Insufferable Music Snob Open Thread

[sabotabby]

It's a guilty pleasure but I'm really enjoying the 80s D00d Music thread on Pandagon.

(I disagree, by the way. About hair metal. I actually think it's kind of subversive and interesting. I don't like it in the way that I like, say New Wave and post-punk, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.)

I always feel like I shouldn't comment on music threads, because while I have some grounding in music theory, appreciation of contemporary music is so subjective that it's almost impossible to be a snob about it. But I have Rather Strong Opinions. And no one else can academically justify their taste either, so there.

Discuss!

Comments

Video is silly, but I consider this the height of 80s hair metal

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Re: Video is silly, but I consider this the height of 80s hair metal

[sabotabby]

Hair needs to be bigger. MOAR PRODUCT NEEDED.

That video, though. Hah. I remember that video.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I am musically inept and don't listen to much music if I can help it, although I can rant about it for hours. But I won't. I know so little about music that I have no idea what the article is talking about, so hey ho. I did try to listen to Gogol Bordello last night, but it seemed a bit boring and unoriginal. Pity, because I love Gogol.

I only like music that is happy and bouncy, because anything at all melancholy sends me into floods of tears within seconds.

[sabotabby]

Gogol Bordello are all right but don't do much for me. All of the music I listen to is angsty or angry. Bouncy music usually makes me feel worse.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

It's odd in an interesting way, that - most people seem to want to listen to depressing or angry music when they are feeling low, whereas I cannot stand it.

I think it is because I am always, every waking moment, making huge efforts to block out all my feelings.

I thought for years I was unmusical, but now I think I am, rather, ultra-sensitive to it, as it wracks my emotions instantly. I really do end up curled up on the floor sobbing in pain if I hear even slightly mournful music. I can control myself a bit, of course, and if the music is spectacularly superficial, like much popular music is, I can brazen it out, but rock and jazz and much classical music, eek, all too much for me.
It is partly because my brother was musically brilliant - one of those child-prodigy types (not extremely so, but enough to be given a choir scholarship to a poncey private school, then a music placement at a state school for musically gifted people, and to be in a ballet at the Royal Opera House, and play many instruments). I can't listen to Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or, especially, Otis Redding or any other funk and soul stuff, because he listened to them all the time before he died, so I immediately go completely insane with grief and pain.
I cry as soon as I see or hear a piano because he played the piano beautifully. He sat and played for the last time just before walking out of the door to jump off the bridge.
Christmas is extra awful because everywhere plays the Pogues song, and he listened to the Pogues all the time too and they (well, Shane McGowan and his splinter group, the Popes) composed and dedicated a song for him the night after he died. And everywhere plays The Snowman song "Walking in the Air," which my brother used to sing beautifully when he was a choirboy.


AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH! I hate music!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been listening to Bach recently, though.

Actually, angry music is ok. I love Janis Joplin, although I can't listen to her either because my brother was a huge fan and had a girlfriend when he was 15 who killed herself and who apparently was like a reincarnation of Janis Joplin.

Life, eh.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

To me, IMS is a form of pop itself - constructing grand generalizations and theories which only need to be convincing for the length of the post and usually relying on selectively narrow examples, contexts and definitions and elided contradictions. Like how IMS writers often criticize the idea of authenticity while using terms like "corporate rock" which depend on it. One can say any IMS essay itself rocks or sucks.

Yet like the pop trends it scorns, IMS can be critiqued for as a questionable cultural artifact. It exhibits a status anxiety and polices boundaries in an artform prized because it is fluid and challenges all boundaries, including socioeconomic ones which any snobbery, no matter how charming and well intended, reinforces.

I cannot deny my deeply rooted IMS side but I also try to take a crate digging Freeform Radio DJ attitude, although one might argue these are merely two aspects of the same phenomenon.

[sabotabby]

IMS fascinates me, because "authenicity" is so arbitrary. Lady Gaga is acceptable to most IMS, post-rock isn't (but was a decade ago). Hair metal is coded as heterosexual; New Wave as queer. I mean, New Wave is queer, but so is hair metal, and hair metal was arguably much more working class and no more white.

I find most "authentic" bands these days sound exactly the same and aren't at all musically challenging. And, of course, "challenging" does not equal "good"; Rush were challenging but the musical equivalent of nails on chalkboard (this from someone who digs industrial and death metal). This leaves the political as the major criterion for IMS, which itself deserves to be critiqued to death.

AOR does universally suck, though.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

[sabotabby]

NO.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Ahahahaha.

Yet if you ever do want to engage some Canada AOR pride, may I suggest Pass The Mic, Tom?

[sabotabby]

Look, we gave you guys Skinny Puppy. And Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And Leonard Cohen. And K'Naan. And Arcade Fire. And all those hipster bands you guys listen to. We get a pass on Bryan Adams, okay?

[fengi.livejournal.com]

I have an soft spot in my heart for Adams after Tipper Gore was so deeply offend by his "Cuts Like A Knife" video which she attacked with Fredric Wertham overkill and misguided literalism while ignoring the more open misogyny of other soft-rockers she praised (like Billy Joel).

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

At the risk of looking daft; what is IMS?

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Insufferable Music Snob. Like so many self-mocking terms it is at least a tiny bit unashamed about the trait being mocked.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

Hair metal was a bit gender subversive in that it had masculine men donning make-up, long hair, fishnets, tight leather etc. But it was still a male supremacist scene to the extreme, except for Lita Ford I can't name one hair metal star who was a woman. Plus hair metal videos had all kinds of objectification and physical abuse of women. In fact the only more misogynist music scene I could think of in (gangsta) rap/hip-hop.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I appreciate Green Day for introducing me to punk rock, but I even more appreciate them for killing the grunge fad.

Hair hair hair...

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Well, on topic I admit that I liked Van Halen quite a bit at the time:



And Motley Crue:



But it all starts to sound the same... :-(

Right after Lennon was shot...Reagan POTUS, so welcome to the 1980's.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I'm so out of it. The 80's eh? Good windowpane, nice connections. Dancing at midnight in the forest rain...anyway.

Was it King Crimson capturing my attention then?



Or was it The Residents?



Or Maybe Snakefinger (Phillip Lithman)



Or was it Renaldo and the Loaf?



Or perhaps Laurie Anderson?



We were still dreaming of Utopia:



We were all left Waiting for the Worms...



We were playing Jeux Sans Frontières!