Internal Criticism

Because, for one thing, it's very easy to seem uncritical. Ronan's had a go at me for appearing to give a free pass to all pop, Ned sometimes seems to have no ability to sift good spacerock from bad spacerock, lord knows there are people who appear to like anything with a glitch on, etc. etc.

And an interesting question that arises from this - who should be the person who you trust on, say, pop? Me, who listens to tons of it but whose quality threshold seems to be low - or Person X who listens to pop a lot less and only occasionally pronounces something a gem.

Thing about pop is I've almost always heard the song myself anyway, but I think I'd trust yourself Tom and Tim probably, to be honest everyone else aswell really becase, er.....this may sound bad, but I think there's more of a consensus to be reached with pop since oddly people here AREN'T concerned with the image of a pop song or group as much as perhaps a rock group.

I'm starting to think I'm quite soft on that generic funky house type stuff. It's always played in bars before I go to the clubs and I used to think it was good, but the more I think about it, it's just aimless and annoying. It's not dance music nor is it anything else, some horrible in-between. Ok so I'm not too soft on it anymore.

Country I guess also, alternative and er traditional, I've stuck to the canon pretty much with the old stuff, buying Hank Williams, Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash, and this makes it hard to tell if I'm giving some cds a bigger chance than others. The only old country stuff I have that isn't canonical is Jimmie Rodgers albums. But I can't remember hating any alt country either, I mean even some albums which my instinct tells me aren't good, I still played to death. Like Whiskeytowns Pneumonia.

Around 1984/5 I listened to quite a lot of industrial or 'difficult' music on labels like Third Mind and from artists like Lustmord, Konstructivits, Colin Potter, David Jackman etc. I can't honestly say that I could say whether any of this stuff was good or bad. It's just a case of 'this noise' or 'that noise'. I might prefer the sound of D. Jackman stroking a violin bow across a cymbal for 12 minutes to an ensemble of road drills, but I can't really apply any meaningful form of music critisism to it.

I reckon if it has melody or rhythm or both I can decide *in a way that makes sense to me* if it's good or bad.

Actually I found it odd with country first, because I had sort of hang ups about listening to it at all. I mean how many 18 year olds blah blah blah, (that's probably why I bought some ; )

But I wasn't sure say at 16 or 17 if me not liking a song was just because I used to hate ALL country, or because I didn't like the song.

You can't get more canonical than Jimmie Rodgers, Ronan...

Really?

Shit now I'm embarassed.

I'd say whenever it is good it has something new to it. There is an element of innovation or freshness. Good example britpop. Oasis have always been bad in my book as they did not do anything new. It was all stolen from the past and not even put together in an interesting way. Blur on the other hand made good britpop (Parklife excluded). Their music sounded fresh and had a drive. An important thing here is also the voice. I prefer Damon's to Liam's as it sounds much more original and individualistic. This is totally subjective of course.

I have a tendency to approach newly discovered styles of music without much discretion. When I started to catch on to the whole glitch thing, I thought.... hey, this is... new! And so I began to hunt down every click and cut I could get my ears on. What ends up happening is my initial excitement levels off and begins to become self-parody. I'd go up to my friends and sorta jokingly say "Man, this glitch, it's just the best," or "You know, Weezer would be better if they incorporated some glitch!" or something. At this point, the novelty-aspect ends and I can begin tackling the genre with a more sober mindset.

It's kind of like thinking a language is sexy. You might think speaking French sounds sexy, but when you move to France, it becomes commonplace and mundane. You develop an ear for the sound and catch onto its subtleties so that you can distinguish the bland from the true sexiness.

Wow, Tom is taking this to strange new places (that's great, btw).

What was important for me in originally bringing this up was less that the discourses (I wish I had an appropriate synonym, sorry) don't (or barely) exist in that subculture; rather that there doesn't even seem to be a desire for them to exist. Any in depth conversation about a topic is filled with implicit criticisms, but that is something that's been largely pushed out of the Jam band milieu. It's kind of fascinating in a way, or would be if it wasn't so irritating.

There are lots of other genres which are just as insular as the Jam phreaks, but they all seem to inspire lots of heated debate. Being someone who, to a large extent, likes music because I like talking about it, this appeals to me.

I'd like to answer some of the other questions but am tired and in need of a bed, so I'll come back later.

UK Garage, natch. Except that I think I can tell very well what I consider to be good or bad UK Garage, and I can back it up with a host of reasoning, probably too much reasoning... It's just that an inordinate number of tracks end up under the heading "awesome/mindblowing". And all my writing on the issue is an elaborate justification for this discrepancy.

Actually that Jon Cutler track you talked about on your blog Tim is the type of house I meant above, if perhaps a tiny bit better.

I do want to hear the remix you speak of now though. Have you heard that song by DJ Matt (no it's not one of my mates or something)? The title escapes me, it kind of seems like two step techno to me, if that's not an insane idea.

Improv and free jazz are all good at the moment. I can't say I've honestly found a bad disc yet. Maybe it's because I'm still buying some of the discs cut by major figures in these genres. Though I really like even some of the lesser known discs.

This might help.

Ned sometimes seems to have no ability to sift good spacerock from bad spacerock

There's such a thing as bad spacerock? Huh.

More to the point -- there's a fair amount of the recent stuff I don't listen to as often or are in my mind clearly doing something more intriguing than some of the paint-by-numbers crowd. Some releases are warm comforts, others more challenging experiences. The amount of distortion and audio abuse on LovesLiesCrushing's BlowEyeLashWish, along with how it's used, is much different from the comparatively gentler efforts of Air Formation, the restrained delicacy of Mira much different from Study of the Lifeless' rather direct piling on of the feedback.