Semantics and Music.

(James, check the hip hop thread you started again. Feller named donut bitch posted a big long response to your original question you might find very worthy.)

My general theory on popular music is that you want to know at least one fanatical fan from each major genre so you can leach the best and the brightest from each genre without breaking a sweat.

Which is a lot different from my attitude in my salad days of grind, noise, industrial, and "extreme" metal. I got the eclectic bug five years ago and never looked back.

Heh, I guess that's kind of an introduction to the board.

If I played an In the Woods record without calling it metal few would notice and might even like it. However, if I implied that it was metal related from the beginning, even if only slightly, a bias would set in for some listeners and they would shut the music out. If someone used the term punk in reference to Joy Division or prog in reference to Art Bears, many wouldn't even bother with either band.

Thanks! I'll be ok!

It's almost impossible (for me, anyway) to like a given peice of music without trying to get into the head or mindset of the person who made it. Labeling music is a way of doing that.

Anyway, yeah, I actually think of labels used in a negative light ("Prog") are usually utilized to explain WHY someone doesn't like a band, rather than an actually adequete description of the band itself.
Its sort of an easy way out, rather than explaining exactly WHY you don't like Yes, i.e. their music is boring/pretentious/etc. rather that it is PROG and clearly that means its not worth my time. If that makes sense.

Emo pop-punk crap and sludgey death metal all tend to sound similar to me. So yeah, I've used "emo" as a derogatory category whereas I wouldn't describe something I'm a fan of as "indie", necessarily, as it seems dismissive. I'll do it if I'm explaining to someone who doesn't know what I'm talking about though, and that's the quickest reference point for them. I cringe when I have to resort to that, though.

Do any of you people actually read any of the posts on ILM? No-one uses "prog" in a negative light in ILM (apart from me prolly) and, in general, you constantly read positive things about "prog" in ILM. It's hip to be square, dudes.

I think there's a lot to be said for becoming "initiated" into how to listen to a particular genre, by talking to people who have been listening to it for years, noticing to how the audience responds to different points in the music (if there is an audience to observe, and if there are any responses to notice), etc.

Take a modal instrumental improvisation in Arab music: the musician is expected to establish that particular mode (maqam), and the improvisation follows an arc-like pattern, as I understand it, working its way up to a higher register. You might enjoy listening to something like that, even if you've never heard it before, but once you've heard lots of examples, you may start to get more of a feel for how it's supposed to go, who does it with more expressiveness, and so on.

Surprisingly, my music discussions do not entirely take place in the apparent vacuum that is ILM.
Yes, there is a good portion of the population here on earth that have a negative association with "prog."

Yes, there is a good portion of the population here on earth that have a negative association with "prog."

ILM may have its faults, but one thing it does do is allow you to re-examine your prejudices w/r/t genre, or whatever. In other words, the widespread dismissal of "prog" that occured in 1977, and which many of us bought into wholesale (at the time, or subsequently), was perhaps based on as much smug prejudice as that genre appeared itself to flaunt. (Apologies for tortured syntax.) Personally, I can now listen to punk and prog and no longer feel guilty (everybody wins! Haha!).

But, to ask a serious question for a second, since you're arguing on ILM, why not at least acknowledge that instead of dismissing it as "an apparent vacuum"? Why are you posting here, then (I mean that as a genuinely curious question)? Otherwise, it just seems like hostility, or trolling, or something.

Or is it by and large full of people who believe that the category of "open-minded eclecticism" is best and reject the category of "enthusiast music"?

Ouch, ow, that thread hurt my head like a hundred dogs...

Seriously, why does that thread make me want to cry so much (and I really don't cry easily)?

I'm just saying that ILM does not represent the opinions of the rest of the world...is this inaccurate?
Certainly I don't claim that BECAUSE something is prog it is automatically bad - genre and good/bad definitions of course are unrelated. I dig disco now way more than I used to.
But my original point was that usually people (who don't post on ILM) label BAD prog music "prog" and label GOOD prog music...something else.

In other words, I think ILM people label prog differently than the rest of the world. In my experience.

Being not of the ILM hive-mind (yet, at least, heh), I give you a pass on the "trolling/hostility" stuff this time around. (Like you care.)

And yeah, what you say about prog and the subjectivity of said genre seems fair enough.

And this:

I'm just saying that ILM does not represent the opinions of the rest of the world...is this inaccurate?

No, that's probably accurate. ILM is really not a hive mind, but it does question some orthodoxies. There may be a core clique of Old ILMers, but that's balanced by... well... everyone else with interweb access who's free to come post here. ILM/Freaky Trigger seems to have done some favours for pop music that were long overdue, while picking apart old rockist tropes. That's surely healthy, even if the pendulum sometimes swings too far the other way. I know that's not the angle you're taking/talking here, though.

I dunno, it just seems strange to be picking fights (as far as I can tell from that other thread) with one of the most harmless of the Old Skool ILMers, the kind hearted Mr. Raggett. Perhaps I'm blinded by similar Anglophile tastes, but Ned seems to be a pretty fair person to newcomers and outsiders in general, even if he is safely ensconced among friends on here. Perhaps it's easy to be magnanimous when you're in such a warm fuzzy environment, but still... perhaps some of the hostility you encountered was partly because you locked horns with a sacred cow, who knows?

You should probably have attacked Momus or something.

(Kidding.)

Why am I rambling at length? Well, reading that hip-hop thread, part of me felt sorry for you (you didn't initially deserve the flack you got), and part of me grew more and more irritated with you -- sneaky rhetorical tricks and talking past people did you no favours. You weren't the only one, but you were the most consistent reviver of a thread that shoulda died long before it reached 500 posts. If I'd been involved in that thread fairly early on, I'd have had three words to say to you, whether you were right or wrong (you were part right and part wrong, in fact , and grew more wrong as it progressed... IMHO, of course ;-)), and those words would have been:

Let. It. Go.

I hope you wake up happier and ready for more ILM fun tomorrow. Don't take it all so personally. (Like I can fucking talk, sometimes, but still...)