Uncharacteristically vague descriptions aside, music is a truly pervasive and powerful tool. Music can turn a crowd, a simple look at football chants shows us the powerful effects. It effectively polarises, perhaps when used socially it taps straight into our wish to be similar. Sometimes, this makes me wonder back about the "quality" of music. The most powerful music I have experienced sometimes correlates weakly with any ideas of high art: maybe a euphoric but cheesy Christian song, a primitive chant inducing solidarity or a shallow and repetitive beat that makes me go crazy.
The only common factor is that the music was a social act. I went along with the flow, it was the feeling of belonging and social acceptance that lifted me. Even if the song was annoying at first, it would grow on me because everyone else was enjoying it. Perhaps it's a big jump to say music is just Stockholm syndrome, but your music taste is defined almost entirely by what you listen to and what group you identify with. Perhaps there is some backward causation too, we are often drawn to people similar to us (in a mildly xenophobic way). I am over-simplifying what is an extremely complex behavior, but I can't seem to escape the feeling of that music quality is near arbitrary.
With a similar disregard for precise words and actual meaning as my first paragraph, read this review of Alt-J's "An Awesome Wave" from NME.
Alt-J indulge in impatient, complex songwriting. From the twisted a cappella interludes offsetting the distorted vocal and jagged guitars of ‘Intro’, to the wafting clap-happy breeze of ‘Dissolve Me’, each song flits between genres with the rapidity with which one would imagine Alt-J completed their algebra homework. ‘Breezeblocks’, starts as a smooth R&B groove before switching to a magnificent, clattering and sinister plea: “Please don’t go – I love you so!” The ‘In Rainbows’-indebted ‘Something Good’ is awash with piano and soaring melody. And while ‘An Awesome Wave’ might begun as some half-baked stab at a cinema concept album – ‘Matilda’’s drab strum is a paean to Luc Besson’s troubled child-star in Leon – it’s all the better for the added grit, real-life misery and heartache, as ‘Fitzpleasure’ attests. It’s a welcome injection of dirge, adding yet more sounds to the mix with rasping bass riffs and storming vocal before ‘Taro’’s finale, which fizzles disappointingly to the finish line.Perhaps I have a unreasonably pessimistic view of art criticism but this previous paragraph strikes me as achieving very little. Sure, for someone who has experienced the album before, it does recall the feeling of listening to it. But, as a piece for expressing how good the album is to someone not in the indie rock in-group, it's useless. I suppose if we think we fit into NME's intended group it could work as a recommendation. It would express "I liked this, and as we like the same things, so will you". But we (I included) occasionally try to convince people outside of our music group that our music possesses some absolute, intrinsic quality. I'm probably being typically autistic and missing the point of such discussions but it always seems that we have the wrong end of the stick. Music taste is defined by who we hang out with and who we idolise. The music speaks to something within us, our identity and our experiences with no reference to intrinsic quality.
How do I conclude? Probably with the shocking revelation that music as an art is subjective, who knew eh? Well, not many, me included. I often thought of music as somehow different, as if there was a way to show that Justin Beiber's music is shit and Alt-J's is amazing. Of course, the stupidity of my statement appears now that I think about it, but as with many things, its trivial but not obvious.
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