Categorisation of Music

[french frank]

What - even Andrew Lloyd Webber ? I had a good friend who was obsessed with Phantom - we agreed not to go there …

Well, I'd say 'Not even' as I'd have to add 'Plus any 1960s pop music'. There is a difference between objective musical analysis (and conclusions therefrom) and personal tastes. I suspect that over a whole spectrum of likes/dislikes - not only musical, no one exclusively likes, enjoys, finds bearable only the excellent and never the rubbish. That would be my philosophy anyway.

Though being, moi-même, of very narrow tastes (and finding sufficient quantity of it for the time available in which to indulge them), the wider your tastes, the more likely that at least some of it is rubbish

[Ein Heldenleben]

Well, I'd say 'Not even' as I'd have to add 'Plus any 1960s pop music'. There is a difference between objective musical analysis (and conclusions thereof) and personal tastes. I suspect that over a whole spectrum of likes/dislikes - not only musical, no one exclusively likes, enjoys, finds bearable only the excellent and never the rubbish. That would be my philosophy anyway.

Though being, moi-même, of very narrow tastes (and finding sufficient quantity of it for the time available in which to indulge them), the wider your tastes, the more likely that at least some of it is rubbish

Thing is I like a lot of “inferior” music : Noel Coward, Most of the Great American Songbook , a huge amount of pop/rock but deep down I know it’s not as “good” as a late Beethoven string quartet. It’s “good “ in its own way , possibly even touching on genius in the case of Gershwin , Rogers and MacCartney , but just not as “good. “
PS a some of the biggest musical snobs have complex hierarchies within genres and indeed sub genres : “How can you prefer Machine Head to Maiden ? - the former are wholly derivative.” Being a classic prelude to an hour of fact-offing ….

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes indeed - spent three years studying poetry! - I just don’t think there’s one there in this instance or more accurately I don’t think Mellers thinks there is one there but as he’s dead there’s no real way of proving it one way or the other. Any way MacCartney was 22 when he wrote it , Lennon a bit younger - I don’t see anything me-tooish about the lyric . It’s all about how she’s dancing with some one else. Compared to some rap lyrics it’s practically a hymn !

Without that 2nd line ("you know what I mean" - as leeringly, winkingly, beery as they come) they might have just got away with it.
Do it in karaoke..... and replace "she" with "he"...any better, d'you think?

But Hard Days Night (which I saw & loved in Liverpool on release), whilst cinematographically and musically brilliant, now looks appallingly sexist (schoolgirls called "the talent"....etc) and ageist (the Grandad is "very clean" - and shoved off into the mail truck. Then the group join him and put on an impromptu performance for the admiring "girls"... its awkward, self-contradictory, amusing and appalling, all at the same time.)

Of course it probably isn't wilfully, or cynically, sexist; that is how it was, and it was not good.
You saw it quicker, the quicker you'd been its victim, or knew someone who had (don't ask....).

The two, or many, historical viewpoints and cultural truths can coexist... you just need to keep a clear eye on it. And keep calling it out.

(Thanks to The Barrett for #161...)

[Ein Heldenleben]

Without that 2nd line ("you know what I mean" - as leeringly, winkingly, beery as they come) they might have just got away with it.
Do it in karaoke..... and replace "she" with "he"...any better, d'you think?

But Hard Days Night (which I saw & loved in Liverpool on release), whilst cinematographically and musically brilliant, now looks appallingly sexist (schoolgirls called "the talent"....etc) and ageist (the Grandad is "very clean" - and shoved off into the mail truck. Then the group join him and put on an impromptu performance for the admiring "girls"... its amusing and appalling at the same time.)

Of course it probably isn't wilfully, or cynically, sexist; that is how it was, and it was not good.
You saw it quicker, the quicker you'd been its victim, or knew someone who had (don't ask....).

The two, or many, viewpoints and cultural truths can coexist... you just need to keep a clear eye on it. And keep calling it out.

(Thanks to The Barrett for #161...)

I don’t see anything beery or leering in the line. You are right though - from my tiny experience on its very fringes I can confirm that parts of the pop/rock world are sexist and a lot of other things as well - floating on a tidal wave of booze, drugs and general exploitation all round . Full of dodgy contracts ,lawyers , managers you name it . Maybe it’s just a bit better now but the me- too movement seems to have left it pretty much unrepentant unlike Hollywood. Incidentally The “subtext” of AHDN is that actor playing Grandpa off screen spent most of the movie chasing Paul.

[french frank]

Thing is I like a lot of “inferior” music :

But not ALW … ? Since he's very popular, his work is enjoyed by many people. All one can say is "It's not for me". Sometimes people can have very clear ideas about the qualities and shortcomings of particular music or performances, but what it boils down to is frequently just a detailed explanation of why they like it or think it's poor stuff. Others may or may not find that helpful.

What I meant about narrow tastes being less likely to include rubbish was that if you focus on, say, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven some may be more sublime but little of it would be written off as rubbish by anyone who appreciated Mozart, Bach or Beethoven. It might all be declared rubbish by someone who never listened to any of it. I think I'm trying to argue that for most people (maybe all?) personal taste is in practice at least as important as degrees of excellence.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I did take a good look at the Guardian list, and found that I knew very few of the artists on it even by name. So I set myself the task of acquainting myself with as many of the items as possible and there were a few pleasant surprises along the way. Of course they're not going to have the effect on me that pop music of the first 20 years of my life did, since they're not going to become associated with particular times, feelings, experiences and the rest of it. But I'm sure that it will have that effect on young people going through those things now.

What I found disappointing was that much of the music was a more or less perceptible mixture of preexisting ingredients, which wasn't so true of 1960s pop music because there were hardly any suitable ingredients to be plundered. But each generation gets its own pop music, and the present music means as much to those who follow it as ours did to us. It's easy to look down one's nose at some supposed decline in quality or originality over the last few decades, but actually none of us is in such an objective position as to make such categorical judgements. And, as you say, the absolute dominance of male-centred viewpoints (even with female artists) in the lyrics of 1960s songs has given way to something different and indeed more diverse, in terms of the range of what's being expressed in the lyrics.

To your point I think Adele and Ed Sheeran’s music much less harmonically adventurous than say Lennon MacCartney or Pete Townshend. There is so little experimentation with instruments or recording techniques. It’s just boring after a while -though it has an immediate ear appeal.

[kernelbogey]

Thing is I like a lot of “inferior” music : Noel Coward, Most of the Great American Songbook , a huge amount of pop/rock but deep down I know it’s not as “good” as a late Beethoven string quartet. It’s “good “ in its own way , possibly even touching on genius in the case of Gershwin , Rogers and MacCartney , but just not as “good. “ ….

I'm reminded here of The Good Food Guide, which (IIRC) rated fish and chip establishments on the same scale as those for restaurants. So an 'A' (or '1', or whatever the classification was) indicated excellence in comparison with others of its kind.

[jayne lee wilson]

I don’t see anything beery or leering in the line. You are right though - from my tiny experience on its very fringes I can confirm that parts of the pop/rock world are sexist and a lot of other things as well - floating on a tidal wave of booze, drugs and general exploitation all round . Full of dodgy contracts ,lawyers , managers you name it . Maybe it’s just a bit better now but the me- too movement seems to have left it pretty much unrepentant unlike Hollywood. Incidentally The “subtext” of AHDN is that actor playing Grandpa off screen spent most of the movie chasing Paul.

That isn't a "subtext" by any definition.. .but I give up.

On a sunny afternoon

On the train into town with my mother
For her hearing test appointment....

I was attacked on the train
thigh and shoulder
A rough grab

I guess I was too glamorous
fair game
I froze but then
My Mother pushed him off

He was drunk and swearing
As he left the train

And I would never be the same...

[Ein Heldenleben]

But not ALW … ? Since he's very popular, his work is enjoyed by many people. All one can say is "It's not for me". Sometimes people can have very clear ideas about the qualities and shortcomings of particular music or performances, but what it boils down to is frequently just a detailed explanation of why they like it or think it's poor stuff. Others may or may not find that helpful.

What I meant about narrow tastes being less likely to include rubbish was that if you focus on, say, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven some may be more sublime but little of it would be written off as rubbish by anyone who appreciated Mozart, Bach or Beethoven. It might all be declared rubbish by someone who never listened to any of it. I think I'm trying to argue that for most people (maybe all?) personal taste is in practice at least as important as degrees of excellence.

I think Richard Rodgers music ( and Berlin, Kern’s , Sondheim’s , Styne’s ) is better than ALW’s and I also think he might well agree with me. But he has made more money than all of those put together and good luck to him. He (with Cameron Mackintosh) mastered the art of the pre-theatrical release album generating interest and then rolling out West End , Broadway prems followed by multiple global productions whilst maintaining high production quality. That is an exceptionally difficult thing to do. He has made a lot of actors, singers , directors , choreographers and even production personnel very wealthy. A magnificent achievement - but his music leaves me cold.

[RichardB]

To your point I think Adele and Ed Sheeran’s music much less harmonically adventurous than say Lennon MacCartney or Pete Townshend. There is so little experimentation with instruments or recording techniques. It’s just boring after a while

I agree, but I'm not talking about Adele and Ed Sheeran. There are plenty of artists in the pop music area now who are far more adventurous than that, and if you don't believe me try a few samples from those mentioned in the Guardian's "top 50 albums of 2021", which convinced me that the music is alive and well after all.

As for ALW, what annoys me most about him and his work is that it's made for people whose knowledge of and interest in music isn't sufficient to allow them to see how it's awkwardly cobbled together from bits and pieces of music by composers who had the melodic inventiveness that he obviously lacks. But as they say that's show business.

[gradus]

I have made absolutely no effort to listen to modern pop in whatever guise but from the comments above I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't dip a toe.
Anyone got recommendations from the Guardian 50?

[kea]

To the extent that classical music used to be a useful shorthand, it was so that I could express in a handful of words the sentiment of "I do not like, and will not listen to, any music characterised by a continuous sequence of repetitive beats performed on percussion instruments or an electronic drum machine or sampler, or any music with lyrics that are comprehensible, or any music that is heavily amplified", but nowadays practically every "downtown" "classical" composer also does those things, and therefore there is no longer any useful shorthand for this. As such, to explain my tastes I now have to resort to the tried-and-true method of naming lists of preferred artists and, when people recommend something, respond with something like "that's not really the kind of thing I like". (Friends who do experimental music refer to my preferred genre as "academic" music. This hasn't really caught on, but it would have been fairly useful, again up until the 1980s-2000s when music conservatories and academics also started to teach jazz, hip-hop and rap.)

Classical music is any music produced by classical musicians, for classical audiences, in classical venues. Since who defines themselves as classical musicians/audiences/etc is subject to constant change, the genre itself also therefore has fluid definitional boundaries. I would further argue that audience reception is more important than the other two. Most listeners now define crossover as its own genre and thus you are almost certainly never going to get the same audience at a Sarah Brightman concert as at a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert. Of these two audiences, the latter would have a much more significant overlap with that at an Alarm Will Sound concert even though such a concert would almost certainly include some "pop" music; it wouldn't be the kind that would appeal to Brightman fans.

[teamsaint]

I have made absolutely no effort to listen to modern pop in whatever guise but from the comments above I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't dip a toe.
Anyone got recommendations from the Guardian 50?

Not me, but I would like some too. I find I don’t really have the time and energy to find the good stuff , but happy to be led. My last dip into the Guardian’s top 50 a couple of years ago yielded nothing of value to me, maybe I was just unlucky.
But then the G is not a trusted guide for music for me.

[RichardB]

Not me, but I would like some too. I find I don’t really have the time and energy to find the good stuff , but happy to be led. My last dip into the Guardian’s top 50 a couple of years ago yielded nothing of value to me, maybe I was just unlucky. But then the G is not a trusted guide for music for me.

I would certainly agree with the last bit! but it's better than nothing. Nor would I say that I liked everything or even most things I heard, but I did have an impression of people doing imaginative and interesting work. One album that stuck in my mind was Vulture Prince by Arooj Aftab. I did find listening to the whole album a bit like eating a whole box of chocolates in one sitting, but she has a beautiful voice and the arrangements are very nicely done, mostly acoustic with a particular emphasis on harp and strings. I haven't heard anything quite like it before.

[gradus]

I would certainly agree with the last bit! but it's better than nothing. Nor would I say that I liked everything or even most things I heard, but I did have an impression of people doing imaginative and interesting work. One album that stuck in my mind was Vulture Prince by Arooj Aftab. I did find listening to the whole album a bit like eating a whole box of chocolates in one sitting, but she has a beautiful voice and the arrangements are very nicely done, mostly acoustic with a particular emphasis on harp and strings. I haven't heard anything quite like it before.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a go, Spotify permitting.