What do you look for in a piece of music?

If a record seems to demand identification with its attitude, and if I do not warm to the singer or their concerns, then I am turned off.

Pop music makes only very broad appeals to identification, which it why it rarely repels me - it is just good or mediocre. Rock music often does, which is why I hate so much more of it (and love some of it too).

This is, in reference to the other thread, why I can't bear listening to Alanis Morrisette, but enjoy a lot of Britney Spears records - I can't hear Morrisette's music as pop. Obviously others can, and thus can appreciate it without being angsty teenage girls. Good luck to them.

sure, thats going to vary across genre and probably across any possible factor.

that said, i'll like any song with "ba ba dip-da-dip-da-dip" backing vocals in it...or clapping hands

Er, really?????? I think that the Disney Mafia of the late 90s are poster children for narrow-focus appeal for identification; in fact, I would think that that would be an integral part of the definition of a successful pop star (ie, "What is your brand/signifier and how will people remember you vs. Boy Band #25 or Random Starlet #16352?").

Anyway, the things I look for in music varies wildly between different genres. As a singer, the quality of the vocals is very important to me but only with respect to how well I think they fit the genre; I love Robert Smith as a singer on his own material but the idea of him singing something like "It's Gonna Be Me" or "Sexual Healing" is the stuff of nightmares (ditto with Aretha Franklin, another great singer, doing Puccini; IT'S NOT YOUR FACH AND IT SOUNDS LIKE ASS SO STOP IT).

In general, I like dense textures and syncopation/imaginative rhythms with imaginative chord progressions following close behind. Unless the lyrics are mind-meltingly bad and/or offensive, I kind of couldn't care less about them as there's a way to set even the most banal sentence to music that can transform it into the most profound statement ever pondered. The bedrock of everything is the bassline; if your low-range is tight, chances are I'll find you all right. (Obviously you don't have to have a bassline to have a good song but I prize bass so much that when a song DOES pull off appealling to me without one I usually overrate it compared to others, which is why I get so manic about "When Doves Cry" and "Maps".)

I love it when a piece of music comes together in a confluence of movement that makes me want to jump up and dance, when all of the components line up in a propulsive, body-jerking synthesis of sound and motion. Certain genres never hit this for me, the biggest culprits being country and ragtime; there is something about the timbres used (particularly slide guitar and banjo) that I find very off-putting.

Have you ever looked at the archives for this place? There are hundreds of thousands of threads about all kinds of musicians, songs and albums so I think on some level people can answer this type of question, even if they can't do it in three sentences or less.

I think that much of pop music does in fact insist that you identify with it, but in a very non-specific way: you identify with it on your terms rather than, say, Britney Spears' or Cheryl Tweedy's.

I just typed out a massive post trying to answer the question(s) but then I re-read it and none of it made sense. I might try again, now.

entirely my point...endless conversation trying to pin down those brass tacks of why music works...

this, of course, points out the purest beauty of music...the ability to be anything to anyone.

i agree with you on texture. as i've grown older, i've come to unerstand that texture is realy at the heart of what i do like about music. its the little variations in texture or the shifts in dynamic that hook into us.

that brings up the question "how do you define hooks?"...has that ben done? off to the archives...

Associating a pop star with some brand/signifier does not entail the kind of idnentification I was talking about. Maybe for kids it does, but as an adult outside of their core audience, I'm unlikely to get too deeply sucked into all that.

I think that much of pop music does in fact insist that you identify with it, but in a very non-specific way: you identify with it on your terms rather than, say, Britney Spears' or Cheryl Tweedy's.

Exactly.

Regarding 6, I don't like rhythms that are clunky or are so complex that they seem ostentatious...but I enjoy rhythms that are off-kilter and not particularly standard.

So, yes.