I'm starting to think I'm pretty foolish for caring how musicians rate music

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On the one hand, yes, I've probably grown to appreciate certain forms of virtuosity over the years, but again and again I listen to recordings that are praised to death by musicians (especially musicians working in the same genre as the recording) and they do nothing for me.

Latest example on my mind (which I just posted about elsewhere): The Alegre All Stars: S/T. This is actually less interesting to me than most Latin jazz I've heard (which isn't that interesting to me to begin with).

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:37 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not a musician. Maybe if I were a musician, I would listen like a musician.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:39 (twenty-one years ago)

Why feel foolish? Just take a musician's opinion as you would any other music lover.

― Dominique (dleone), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:40 (twenty-one years ago)

I think there's actually a difference, a lot of the time anyway, between a musician's opinion and a laylistener's opinion.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Also on some level, musicians are competitive with each other on a level different from non-musician music fans.

― sexyDancer, Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:44 (twenty-one years ago)

There's a lot of "This is the album that taught me. . ." Maybe they just value it so highly because this happens to be the place where they learned something or other.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:46 (twenty-one years ago)

Maybe there is a difference, but why feel foolish? I mean, isn't there a difference in opinions between any two people?

(yes, I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit, but as a musician, I'm kind of frustrated at how musicians' points of view are treated among non-musicians)

― Dominique (dleone), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:48 (twenty-one years ago)

there's a lot of talk about "craft" that doesn't go down well in this anti-rockist era

― Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Maybe I overstated it. I'm usually a defender of chops, technique, musoism, and musicians, but I'm feeling annoyed that I would puzzle over a listening experience that is just utterly gray and lifeless for me, just because a thousand musicians say it is the greatest thing ever.

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And I like craft and all, but it better sound good or move me or something.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:52 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not sure "musician taste," as a supposedly-coherent entity, works particularly different from any other taste subgroup -- say, NPR-taste, or something. Which is to say that I agree with Dom, I guess.

NB Dominique: on Sunday I met another guy who spent a good five minutes telling me what a huge crush he has on you. My question: how come nobody ever thought I was a girl? I want boys to have crushes on me, too.

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Yes, nabisco, as long as I remain an anonymous internet being, I can always rely on crushes to pave the road of my life.

― Dominique (dleone), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:56 (twenty-one years ago)

I enjoy hearing one of my musician (rock guitar, songwriter) friends talk about his tastes-- he can almost always articulate specific reasons with examples of why he likes something. I find his taste enigmatic because he is looking at music from a craft perspective, he's interested in stuff that does something 'new' (to him, at least), that he hasn't heard before or done in his own songwriting. I have something of a musical background but I've never tried to write pop/rock songs. But he doesn't rate a LOT of music I love and I get annoyed by his dismissal of music that doesn't have some technical/craft-based 'hook' for him to appreciate.

― W i l l (common_person), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 16:58 (twenty-one years ago)

I've never been interested in what music musicians like - most of the musicians I really admire either don't seem to care about other people's music at all (or else don't admit to it) or have pretty dire tastes

― Dadaismus (Dada), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 17:00 (twenty-one years ago)

I have another musician friend who makes his living playing classical piano, and so far I've never been less than pleased with his recommendations for performers and pieces. Again, my taste is a little broader than his, for example, I (generally) rate Liszt, he thinks he's cheesy.

― W i l l (common_person), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 17:04 (twenty-one years ago)

NB Dominique: on Sunday I met another guy who spent a good five minutes telling me what a huge crush he has on you.

Please tell me you didn't clue him in.

― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 17:19 (twenty-one years ago)

i think it is, in the abstract, a foolish thing to care about.

however it's quite interesting to me that there are musician's musicians, people who play or write in a way that people seem to get more joy from if they are musicans themselves. as if these musicians are doing something very new or something very well that is so subtle that you need a grasp of the techniques and aspirations of musicianship to appreciate it.

― debden, Tuesday, 9 November 2004 17:20 (twenty-one years ago)

probably the worst building in all of dublin is the busarus bus terminal
really grim looking,horrible plastic crap,its from the late sixties i think
everyone hates it
but to this day it is regarded by architects all over the world as one of the best examples of public buildings

i gave up on trusting musicians opinions on music when timbaland started shiteing on about coldplay and metallica

― robin (robin), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 17:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah I feel that way about a lot of Venturi buildings. I tend to make snap judgment about visual art (or anything with a heavy visual component--I don't want to call architecture visual art, since it's more than that) with no compunction, which tends not to be true about my judgments of music.

― RS, Tuesday, 9 November 2004 18:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Well, Jay, we were talking about Pitchfork, and he said, you know, "there's this girl that writes for them that I'm totally in love with," and it was easy to figure out where he was headed from there. So he explained himself, at length, and I stood there nodding, and finally in the end he said, "I think her name is ... Dominique ... Leone." And I said yeah, Dominique's a great guy. A great big manly Texan guy.

Then we talked about these hot chicks Jess H4rvell and Simone Trife.

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 18:31 (twenty-one years ago)

The "Texan" part was the deal-breaker, I'm sure.

― Dominique (dleone), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 18:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Dominique I can relate as, thanks to Drew Barrymore, I have a similarly gender-slippery name.

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Don't forget also that musicians are sometimes playing scene politics when they claim to love something; if a friendship is involved it may be that they are backed into a corner and can't "afford" to dislike record X in public. The solution: get them drunk first and THEN ask what they like.

― Drew Daniel, Wednesday, 10 November 2004 00:57 (twenty-one years ago)

What I reckon would be much more interesting is musicians telling you which records they don't like, and why.

― damian_nz (damian_nz), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 02:32 (twenty-one years ago)

As a (ahem) musician, I generally try as much as I can to listen in a non-musicianly way, because I want to make music that doesn't only appeal to musicians.

But there seems to be this generalization in some of the posts here that musicians' tastes are in fact somehow WORSE than everyone else's -- the implication being the cliche that musicians are only interested in technical virtuosity and other such pedantic things (see the architecture analogy). I assure you this is not true, especially not of many of the best musicians.

― Hurting (Hurting), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 02:43 (twenty-one years ago)

there seems to be this generalization in some of the posts here that musicians' tastes are in fact somehow WORSE than everyone else's -- the implication being the cliche that musicians are only interested in technical virtuosity and other such pedantic things (see the architecture analogy).

I don't want to give the impression that that's what I think. But I do think that often musicians will praise things for musicianly reasons that might not be relevant to a listener like me.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 03:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, that's probably fair. I've also had musicians praise stuff to me for musicianly reasons that I don't find relevant (Woody Shaw, Alan Holdsworth, Tom Harrell, for example).

― Hurting (Hurting), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 03:57 (twenty-one years ago)

I think this thread was started partly as a reaction to trying a little too hard to like things that were praised by musicians.

Oddly, www.descarga.com, which is the main source I use for finding out about salsa and other Latin recordings, relies unusually heavily on blurbs from musicians. This is more true of the less pop end of what they disribute. But maybe those blurbs are meant to be selling these recordings to other musicians, to begin with, so maybe it's my own fault for thinking they apply to me.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 04:03 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, I think it depends on who's telling you too. If I hear that Bob Dylan thinks so-and-so is a great songwriter, I'm going to at least give that person a few good listens to try to hear what he hears. But there's not much use in quotes where a technically ultra-proficient pianist praises some other technically ultra-proficient pianist.

― Hurting (Hurting), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 04:37 (twenty-one years ago)

Did you know that Bob Dylan has praised Oum Kalthoum highly? Sorry, I can't resist. It's true though.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 15:04 (twenty-one years ago)

In old interviews anyway. I don't know if he still talks about her.

― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 15:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Musicians are usually more trustworthy than fans or writers regarding what is good music and what is not.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 21:24 (twenty-one years ago)

In Chronicles, Bob Dylan sez he likes Ice-T.

― LSTD (answer) (sexyDancer), Wednesday, 10 November 2004 21:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Cool. Bob Dylan was probably a bad example, because he can be very coy and elusive, but I like Ice-T.

― Hurting (Hurting), Thursday, 11 November 2004 07:45 (twenty-one years ago)

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