Music confuses and intimidates me

The problem with bringing up Robert Christgau and saying that he objectively knows about music is the fact that I take reviews and subtract his score from them in order to get a feeling for whether or not I'll like an album. Every single album I've ever seen him rate, with only a couple exceptions, I've disagreed with him on. I pretty much passed him off as a joke reviewer until this statement right here. Possibly that, more clearly than anything else, shows that what I like is objectively bad.

Sorry. I'm just frustrated right now. And I'm still at a loss.

edited 17th Nov '15 1:52:17 AM by Nintendork64

I'll address your response to my post when I have more time, but I feel like it's important to note that it is very possible for someone to know a lot about music and still have terrible taste in music (or at least have taste that differs from others who know about as much about music). Hell, if we're still talking about ol' Robbie, there are probably just as many critics who would agree with his reviews as those who would disagree.

edited 17th Nov '15 3:22:27 AM by Odd1

You shouldn't feel bad for disagreeing with Robert Christgau. Even though he listens to a ton of stuff, I still find myself looking at his reviews and wondering how the hell he could possible reach those conclusions—were we even listening to the same album or what?

If anything, you're in a better position than I am. You consistently disagree with him, so you can use his reviews as Anti-Advice. I agree with him as much as I disagree with him, so he's not useful to me as a source of recommendations either way.

So it occurred to me that I don't actually know how to change a person's taste in music. My degree's in music education, and we never did go over how to get kids to like one kind of music or another. So honestly, I don't know that I can help you.

Sheer dint of listening/performing doesn't work: I have sung SO MANY ARIAS and I still hate opera as much as I always did. It isn't necessarily the music you grow up with either. I'm an 80s child, and I feel no special affinity for 80s music.

I did learn to appreciate atonal/minimalist music. A friend told me what he liked about John Tavener's piece "The Lamb" that somehow made it all make sense. But I don't know if I can replicate that. I'd like to "get" rap & hip-hop and sometimes wonder if I just need to listen more, or have someone explain what's cool about it. But would that work? I don't know.

And that's probably why I don't argue about what kind of music is best. Taste is taste. I suppose you can stretch it, but I honestly don't know how to change it.

That's something that'd take a literal history lesson to explain if it's not a culture you understood to begin with. Or, alternatively, documentaries (like Scratch or The Art of Rap).

Basically, not even getting into its earlier roots, it began as a way for underprivileged people who couldn't necessarily afford instruments to express themselves musically, by reappropriating music that they already owned in a creative/new/different sort of way. Rapping became an art form that developed from emcees simply talking over the music they spun to a form of expressive, rhythmic poetry. I'm glossing over a LOT here, but that's the basic gist of it.

Still, understanding the genre won't necessarily guarantee that you'll love it, but hey, better to at least have the understanding whether you listen to it or not, right?

I'm actually a bit surprised, you had formal music education but never really discussed hip-hop? (Unless I'm assuming totally incorrectly here.) I minored in music when I was in college and I had at least two different classes in which a major part of the course was devoted to understanding hip-hop and rap.

edited 18th Nov '15 4:24:43 AM by Odd1

I know the history and cultural significance of hip-hop - that's why I want to "get" it. It's the structures and patterns that elude me. Kinda like learning music theory and how chords and intervals and so on relate to each other. They form a sort of language outside of words. I "get" those instinctively, probably because I've been listening to that stuff all my life.

I might just need someone to give me a good, detailed analysis of their favorite hip-hop album/work/whatever and what it is they like about it.

Hip-hop is a tricky genre in its appeal, at least for me. I intially thought that in hip-hop lyrics should always outweigh everything else, but then I'd get frustrated over the fact that some rappers just do not enunciate clearly enough, and yet I kept coming back to them. Later it came over me that misunderstanding lyrics in a song, not even a rap song, seems to occur more often in English because of the lesser average word length and some structural peculiarities, so the voice does, in fact, become more an instrument than a narrative tool. And it is pretty common in hip-hop: the flow is not about the speed or clever punchlines, but more about the vocals interlocking with the beat and forming a more complex rhythmic pattern. One may need a couple listens to get the gist of the lyrics, and yet musically it is a whole other level.

The lyrical matter is still important, of course. And that is the reason why even the most commercially successful rappers get lower aggregated scores on sites like Sputnikmusic than other estabilished musicians. It is also interesting how (and I don't mean to be segregating) the rapping techniques differ subtly between black and white performers. It's like black rappers have the musical thing pinned down from the funk heritage, being able to find the best patterns and craft a catchy track even if the theme isn't all that exciting, while white people care more about the meaning of the lyrics, trying to say as much as they can, but the flow often sounds kind of stilted.

edited 18th Nov '15 1:22:40 PM by Small_Mess