Pretentious

Yes.

Most "great" artists are pretentious.....It's pretentious to make records...or to charge people money to come watch you perform....when people say "genius" they usually mean 'it's pretentious but I like it" and when they say "pretentious" they mean "it's pretentious but I don't like it"

I think "angular" & "seminal" are beyond redemption, though (& I say that as a dood that uses them way too often).

"Main Entry: pretentious
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: snobbish
Synonyms: affected, arty, assuming, aureate, big, bombastic, chichi, conceited, conspicuous, euphuistic, exaggerated, extravagant, feigned, flamboyant, flashy, flaunting, flowery, gaudy, grandiloquent, grandiose, high-flown, high-sounding, highfalutin', hollow, imposing, inflated, jazzy, la-di-da, lofty, magniloquent, mincing, ornate, ostentatious, overambitious, overblown, pompous, puffed up, put-on, rhetorical, showy, snobbish, specious, splashy, stilted, swank, too-too, tumid, turgid, utopian, vainglorious"

jazzy! that's pretty lazy. what the hell has jazz with pretention to do?

That's backwards.

oh no, Jandek = Dan Ashcroft!

man, "pretending to have something it doesn't" sounds kind of sexy to me. i could imagine describing a lot of the music that i love exactly like that.

One of the worst things I read last year was this show preview in my local alterna-rag of the Ludacris / David Banner tour, and the hack wrote that people should skip the "pretentious" David Banner. And that was it -- no, you know, *ideas* or anything to back that up. Shitty writing. (not to mention, Banner "pretentious" wha??)

should only ever be used by Holden Caulfield.

Underground hipsters loved it, but I found the Chicago debut by these Icelandic art-rockers Sigur Ros pretentious (it featured a cameo by an opera star) and dreadfully dull as well as seriously unoriginal--My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive did it before, and better.

U2 followed the unprecedented commercial success of ''The Joshua Tree'' with this mix of new material and live tracks that aspire to pay tribute to American roots music but wind up amplifying all the worst traits of ''The Unforgettable Fire.'' It's awkward, pretentious, ponderous--a real mess. But maybe the band had to get this out of its system before it got where it was going next.

Is emo becoming the jazz-fusion Muzak of a new generation? Or is it just boring and pretentious in its own right?

'The Last Waltz' is still overrated and pretentious.

Simon, who wrote the vast majority of material, was always capable of crafting a memorable melody a la early hits such as "The Sounds of Silence" and "Homeward Bound," and Garfunkel's high-tenor harmonies were never short of amazing. But the pair could also be annoyingly twee and cutesy -- witness "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" -- or unbearably smug, pretentious and self-important.

New songs such as the album's title track, the VH1/adult contemporary single "Send Your Love" and the ponderously self-important political toss-off, "Let's Forget About the Future," are, in a word, dreadful -- tuneless, pretentious, overwrought and (despite the best efforts of master drummer Vinnie Colaiuta) positively leaden in the groove department.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard it all before. But I like rock 'n' roll, and what I'm saying is that on occasion, on album, the Dead made good rock 'n' roll. I wish there was more Warlocks--the early stuff on the box set--and less pretentious faux-Cage and Coltrane.

The Village Voice has this kind of pretentious vision of what they are . . . the last word in hipness in American underground music, and they don’t give a fuck about New York, to the point where, they didn’t care about the Strokes, then the Strokes happened, then they don’t cover the Strokes because now the Strokes are too big for them. So [Village Voice] readers never got [to read about the Strokes] at all.

Though they [John McEntire and Sam Prekop] share a similar approach to recording and rhythm and an aesthetic that I call pretentious postmodern hippie, these efforts stand in sad contrast to Drumhead because they're just too static--the tunes aren't tuneful, and the grooves ain't groovy enough.

The event is organized by Village Voice graduates Eric Weisbard (who edited the book) and Ann Powers, and their goal is to establish the ultimate forum for high-level discourse about rock as art, a sort of post-graduate school seminar where academics and critics come together to share great thoughts. Not surprisingly, the majority of the 25 essays are as pretentious as that idea sounds, reading with a joyless impenetrability.

Wilco's set started off shakily with one of guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Jeff Tweedy's misguided gestures of defiance as its producer, avant-garde instigator Jim O'Rourke, joined the sextet for an indulgent version of "Less Than You Think," the pretentious and tuneless art-wank noise jam that is the sole blemish on 2004's otherwise brilliant "A Ghost Is Born."

The political assaults, including the anti-imperialist anthems "The Gringo's Tale" and "Rich Man's War" (which could have been written by Woody Guthrie); the title track, which is effectively reprised at the end of the disc, and the veteran's lament "Home to Houston," are even more barbed and thought-provoking, and, with the exception of the stilted and pretentious spoken-word piece "Warrior," they rock with a melodic gusto that makes their messages all the more potent.

is not searching for old threads as pretentious as searching for them?

I really, really disagree with this.

I like plenty of things that a lot of people would call pretentious. I am a fan of ultra-pop, over-orchestrated shit like the late-'60s Bee Gees, for example. It's obviously pretentious. A lot of prog is totally pretentious; someone who says he's in touch with the cosmic is maybe like not actually in touch with it. But that doesn't rule out the fact that maybe it's fun to listen to. If someone can pull it off and make me not care that whatever they're presenting is concerned with things that no one can really know about with certainty, then I guess it's like writing that tries to explore the mystical dimensions of life. But the thing is, poetry could fall in to this category. So I think the question is whether or not the artist in question has command of detail? Anyway, a lot of that roots music so-called is pretentious in its unpretentiousness, you know--the world in a good sandwich and all that.

I agree with Tim Ellison--the goal is to make something that works on its own terms, how are you using the vocabulary you choose? If you have a bigger vocabulary, then it's all in what you wanna do with it. This is a common complaint people who don't understand the vocabulary of jazz, say, have--they're hearing the surface, or they're so concerned with "getting it" they just forget to swing, and in jazz (most of it, some of the '60s free stuff and a lot of Euro-jazz/quasi-jazz maybe don't swing) that's half the battle. It's like, I'm reading right now George Pelecanos and I'm re-reading Nabokov, who are pretty much poles apart, and given their respective paramaters both are pretty great. But where I think Tim is right is that many artists, who are really artistic but who don't show it so much, which is a fairly old-fashioned but still relevant test of art, set out to write simply about complex things--like one of my favorite writers, the great William Trevor. So I don't think they set out to be "pretentious" or have an idea that they're trying to do something more than what they want to do.

Also, kudos to whomever that person is for pooing on the EMP book for having the gall to be smart & academic & stuff! (or: what Daddino sez.)

The California Raisins were totally pretentious....pretentious claymation fucks.

I think the average rock critic intent on making these distinctions between what's rockin' and what's not tends to use the word or at least think in those terms. I mean the Bee Gees use all this orchestration and sing funny and all, well, so did Arthur Lee. So how is "Forever Changes" good and pretentious and "Odessa" bad and pretentious? I'm not prepared to make the distinction and in fact am completely uninterested in doing so. Someone writing about those two records might say that Lee was writing about "real stuff" like the psychic damage inflicted by smog and L.A. and so forth, and that the Bee Gees were writing about some kind of generalized post-British-Empire experience filtered through the Beatles and mid-'60s British rock. That's fine with me to say that but it seems like then you're falling into that trap of expecting artists to hew to some populist standard that was already sorta abandoned in 1964 or '65. I think a lot of the fear ot "pretension" is just this useless effort to be populist anyway, like Dave Marsh, he's a good example (and I do like some of his work). It's like me, I like bossa nova music a whole lot, and there's not much really populist about it, it's more like about middle-class comfort, which seems as good a subject as any to write about, and the orchestrations are often a bit saccharine-sounding. So I don't know--I suppose I reserve the term "pretentious" for really egregious attempts to teach me about the Wondrous Workings of the World, kind of quasi-religious shit, and that's about it for me.

I was talking to some record store clerks about the sound of the band D.N.A., and they both said

"I mean, it's pretty, like, angular...with their guitars..right?"
"Yea, yea. Really angular."

The thing is, when criticising music writers, it's easy to say "use other words", but sometimes, there just aren't any left, and scouring a Thesaurus is often a dead giveaway and comes across all stilted and... um, angular. The key is to justify those words, as someone already remarked. Why is something "angular" or "pretentious" or whatever?

I think the two qualities that seem to make critics reach for the word are

1) use in lyrics of aureate language, inverted syntax, especially arch constructions or abstruse references- basically anything that seems to self-consciously aspire to code as "literary", ie. Morrissey's lyrics for The Smiths in tunes like "Cemetary Gates" might be an example here

2) musical gestures which do the same but in reference to musical history, and particularly to genres of music which have some cultural capital behind them, ie. prog's attempts at cod-classical symphonic forms are a good example of a red flag of pretension here

so "over-reaching" seems to be a good synonym for how it gets used. This winds up affirming a general "don't talk down to me" aesthetic commandment- but it's hard to know if the people who bust musicians for being pretentious aren't also working through some anxiety/shame about their very ability to spot such references, unless they point out a positive example of lyrics which actually succeed in being poetic, or musical structures which are acceptable/successful contemporary efforts at participating in a "high art" tradition etc.

'Pretentious' is a great descriptor, and not necessarily negative. As long as it's being used where it fits, and not for want of a more suitable word, then who cares. (I think i just paraphrased everyone else...crap)

I used to think "pretentious" was meaningless as a criticism but this thread is making me reconsider!

[...]

But too many of the other songs went nowhere, repeating the same formulas to the point of stultifying boredom, and the pretension meter shot into the red when the musicians sat down to render the fragile "Don, Aman," with Walford solemnly intoning the impressionistic lines, "A plane passes silently overhead/The streetlights, and the buds on the trees, were still."