Choofers and music

[Arch0wl]

posting this in CT because I don't want to shit up his AMA with this debate

I asked Choofers what, if anything, causes him to think negatively of someone regarding their taste in music

Originally Posted by Choofers

When it comes to music, it's not really the genres of music other people listen to that I pay attention, it's the reasoning of why they listen to that certain genre. Music is art, so it bothers me when people listen to music so passively that they can't say why they like a certain style of music. I used to be like that, oddly enough. I've found that listening to music in different ways and with different mindsets opens me up to a plethora of different ideas.

this is a solid view and is more in line with most formalistic ways of viewing music, but I'd like to offer an alternative perspective for your consideration:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/...introspection/

the above article establishes that if you try to establish reasons why you don't like a work of art, these reasons will most likely be bullshit.

in case you don't want to read the whole thing, here are the critical parts of the article:

Is there a certain song you love, or a work of art? Perhaps there is a movie you keep returning to over the years, or book. Go ahead and imagine one of those favorite things. Now, in one sentence, try to explain why you like it. Chances are, you will find it difficult to put into words, but if pressed you will probably be able to come up with something. The problem is, according to research, your explanation is probably going to be total bullshit.

Tim Wilson at UVA demonstrated this with The Poster Test. He brought a group of students into a room and showed them a series of posters. The students were told they could take any one they wanted as a gift and keep it. He then brought in another group, and told them the same thing, but this time they had to explain why they wanted the poster before they picked. He then waited six months and asked the two groups what they thought of their choices. The first group, the ones who just got to grab a poster and leave, they all loved their choice. The second group, the ones who had to write out why, hated theirs. The first group, the grab-and-go people, usually picked a nice, fancy painting. The second group, the ones who had to explain their choice, usually picked an inspirational poster with a cat clinging to a rope.

This brings up a lot of concerns. It calls into question the entire industry of critical analysis of art – video games, music, film, poetry, literature – all of it. It also makes things like focus groups and market analysis seem like farts in the wind.

When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotion, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs. Also, when you attempt to justify your decisions or emotional attachments, you start worrying about what your explanation says about you as a person.

In the above example, most people truly preferred the lady over the cat, but they couldn’t conjure up the rational explanation why, at least not in a way which would make logical sense on paper. On the other hand, you can write all sorts of bullshit about a motivational poster.

In a similar experiment by the same psychologist who conducted the Poster Test, people were shown two small photos of two different people and were asked which one was more attractive. They then were handed a larger photo. They were told it was the one they picked, but it was actually a completely different person. They were then asked why they chose it. Each time, people dutifully spun a yarn explaining their choice.

Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the Introspection Illusion. You believe you know yourself, and why you are the way you are. You believe this knowledge tells you how you will act in all future situations. Research shows otherwise.

---

this establishes that the reasons you give for liking something are probably based on

(a) your ability to articulate, for one

(b) your ability to bullshit, and/or

(c) your self-honesty, since you will be tapping into essentially arbitrary reasons for things

---

another point to consider is that all music preferences boil down to the visceral in some way or another, and layers of reasoning to justify your preferences are just detours to the visceral anyway

which is to say, it's a dualistic mindset that stigmatizes the visceral, by thinking that with enough complexity the visceral is somehow taken over by a higher faculty, but it's viscerality, all the way down, with the exception that complexity may add satisfaction to a problem-solving impulse in some people

in other words, added layers of complexity don't, to me, make something any different or "higher", they just make it more indirect -- like adding a forest maze on whatever path you're trying to walk.

[infinity.]

Pushpin vs poetry is a very popular argument within utilitarianism. I think in an academic case there must be some validity to it, but I think that valuing others music taste as lower does not apply. I'm on my phone and can explain this if need be,

[Arch0wl]

yeah I have a book that is a compilations of essays in Aesthetics and I'm pretty sure I ran across it in there

side note, almost every argument I've heard for objective aesthetics has been ridiculous, at most you could say it's inter-subjective but even then I find a lot of people go through a lot of twists to make inter-subjective mean objective-lite

[infinity.]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

yeah I have a book that is a compilations of essays in Aesthetics and I'm pretty sure I ran across it in there

side note, almost every argument I've heard for objective aesthetics has been ridiculous, at most you could say it's inter-subjective but even then I find a lot of people go through a lot of twists to make inter-subjective mean objective-lite

yeah, but in some cases it gets kind of spotty.. (not thread relevant but) in cases of someone who legitimately lacks mental capacity in comparison with one who does not, a natural assertion would be that the person with higher mental faculties has the ability to appreciate greater pleasures, and therefore has a higher potential/actual utility

but it makes it difficult for big group / societal obligatory political philosophy.. like whose to say what person experiences more utils? what's it like to be a bat?

in this thread it's pretty much just blatant pretension, claiming that some music is on a different level than others, which may be true at some levels, but it's a slippery slope until it's all (music, genre, whatever) valuated and categorized

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by infinity.

what's it like to be a bat?

nice

[Reincarnate]

You like what you like.

Sometimes there's a rationale behind it, and sometimes there isn't. Asking people why they like something is risky because now you're forcing that person to introduce a shitload of biases and conflicting variables that have no relation to the underlying drivers for that particular preference. You're asking someone to defend the ineffable.

In many cases I suspect that certain preferences are just hardwired into the brain based on its structure. It's not a very sexy answer, but I think that's a big part of it. For example, I've always loved black licorice. A lot of people hate it, but even from a very young age, I could never get enough of it. The feeling I get from eating it is probably the same feeling someone else gets from eating something they love that I hate. But if you asked me to defend my preference, I'd have no fucking clue what to tell you. "When I eat this licorice, some chemicals shoot off in my brain that make me want more."

It's like trying to explain what a banana tastes like. It tastes like a fucking banana. Explaining something that occurs on such a base level of utility-interpretation is pretty much impossible with words, since much meaning will be lost, forcing us to come up with bullshit in hopes that we fill the gaps with something that'll satisfy whoever is asking the question.

[Nullifidian]

Here is another interesting theory from an evolutionary standpoint: http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutto...of_beauty.html

Aside from the above, Choofers viewpoint is similar to mine. But rather than listening to the reasoning of why they like a certain genre, I'd rather listen to the reasoning of why they absolutely don't like a certain genre. I don't care about why you don't like a particular song (I don't really question their reasons to why they like something, to each their own). But why someone would dislike an entire genre is a weird notion in my mind because from my experience, I have not found a single genre where I didn't like a single song of. What I usually get from that is that they're either too lazy to explore, narrowminded or scared about what others might think because every genre in existence has their gems as far as I can tell.

[Reincarnate]

OH, and also this

If you haven't seen this yet, then fuck you, watch it


"When you explain a 'why,' you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise you're perpetually asking why."

"I'm telling you how difficult a 'why' question is. You have to know what it is that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known and what it is you're not."

"I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands; I should be in trouble. [...] And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see. So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do."

Originally Posted by _.Spitfire._

Here is another interesting theory from an evolutionary standpoint: http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutto...of_beauty.html

Yeeaaaappp -- preferences obviously fall within some variance due to the nature of mutation (and other environmental influences), but there are always going to be general trends. For example, "Why do we like fresh fruit instead of rotted, dead fruit?" Well, the agents that liked rotted fruit didn't last very long. The ones preferred the fresh fruit survived more easily due to the chemical utility of the fruit itself, and therefore any mutation that streamlined/facilitated this process was favorably selected for. Apply that concept to just about everything and it helps explain our utility profiles.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

Reminded me of this stand up of Louis C.K. lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA#t=7m14s

[moches]

Just adding my two cents to this:

What the article above touches upon is something that always bothers me; I write reviews for albums and read a crapload of other people's writing in that time, and sometimes it bothers me how some things are just taken for GRANTED. Of course pop music is shallow and superficial, of course Kanye West is SO brave and important, of course nothing Nickelback does deserves even the slightest iota of respect. It's a lazy way to approach criticism and I try to stay away from it.

Personally, I feel like there's a separation that should be made:

1. For judgments that pertain to the INHERENT quality of a work and use those supposed inherent qualities as signifiers (for example, how the word "pop" seems to be synonymous with fake sometimes), I think it's right to say they're...like, misinformed at best? Actively ignorant at worst. It doesn't get you any closer to understanding the true nature of a work to make neat little categories to separate human experience--this is important in a way that isn't! It sounds knowledgeable to dismiss something on the grounds of where it comes from, but it has no worth to me. It discourages actually widening the scope of one's understanding, which is why critical analysis is valuable to me.

2. On the other hand, EVERY work has structure/method, and this is where I think critical analysis has merit. Regardless of how I feel about black metal personally, I'm willing to acknowledge music from that genre depending on how well it uses the conventions and characteristics of its genre to express something, and I feel like this is where the focus of critical analysis should be. That's why Literature is so important; ideally, you look at works from the entire scope of human experience (historical, social, and cultural) and dig into HOW the author is expressing himself. If art is about an author holding up his book, a musician holding up his album, a painter holding up his work, and saying, "Hey, you should look at this," criticism in its ideal form is about how we can evaluate that claim.

Where my post falls apart, admittedly, is that the above two categories aren't always mutually exclusive: the author of the article Arch0wl posted in the OP, for example, cites a 19th-century review of Moby Dick:

This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed…We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book…Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature — since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.

- Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum

It seems like there, his personal biases are informing his analysis of the structure. So maybe we're just doomed to go in circles.

I know this post is half-baked, but it's a lot to chew on and I still figured I might as well get my thoughts out there.

[Spenner]

Most times I can find specific reasons for liking music and art due to the fact of immediate associations, and by the triggering imagery and feelings I can feel in a subtle way due to the pace and sounds of the music, or to the colours/shapes/textures of art that affect more subtle things on the mind.

I'm sure there is at least a subtle association one can find to realize their taste for certain things. Either it reminds them of something, sparks certain flavours of things on their mental palette, etc. For me it's not hard to find why I like even the most abstract of things, and I would actually challenge someone to find something I cannot explain why I like, without a totally bullshit answer. I think it's just how much you are in tune with the way your mind delivers the specifics surrounding your taste profile. I understand that there is a point where your relation to the taste becomes purely an abstract attraction, but I don't think it's something that needs to be brought to planck length, for the same reason that the individual electron has no significance in the change in my taste <_< it's only the collective action of all of them working. There's a certain level where things start to not directly impact what drives your attraction.

Also moches that's a fine point made as well for someone who is trying to find a judgement that is based on structure and idealization due to a generalization (i.e. pop music, chocolate candy, horror movies, etc). I think that there's too many assumptions being made when someone judges something on the basis of it being part of a general group, and it doesn't make much sense to me, for the same reason I don't hate any one entire genre, or one whole class of movies, etc.

[Jonlovesddr]

People will usually say they "dislike a whole genre" because they've never heard a song from that "genre" that they liked

[Frank Munoz]

resentment towards a specific genre is racist.

[Reincarnate]

I can pretty confidently say that I hate most country music.

[Fission]

genreist

[hi19hi19]

The problem is most people who are looking for a "critical review" look down on you when you say something such as "I just like it"

When honestly that might be the true extent of your analysis. Sometimes you just... enjoy something and you do it without thinking into it any more. But apparently that makes you some kind of plebeian or something

[Jonlovesddr]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

I can pretty confidently say that I hate most country music.

i would say i hate country as a genre but i guess i'm not allowed to anymore

[Frank Munoz]

I'm racist

[Choofers]

I like art for reasons. You like art for reasons. I think your reasons are bad. You think my reasons are bad.

SuBjEcTiVeMaNiAz.

[Jonlovesddr]

this is why i hate aesthetics and philosophy
there is no right answer