Purism : Classic Or Dud/Discussion

Warning: i'm going to defend purism.

i would suggest Purism as *a bad thing* probably like most everyone else here, BUT--- everyone's oh so pleased with their goddamn eclecticism all the time. you get dance DJs talking about how they play rock music in their set, coz they're *not ruled by dance tyranny yo* and, like, *i must be the only DJ unconventional enough to play Guns'n'Roses/New York Dolls whateva inbetween the Guidance 12s. latest edition of Jock*y Sl*t, you got Justin 'tedium' Robertson boasting how he got bottles thrown at him for playing the Waterboys 'Whole of the Moon'. coz its shit Justin (would probably fit in just fine with the rest of yr dull ass set, surprised they could tell the diff)

so, yeah, i think its time we had a big up for PURISM now and then. Lets be honest, if you pay yr money for Claude Young or whoever else, let them do what they're good at.

Some 'eclecticism' = symptomatic of an era of prolonged adolescence. "Oh, today you've decided to be a Communist/Moonie/str8- edge/Amish/whatever? That's nice dear, take the trash on your way out".

I'm all infavour of purists, but I wouldn't want to be one. After all we dilletante eclectics need someone to grade the 50 rap/jazz/metal/folk etc records released each week.

My problem with purists is when they're too uptight to listen to anything else. To which I say: relax.

Whilst I do find those who think their eclectic collections are something novel to be shouted about from the rooftops intensely irritating, it isn't quite so widely inherent as you'd think.

The vast majority of people will like something outside their speciality, yes, but at the same time they'll rabidly avoid anything that they think might not be accepted by its circle. For instance, I met someone the other day who was claiming his eclecticism:

"Oh yes, I don't just like rock, I like many other things... umm... oh no, I don't like any dance music."

Two things- 1)Wilful dismissal of such a broad spectrum of music is indeed purism of a kind. 2)Purism is a less accepted thing to brag about, but is still very rife.

I am a purist- I only like good music.

I think everyone should have the imaginative resources to slip into and out of purism, pragmatically and as it suits their listening needs. DJing I try to be a hooks purist. Often when writing about something I try and get inside the 'everything else but this sucks' argument because the music seems worth such a scorched-earth response. But only until the next track starts playing.

Somehow this is a great topic. Really I like Ewing's line: Pragmatism. Put me next to a bunch of purists and I'll look eclectic, next to a bunch of eclecticists and I'll look purist. In other words the category is possibly mobile and relational. That means that it is not always a bad thing, though it sometimes is. And I think that certain posters so far, eg. Gareth and Q, have caught this pragmatic aspect rather well.

Tom's hit upon something which I think I do at times - check something out with my purist's head on, and then (usually) decide that, sod it, I like it too much to be bothered with authenticity (whatever definition of authenticity I care to use that particular day).

I agree with Gareth and dq about the tedium of some eclictics.

I will don my perverse pinefox purism helmet to say:

>>> decide that, sod it, I like it too much to be bothered with authenticity

My experience = the reverse. Someone I like plays record from 'eclectic' range of music (top 10 45s or whatever). I would like to like record to enhance relations with friend and open new horizons. Then I decide, sod that, I dislike it too much to be capable of eclecticism.

Purism is as bad as forced eclecticism, as I see it. I think it silly to confine yourself to certain forms of music or styles, or genres, whichever- but it's also rather silly to force yourself to listen to radically different styles for the sake of being eclectic. Really, is there any better way to listen to music other than listening to/for what you like to hear?

purism ? ageing has helped me in feeling more relaxed in welcoming any musical genre . purists tend to be a bit boring with their anal arcane knowledge sometimes . another thing against "purism" is that often produced by an identity construction process ) . I think that , with time, one loses interest in being defined by the records you have in your collection .... or maybe I'm wrong .. death to false metal

I think to a greater or lesser extent we're all purists at some point. As francesco says aging changes your perception and helps open you up to new stuff, or more often things you had previously dismissed.

The punk orthodoxy informed my listening for a spell in the 80's and although I would listen to a wide range of music there was stuff I wouldn't listen because it fell outside the ideological canon e.g folk/country/classical/aor/prog. As you hear something new which doesn't fit into your perceived limitations it chips away at the very foundations of them until I realsised they were pretty useless.

No doubt I've replaced it with a different kind of purism and hopefully in time I'll be able to say I was wrong about some of the assumptions I'm making at the moment.

You know, the interesting subtext to this discussion is that you're all basically talking about "cheating," aesthetically speaking.

By which I mean this: pretty much all sane people in the world agree that people should listen to whatever music they like. This is pretty basically the point of music -- you listen to what pleases you, and that is fine. But at the same time, all of us who care about music are aware that a whole lot of people are pleased by music that is, based on certain pseudo-objective standards, really pretty wretched, and we part of the listen-as-you-please bargain is that if you are listening to something wretched, others aren't going to be shy about pointing this out. So there are two sometimes conflicting impulses -- the impulse to listen to what pleases you, and the impulse to listen to what you think, in the larger cultural sense, is "good" or "cool" or what have you. Hence: cheating.

The references to "forced eclecticism," above, seem like a pretty direct call-out of cheating -- people trying to make their tastes appear more refined and all-encompassing than they may actually be on a visceral level. The same, to a lesser extent, sometimes goes for purism -- i.e., people deciding that a particular genre is the only thing they're willing to be associated with, and defending this niche beyond the boundaries of all rationality. The sense is that a person is slanting his or her actual listening inclinations in order to create an appearance of "better" listening inclinations, which is what cheating is all about.

I don't have anything much to say about that, other than that I find it fascinating -- we'd like people's good taste to be completely naturalistic and stumbled-upon and actually-liked, as opposed to mentally constructed to have the maximum appearance of good taste. I think it's pretty damn rare that this sort of ideal taste- development actually happens, although it's hard to tell, because whatever set of likings a natural development results in will be exactly what "cheaters," even in the tiniest sense, adapt themselves to resemble. This gets very convoluted, I think, so I'll leave it alone for now, apart from noting that I don't view "cheating" as an entirely bad thing.

I'd also note that I find Ye Olde Pinefoxe a pretty good model for not-cheating: he's clear about where his personal inclinations lie, doesn't feel compelled to cheat at hipper inclinations, and manages to defend his own likings in a way that's forceful and solid is very clear about where it's coming from and doesn't necessarily ask you to go there as well.

I think if people were really purist in the manner Dr. C described they'd be bloody annoying, but I tend to find the smug eclecticism to be more of an issue generally. Purism's one saving grace is that it allows the listener to really get inside the given style of music, but it's ruined by the rigidity of the listener's demands. Eclecticism done wrong loses the former - the listener knows that the music is different to everything else in their collection but is perhaps less able to put that difference into context - while preserving the latter: most self-conscious 'eclectics' I know will have stylistic/thematic schema they apply to their choices - eg. buying Moby's Play because it has "soul" - that make their taste as rigid as a purist.

If "cheating" means an expanded musical dialogue, an ability to better understand the tastes of others, perhaps at the expense (and expendability) of your own visceral responses to music, then so be it- even if means my Album of Year is as likely to be "Choclate Starfish" as it is "Amnesiac". (PS. I am not entirely certain I believe this)

I don't think the idea of 'taste' is a useful one at the best of times and certainly not here. I'm not talking about listening to records differently, or different records, in the context of what other people might or might not be enjoying. I'm talking about listening to them differently in the context of other records, and themselves, and forcing this listening sometimes.

We can learn something about record A by comparing it to record B, which is fairly close to it, generically. But maybe we can learn more by comparing it to record Z. What anyone else thinks of records A B or Z is irrelevant except in the sense that "record A" actually includes everything we know about it. (i.e. it's as relevant as you're willing to make it - one might say that not acknowledging the impact of your ideas of public taste is the real "cheating", cf. the music-as-just-music thread)

What anyone else thinks of records A B or Z is irrelevant except in the sense that "record A" actually includes everything we know about it.

But Tom, couldn't it be argued that without those external social constructions of what certain genres or categories entail, there can be no such thing as "purism" or "eclecticism?" Otherwise your listening inclinations can be claimed to be either united (purist) or differentiated (eclectic) by some minute details that are completely personal to your listening experience. Mind you, I think this happens; I sometimes suspect that even the most eclectic listeners are still mentally connecting the bulk of their likings via some minute and inexpressible commonality.

Oh, explanation of the above: the fact that a person greatly enjoys both Woody Guthrie and Rage Against the Machine might seem like a symptom of eclecticism, unless it turns out that this person only listens to music with left-leaning political content, in which case it becomes purism of the strictest sort. It's essentially a social construction that Guthrie and Rage do not "go together," because our genre categories are more about formal conventions than political content. But that needn't, in theory, be the case.

I think we're actually agreeing with each other - I'm arguing at base that more can be learned about records by substituting personal generic links for public ones. I'd not considered how this might dissolve the whole purist/eclectic divide, but that's a good thing really.

Ahhh, I see, Tom.

But so now -- does this bring the purism issue down to a question like: "Do you, as an individual listener, have particular expectations of what music must be in order to be 'good,' regardless of whether or not those expectations fit into some generally accepted idea of genre or style?"

Because that brings us dangerously close to the really-hard-to-answer music questions, e.g., "Why do you like things at all?"

Ah, but that's easy, Nitsuh -- because they're enjoyable. And yes, that's a circular answer, but can a better one be given? ;-)

With a bit more self-examination, Ned, yes. I mean it would be possible, even easy, for most people here to sum up your or my preferred music such a way as to account for 90% of what we like. (We might claim the other 10% is the key but I'm a market researcher). So having isolated that - whether it's genres or some property or other that we seem to look for - we can discuss why that might be and make arguments around it. "Because it's enjoyable" is both the ideal heart of things (as Nitsuh suggests above) and also a 7-year-old's reply. To dip into market research lingo again, "Probe further."

I may be repeating what Tom said, but to my mind "eclectic" is just a word to define a range of music that crosses a range of publically perceived genres, while from the personal perspective, there's nothing eclectic about your own musical taste -- it's all "music that you like".

So it all depends on how you cut things up. the publically accepted genres help people to compartmentalise music, which makes sense, as the makers of the music are usually quite consciously staking out ground to, in some sense, explore the craft of creation. Naturally the consumers (sorry) of the music are relieved of this duty. (Perhaps this means the more of a muso you are, the less eclectic your musical tast will generally perceived to be. though i dunno)

It might be that after 30 years of buying albums which may be described as eclectic, you notice that all the artists use a variation on the same blues chords (for example) or some other musical trope -- which all along was the secret ingredient you craved. This isn't the emotionless eclecticism that gives having your own musical taste a bad name -- it's practically defining your own personal genre.

Interesting stuff, Tom and Nitsuh! I've been trying to think of an exercise which might somehow describe the links between 'the things I like'. These links could be made by me or more interestingly, other people. For example if I listed 5 records which I think represent the furthest reaches of my collection and for each one listed four or five 'attributes' or phrases to describe it, would it reveal anything of interest about hidden purist tendencies? Of course it's a deeply flawed excercise as I would be the one defining the 'furthest reaches...' which to someone else may appear quite a narrow spread. It suspect that if I listed five records at 'random' (perhaps every 35th CD on the shelf, or 5 CDs with a blue spine) and then got several other people to list what they thought were the attributes, it would be more interesting. A minimum of say 5 sets of 5 attributes for each record would perhaps allow some common opinion to form about each one. That would then tell me something new about 'what I like'.

So, first, any better ideas about refining this. Second - would it tell us anything, and thirdly - am I talking bollocks? Whatever, I wouldn't mind trying it anyway.

Perhaps, Tom, but ultimately surely every review or statement of intent at heart boils down to expressions of 'it rocks' or 'it sucks' or 'it's sorta there' or various spots on that scale. One can easily argue predisposition towards certain genres, however ill defined, merely reflects extensions of that principle: 'x reminds me of y, which I like because it's enjoyable.' Of course my general answer is an ultimately simplistic answer, but the application of the answer itself *can* change -- something once not liked can eventually become liked, or vice versa. Can this shifting of tastes be ascribed to a measured standard somewhere, though? I've always doubted it.

Why do you like the taste of one food and not another? Why follow one sport and not another (or why follow a sport at all)? Why do some people follow the inclinations of their parents and peers on such things but others specifically avoid them? No doubt Josh would have some thoughts on this all as well, but it seems terribly hard in my mind to try and nail down a more extensive process in all this. However, I could well be overlooking a very obvious point, so let's hear it from all...

IME Purists have a neurotic fear of being conned while eclectics have a neurotic fear of being marginalized.

Well, music lies somewhere on the spectrum of 'taste' explicability. Something like ones taste in food is very hard to explain. Something like ones taste in politics demands a full explanation, even though I suspect people's political opinions are in many ways as irrational as their artistic ones.

These explanations needn't be based on any kind of objective standard, but I do think a sense of the patterns and themes in ones own listening are fairly important in ones development as a listener and a critic. If all that can be said is "I like it because I like it", why bother saying anything at all?

Because it's all in how you say it. Which is like a lot of music itself -- nothing may surprise, but plenty will please. :-)