleetwood Mac (and solo Bucky), Pet Shop Boys, a bunch of country (but esp. Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris), Neil Finn etc., and some other stuff not immediately coming to mind. Metal is pretty much the only thing that will just outright make her turn the music off, but she's very tolerant of metal-adjacent stuff like Van Halen and Faith No More. She's far more into contemporary pop than I am, but as of late has taken to playing random '90s hip hop in all its uncensored glory (often to her surprise, since she's mostly familiar with the radio versions).

I like all the music my wife likes but she absolutely does NOT like all the stuff I do. Mostly the metal and what she refers to as "space jams" - which seems to mostly refer to electric Miles Davis, Can, dub reggae, free jazz, etc.

The 7 year old is really into music now, mostly very rockist stuff like Nirvana, Van Halen, the Misfits, and lots of metal - which bums my wife out when he makes her phone play Slayer or Metallica while he runs around when we're cleaning the kitchen. He does not like hip hop at all which we subject him to a lot, but he was into "Tootsie Roll" by the 69 Boyz on the radio the other day and described it as "really awful but also kind of good".

She's got much more of a penchant for a lot of yacht rock, and put on the Doobie's "Taking It To The Streets" during after dinner cleanup and the kid was like "this is the worst kind of music - like jazzy, but rock?". Then she played Steely Dan and he got even madder.

Lol

Lol same

he was into "Tootsie Roll" by the 69 Boyz on the radio the other day and described it as "really awful but also kind of good".

7-year-old otm

I think maybe I have to look harder for these godlike moments of SW

I think 'Living for the City' is a very clear example of the heaven/earth binary in Stevie Wonder's songs. Even though the riff feels more constructed than "pulled from the ether", it is groundless and sublime and has a spiritual radiance that exists in direct opposition to the inescapable gravitational pull of the verses. The effect of this is to force your resistance against one aspect or the other, so it's not hard to understand how an aversion to the miraculous could result.

* though as much as I like her, picking Gal Costa out of the available options in Brazilian music is p bizarre

I mean the *really obvious* counter example would be Milton Nascimento's 70-76 (at least equally) major run: roughly concurrent to SW, a crystal clear voice that radiates divinity, a genre-melding soup, a social consciousness, a sprawling double album with massive hit singles turned indelible pop standards, a universality etc.

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.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me constantly question why I'm even on here, but that I've so far more or less tolerated for the occasional opportunity to witness art coming into contact with the external world, or whatever Duchamp said about the viewer completing an artwork. What I'm hoping to see when I log in here is the liminal space between the art and the viewer, that's the most exciting thing about art to me, in that intermediate space where it's truly alive. When someone else gives me that, or allows me to see it, it tells me a helluva lot more about them than a stupid fucking list. And it happens pretty rarely on here but when it does i don't really care which artwork it is, preferences are pretty arbitrary and very fluid anyhow. I could turn on a dime.

Abolish taste and conoisseurship, right away please.

controp, all music is bad and all people who like it or bad, we should rename this board I Hate Music

I mean the *really obvious* counter example would be Milton Nascimento's 70-76 (at least equally) major run: roughly concurrent to SW, a crystal clear voice that radiates divinity, a genre-melding soup, a social consciousness, a sprawling double album with massive hit singles turned indelible pop standards, a universality etc

or Caetano Veloso's late '60s-eary '70s run.

Deflatormouse, you don't consider what you said about Stevie Wonder to be an example of "taste and connoisseurship"? Do you think that's it's arbitrary that you find his music "groundless and sublime" with "a spiritual radiance"?

Wow Deflatormouse, I admire your posts (and your username), but if you are really that annoyed by the normal traffic here, the exits are clearly marked.

controp, all music is bad and all people who like it or bad, we should rename this board I Hate Music

― sorry Mario, but our princess is in another butthole (Neanderthal), Thursday, March 3, 2022 2:44 PM

Rebuttal: some of the people who like music post here and the people who post here aren't so bad.☺

Is there a rock equivalent to Stevie's classic run? Beatles? Led Zeppelin? Talk Talk?

(Threw Talk Talk in there because this is the controversial opinion thread, after all.)

I'd actually agree (or contend) that the Talk Talk/Hollis run is nearly flawless. Maybe five weak tracks over six albums, and then silence. The b-sides are mostly good too (never mind the remixes).
Five weakest tracks, maybe:

Have You Heard the News?
Strike Up the Band
Why Is It So Hard?
The Last Time
I Don't Believe in You