What is worst? Annoying or boring?

Thought about making this a poll, but decided not to, as this is more about discussion than about voting and "making a decision" really.

The title sums it up really. What is worst? What do you hate the most? Really irritating and annoying and cringeworthy songs that make you want to just run and cut the entire record into pieces because you hate how it sounds, or completely unengaging and boring muzak that you hardly notice at all, going into one ear and straight out of the other one? Or in other words, "The Ketchup Song", "Agadoo" and The Crazy Frog vs. Kenny G, Michael Buble and James Blunt.

And I think you know what I consider the worst :)

what if both options are present and accounted for

If you consider boring annoying, then you choose to be annoyed by it, which I guess means you hate the latter even more than the former.

james blunt is fucking annoying

he doesn't even bore me. he FUCKING ANNOYS THE SHIT OUT OF ME

I'm gen y. I can't stand to be bored.

Ah Geir, it was all going well until you gave examples. "Ketchup Song" is amazing, Crazy Frog is boring, and Kenny G is annoying as hell.

the ketchup song is terrible!!

i love boring music! sometimes it's just like "jeeze, can you stop trying to blow my mind and just hang loose for a bit?"

annoying music bores me, boring music annoys me

Of course annoying is worse than boring. With boring music you can always choose not to pay attention -I guess the question only makes sense if we exclude everything that fits into boring AND annoying.

in a general sense boring music definitely annoys me more

yes but then that makes it annoying!

annoying music is pretty heavily dependant on context, boring music just slides past my ears no matter what situation really. to me annoying music is my sister listening to souljaboy while i'm trying to write essays, or how deceptacon used to come up on the playlist every fifteen minutes at my old job.

annoying music can actually make me THINK sometimes. it engages me. it's in my face and its ugly and i have to try and figure out what it is that bugs me so much about it. so, it has some value. with stuff that's just boring though, i dunno, somehow its worse. its just there. it lies there like a rug. and, yeah, i guess this can annoy me sometimes. cuz i want to kill it with a stick. but it usually doesn't require any further thought. so, music that is just bland and hardly alive is more of a threat to me than wrongheaded cacophony that makes me grit my teeth.

again, the question would only make sense if you could come up with something that bores you but does not annoy you and vice-versa.

then again i listen to pop tatari once a month and it doesn't get much more annoying than that... this is a hard question, i guess i love both in a way, although annoying music will be ocassionaly actually painful.

xp there are plenty of songs like that

I guess in practice I prefer boring and in theory I prefer annoying music. In a way, I have some respect for the latter cause at least it's able to get on my nerves... so yeah, kind of what Scott said.

i was going to make a post very similar to scott's earlier but this thread is deeply uh well omar little with an underrated first response tbh

Crazy Frog and "The Ketchup Song" are fun. I've never heard "Agadoo," but I wouldn't be surprised if I liked it, whatever it is.*

So given that choice, "annoying" wins (for lots of reasons Scott said, too. Though I probably like some music other people think is boring.)

* - Just looked it up. Apparently it's by Black Lace, who've done other songs I thought were fun on German K-Tel compilations.

i looooooooooooove boring music

With boring music you can always choose not to pay attention

Unless you hate muzak so much that muzak annoys the hell out of you. Then you will get so annoyed that you just aren't able to not pay attention.

again, the question would only make sense if you could come up with something that bores you but does not annoy you and vice-versa.

In my case: Kenny G, James Blunt, muzak in general. Very easy to ignore, very easy not to pay attention. But it gives me nothing at all.

And, on the other hand, "Gypsy Woman" and "One Thing" are loved by a lot of people, not least here, for being "creative" and all that. But they annoy me so much that I'd rather listen to "You're Beautiful" and "Songbird" 10 times in a row rather than one listen to "One Thing".

And of course this is subjective. I mean, I love Coldplay and I love "Wake Up!" by Boo Radleys. The former are terribly boring to a lot of people, while "Wake Up!" sounds extremely irritating to some people (even the same people). (And, well, OK, if would sound extremely irritating to me too if I was forced to be awoken by it in the morning ;) )

annoying music. I can ignore boring music, but annoying music makes me want to smash things. like that 'I can ride a bike with no handlebars' song, or 'Simply having a wonderful christmas time'. Earworms of the Chekhov variety = painful, unpleasant, and cause me to make everyone around me miserable with my caterwauling about how annoyed I am.

scott, you don't wonder exactly why certain music bores you?

vegemite grl otm

annoying is way, way worse. to be bored is not to care. to be annoyed is to be forced (horribly, unwillingly) to care A LOT.

i can easily ignore music that bores me just by concentrating on something else. but relentless mosquito-buzz of the actively annoying can only be destroyed or escaped, never ignored.

annoying is way worse. i hate those love-it-or-loathe-it songs, the ones that everyone says are more "interesting" purely cuz they're divisive and cuz they rouse me to actual anger. would much rather have 5/10 boringness which i don't have to think about and which doesn't impinge on me ever.

as always with geir one suspects some sort of 'point' is being made with this q.

if boring = fundamentally musically uncreative then it has to be annoying. i can admire things which i find annoying. last night rimsky-korsakov's 'scheherezade' came on the radio and i realised i find it annoying though i know it's a good well-crafted piece of music.if i think something is creative i can to a certin extent see past the annoyances; poor music is boring.

if you're writing about music, boring is infinitely worse than annoying. strong reactions tend to produce stronger, more instinctive writing. utter indifference is not a powerful motivating force.

if boring = fundamentally musically uncreative then it has to be annoying. i can admire things which i find annoying.

― Henry Frog (Frogman Henry), Wednesday, December 2, 2009 1:06 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

[think u meant "...then it has to be boring."]

anyway, i don't accept that boring = uncreative. creativity is very hard to nail down, for one thing. i'm often be bored by what others call musical creativity, as a product of my tastes and the way the purported creativity is applied.

and the fact that i find something annoying isn't necessarily a measure of its complexity or originality. i can be annoyed to the point of insanity by the most simplistic and derivative crap. really depends more on the situation than anything else.

[think u meant "...then it has to be boring."]

er no, sorry, let me unpack: i was saying if boring = musically uncreative then my choice would be for annoying music.

and for me if something is boring then it is de facto a poorly constructed piece of music, i cant see how it would be otherwise. of course this isnt to say that i will be riveted by a good piece of music first time, much good music is a hostage to my attention span/level of business at the time im listening to it, but if after many hearings its still fundamentally boring then i think it cant be that well made.
of course annoying doers not automatically equal well made, but you've got an actual chance there.
boring music aint good.

*business = busyness

but if after many hearings its still fundamentally boring then i think it cant be that well made.

but whether you're bored or annoyed by something reveals nothing about the quality or otherwise of its construction, it's more to do with your own reactions, cues and prejudices.

there's no such thing as inherently boring/annoying music, just bored/annoyed responses.

i'm honestly not sure what "good" or "poorly constructed" might mean relative to art-type things like music. do you mean that if something is consistently boring then you won't like it? cuz doesn't that apply to irritating, too? as long as it remains irritating, you won't like it?

i ask cuz both these things work that way for me. something may bore me at first, but then one day i'll hear depths i didn't before. or something will annoy me for a while, but then the annoyance will suddenly vanish, replaced by affection.

or, rather, m the g otm.

haha if this is just going to devolve into another debate on subjectivity vs objectivity what's the point? do these things really have to be stated again? oh, they do:
- boring and annoying is in the eye of the beholder
- so are value judgements about music like "good" and "well-written" though, you know, i hear there are some academic disciplines devoted to examining artistic composition and these rest on a number of criteria by which one makes quasi-objective judgements?
- if i think something is boring or unimaginative,guess what, that doesn't make it those things, and i must congratulate you for spotting that. nothing is inherently anything, it's only an opinion or multiple opinions that give it that status in the mind of someone living.
i'm thinking the phemonology of aesthetic experience is a bit much to go into on this thread but, y'know, knock yourself out.

*phenomenology, natch. could never spell that.

Boring annoys me more than Annoying. Annoying has spark and purpose, whereas I object to the limited aspirations of Boring on a more profound level... ahem.

I would say there may be different ways of annoying. I mean, I wouldn't say that "The Ketchup Song" or "Axel F" (the Crazy Frog version) are particularly musically creative works, but a lot of black metal is. And still black metal annoys the hell out of me too, just because of the way it sounds and certain elements that it is supposed to contain stylistically. But I have a lot more respect for black metal musicains than I will ever have for Las Ketchup or The Crazy Frog. Exactly because black metal musicans are indeed more musically creative. And I guess that goes for Amerie too even though I loathe "One Thing". Obviously "One Thing" deserves more props for being musically interesting than "The Ketchup Song" or even "Macarena" will ever be. But I still hate it nevertheless.

dude i was being sincere, and not making some Big Observation About Subjectivity.

your post doesn't make much sense if i substitute out the statements about quality of construction for statements of simple taste: "if something is boring then it is de facto a poorly constructed piece of music piece of music i won't like."

that's a tautology. of course you won't like it if it bores you. or annoys you. so i wondered what you were getting at.

i mean, you wind up with "boring music ain't good," and i understand that. but how is that not equally true of annoying music? like i said before, you can go on being bored or annoyed by a piece of music for quite a while before one day having a big revelation and finally getting something more out of it. or so it seems to me.

Said piece of music I will always be annoyed by not bored. In the case of boring music I have already got as much out of as it is possible to get.

that last one to frogman henery.

and i don't get geir's point about "black metal musicians" either. lots of black metal dudes are hacks running rote repetitions of other people's musical/aesthetic moves. same goes for supposedly trashy pop like crazy frog and the macarena. and there are brilliant, creative people in both genres too - especially given how subjective (there, i said it) assessments of brilliance and creativity often are.

Said piece of music I will always be annoyed by not bored. In the case of boring music I have already got as much out of as it is possible to get.

― Tied Up In Geir (Geir Hongro), Wednesday, December 2, 2009 3:11 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

really geir? you've never had the experience of thinking a piece or musician or genre is boring for ages - and then one day, out of the blue, you suddenly "get it"?

happens to me all the time, and it's a wonderful feeling.

I can tune out boring (Kenny G background music in the shopping mall), but I can't do that with annoying (KrrrraaZzZzZzZzZzYyYyYyYy Frog nimnimnimnimnimnimnimnimnim). Annoying somehow hooks me in and I'll find myself involuntarily walking in time to the beat.

Annoying can be memorable. Boring usually isn't.

in the case of annoying, memorableness is perhaps not a virtue.

Actually, all this talk about black metal reminds me that I tend to prefer boring metal to annoying metal -- Go figure. (That is, I prefer metal that sounds innocuous in the background to metal that just sounds ugly. Which I guess means I prefer black metal to death metal. Usually.)

xp to be fair, true randomness can't really be achieved by human beings, but I'm endlessly fascinated by their attempts to get close to/approximate it - whether that be free jazz, noise or hyper technical math-prog-whatever. there are patterns in there, but they're at their most thrilling when they're unrecognisable. once you acclimatise to them, they're less interesting. for me, anyway.

point being that one's bored/annoyed response to complex/simple music is, once again, a very personal thing, and not something that's subject to universal rules.

that's why i think that "boring" is a red herring and the word we're really looking for is "bland"

lot of interesting points. free jazz is curious to me simply because i DO like a lot of it - at least the "spiritual" free jazz of the 60s and early 70s. i think i'm able to accept that music because it's usually tied to an emotional expression and an underlying (sometimes buried) ear for melody and swing.

the free jazz that came along later, the genre that continues today, i often don't like because it isn't tied to that deep feel for musical cohesion and emotional expression. it isn't an exploration or a reaction tied to a more conventionally organized tradition, but simply freedom (in real-speak: abrasive chaos, faux randomness) as an end in itself. and again, that bores me.

the idea of unpredictability vs reassurance is likewise interesting. even the most minimal music tends to change a little, every now and then. or at least to wait a while before fully developing. i think we require the idea that we don't know EXACTLY what's coming next in order to engage with music, at least the first time we hear it. a solid and unvarying 2/2 beat on a floor tom with no other voices or variation wouldn't do much for anyone - not for long anyway. but there's a physical solace offered by repetition within a framework. it becomes a sort of space you inhabit inside the music, so that you're not just observing it from a distance - you can actually become a part of it. thus trance music of various sorts, minimal electronic stuff, glass & reich, drone, etc. its fascination is hypnotic, mesmeric, and almost purely sensual.

the intellectual attention required to actively engage with music that ceaselessly fluctuates is necessarily distancing - especially if the music doesn't offer much by way of consistent melody, harmony & rhythm. you have to hold the music in your consciousness and pay attention to it as a discreet object in order to "get it". and that can be loads of fun. but it's also exhausting, and only remains fun for me if i get a sense of larger/deeper unity and musical purpose - if the squiggles and veering add up to something meaningful, however i define that. my problem with the likes of patton and early zorn (and like the ruins or whatever) is that they don't give me that. i only hear the athletic mania, and it can be a blast, especially live, but it doesn't make for very satisfying home listening. i get bored. my attention wanders...

i'm often bored by my inability to engage positively with what complex music is doing.

this is true! although sometimes the exact same thing ANNOYS me. i blame myself for not being able to get into music in its more complex forms, though, one of the things i expect i'll grow out of. i'm sure one day i'll burn all my garage punk 7" and flat away into an endless sea of math rock and free jazz.

'i'm sure one day i'll burn all my garage punk 7"'

you mad. those are worth $$$$, right?

if boring == music that does not engage the listener
and annoying == music that engages the listener in an intensely negative way

then annoying roolz for the reasons scott lays out here: it's in my face and its ugly and i have to try and figure out what it is that bugs me so much about it.

this intersts me to a degree:

scott, you don't wonder exactly why certain music bores you?

― hope this helps (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, December 1, 2009 9:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

but i'm usually satisfied by my reasons for finding something boring.

I like your post, contenderizer, but even as a dilettante I have encountered spiritual free jazz in the late 20th century European tradition. Ned Rothenberg is one example.

I'd have to go back to last year when we still had the radio on at work - it'd be Radio 2 more or less every day. Boring songs would bother me just because they played so many of them; I'd get wound up wondering who could possibly get anything out of hearing all these identical singer-songwriters day-in, day-out yet I didn't have a problem with individual tracks. Annoying records, though, would get to me just for how bad they were as songs and as someone who likes songs, this was more bothersome. So I'd say annoying is worse. For what it's worth, I'd put 'You're Beautiful' in the Annoying category, it has too many cringeworthy bits to just be boring.

the free jazz that came along later, the genre that continues today, i often don't like because it isn't tied to that deep feel for musical cohesion and emotional expression. it isn't an exploration or a reaction tied to a more conventionally organized tradition, but simply freedom (in real-speak: abrasive chaos, faux randomness) as an end in itself. and again, that bores me.

people involved in making that music that it seems like you're describing probably wouldn't call it free jazz, though. It sounds like you're describing what is often called EFI (European Free Improv), though maybe you're also talking about EAI as well?

But I think when a lot of jazz critics talk about EFI they say free jazz, don't they?

They might. The thing is - some of it is more jazz-like and some of it isn't. It probably depends on the musicians, and their backgrounds. I could get into the rationale for that "freedom as an end in itself" but that might be too off topic.

Some perceive "free jazz" as being a historical movement. There's been a bit of interest in that and appropriation of instrumentation and ethos - to some extent - from people coming out of rock and metal.

I'd resist only talking about it as an historical movement because of the musicological patterns you could use to describe it, although I understand its position within "Black is beautiful" and black militancy.

I've always thought the barrier to jazz entry for the European tradition of free jazz was its moving away from swing, but that was because, when friends would ask me, "What is jazz, anyway?" I could say that, roughly, it was music with an element of improvisation that swung. That's no good, though, because we'd call a lot of things jazz that had no solos or that had written solos. Though you can consider the looseness of the ensemble playing as a kind of improvisation, that makes less sense today since so much rock music has a looseness to its ensemble playing.

It's almost like, though, talking about Throbbing Gristle as industrial instead of musique concrete or some other postmodern compositional style, because of them seeming to perform in a rock idiom. It's as if intent and methods help define what the music is. There'd still be a lot of cross over, though.

This is debated still, though. It's about philosophies of improvisation and how improvisation butts heads with instrumental technique and knowledge of music theory.

"What is jazz, anyway?" I could say that, roughly, it was music with an element of improvisation that swung.

Yeah - though the degree of swing and improvisation do vary. Euro free Improv pretty much kept a lot of the aesthetics of free jazz and ditched the swing requirement.

It's as if intent and methods help define what the music is. There'd still be a lot of cross over, though.

Most definitely. I mean, I've heard things that sound similar made by 20-something dudes in warehouse spaces that some will call noise and some will call free improv.

It's about philosophies of improvisation and how improvisation butts heads with instrumental technique and knowledge of music theory.

Criteria are always a sticking point as well. How do you determine if it's "good"? Also, something can be improvised and still have a recognizable structure, or combine compositions with improvisation, which I believe is what a lot of the older free jazz musicians did.

A handful of jazz critics have a good debate about this in the free jazz chapter in The Future of Jazz.

A handful of improvised musicians have constant debates about this on another board I'm on.

I wonder what that is.

the board? it's a regional board.

sssssssssssssssssssssssaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrccccccccccccccc

asm

it's not the one you asked me about the other day.

Of course there are subjective qualities, but I still think there is a distinction about two main ways of explaining or wording your dislike of something particular.

Boring:
This is just like a meaningless bunch of hot air. It gives me nothing, it doesn't make me think. It might as well not have been on at all. It's just soothing background music for brainless people, and there's nothing interesting about it

Annoying:
Heck! I HATE that shit! I just cannot stand listening to that crap! WILL YOU TURN OFF THAT SHIT RIGHT NOW BEFORE I GO COMPLETELY MAD???!!!!!

Surely there may be greyzones, but the former is considerably easier to ignore than the latter. On the other hand, the latter is kind of more interesting and it engages more though and emotions.

thought and emotions even.

uh, there is plenty of music I find annoying because of its boringness.

Annoying music seems more like something thrust upon you against your will rather than referring to any intrinsic complexity of the music (e.g. gitmo torture songs)

Annoying music may be anything from cheesy and "up" stuff to more or less experimental (or very genre-specific) stuff that you just don't get or see the value in.

Annoying music may be anything one finds annoying, right?

Being able to be bored by music means being able to disengage. Concentrating on music that's boring turns your experience into something else. The music I hate the most is music I feel much too familiar with but still can't help but listen to, so I feel trapped&oppressed by it. It's more than annoying.

re: a bunch of previous points - yes, i'm mostly bagging on a proud tradition of european free music that is jazzlike but that totally fails to engage me. don't claim to be expert, however, and i'm certain that there's tons of wonderful stuff i've yet to hear. confess that it's very hard for me to understand/appreciate such music absent some element of swing and (courting controversy here) a position in an ongoing exploration of black identity in america.

annoying roolz for the reasons scott lays out here: it's in my face and its ugly and i have to try and figure out what it is that bugs me so much about it.

― bamcquern, Wednesday, December 2, 2009 3:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, but look: hypothetically:

scenario 1) yr in a doctors waiting room, sitting in a moderately comfortable chair. no other patients. there is a dead ficus and several issues of people from 2006 with dried applesauce or something on them. you are bored.

scenario 2) exactly the same as scenario one, except with a lady whose crying (but uninjured) baby will not stop crying. you are annoyed.

which is worse?

come on, the second HAS to be worse! i argue that it is much, much worse to be annoyed than to be bored. boredom is that which is enurable, more or less, and irritation that which is not. if we CAN acclimate ourselves to the irritation, it becomes boring, and therefore less bad. i think the same logic must apply to the art we do not like.

m. bison said that, by the way. :-)

yes, i'm mostly bagging on a proud tradition of european free music that is jazzlike but that totally fails to engage me. don't claim to be expert, however, and i'm certain that there's tons of wonderful stuff i've yet to hear. confess that it's very hard for me to understand/appreciate such music absent some element of swing and (courting controversy here) a position in an ongoing exploration of black identity in america.

wait, are you saying that the "ongoing exploration of black identity in America" is one of the things that you value/like about jazz? Or are you questioning how euro free improv relates to the exploration of black identity in America? Because, I don't think any of the people making that music see what they do as exploring that. When that genre name was introduced, it was intentional that "jazz" wasn't part of the name. There's definitely a jazz influence on it, but they see it as distinct from what is traditionally understood as jazz.

i'm saying that the interest in combining saxophone skree and convulsive drumming doesn't interest me outside a specific context. or rather that it doesn't make musical/emotional sense to me outside that context.

see, that's something that I like for its aesthetic - outside the jazz lineage. Granted, I've heard a lot of it in the past few years, so now I'm pickier about what I like. I also like wailing shredding guitar and convulsive drumming. So music like that that doesn't swing makes perfect sense, because it is in a sense substituting the saxophone for the guitar, and works for me as rock music, for lack of a better large genre category.

I think contenderizer is right in that most European free jazz doesn't swing and doesn't have a spiritual quality to it. Earlier I only wanted to point out to him that some of it does and is worth seeking out, and that new methods and modes of improvisation don't exclude those things.

But Sarah, just because people call music they make or write about by an acronym doesn't exclude others who sound very much like them from saying that they work in what they consider a jazz idiom. Or from those listening to relate that music to jazz.

And also, Sarah, harsh rhythm guitars can swing perfectly well. Lots of rock music swings. You might have to relax your definition to think so, but it wouldn't be the first time (Richard Meltzer, for instance) someone did so.

I also wonder, is EFI distinct from jazz only because it doesn't swing? Or are you thinking more about people you've seen play in the Bay Area? Is it that in the improv music you're talking about, intuition plays a larger role, and in jazz there's more rigorous music theory and instrument training? How do methodologies differ? We established that new improv music borrows frameworks from rock, but do they borrow from other musics besides rock and jazz, such as modern composition?

But Sarah, just because people call music they make or write about by an acronym doesn't exclude others who sound very much like them from saying that they work in what they consider a jazz idiom. Or from those listening to relate that music to jazz.

Definitely. That's what I was getting at earlier with the noise vs. free improv statement. Things that sound similar could be coming from different places, or the people making that music consider themselves working in different genres/idioms. And it definitely relates to jazz. A lot of it came out of free jazz. It is totally understandable to examine it in terms of jazz, though there've been plenty of critics that say essentially, "this is bad because it doesn't swing" when the musicians had no intention of making music that swings. And thus, have grown wary of the association of what they do with jazz.

And also, Sarah, harsh rhythm guitars can swing perfectly well. Lots of rock music swings. You might have to relax your definition to think so, but it wouldn't be the first time (Richard Meltzer, for instance) someone did so.

I agree. I'm just saying that what contenderizer called "saxophone skree + convulsive drumming" doesn't de facto have to be viewed through the lens of jazz. It could be viewed as coming from rock music, which is where a lot of the people I know who play music that sounds like that come from.

I also wonder, is EFI distinct from jazz only because it doesn't swing?

There are several key things that people would point out as differences. Swing is one of them. Melodic lines are another. The use of standards as launching points is another. Though some Euro improv I can listen to and describe as jazz, or jazz-based, or jazz-influenced. The instrumentation is often the same. Basically, there's definitely a range of things that fall under the category of EFI - and some sound a lot like jazz, some sound a bit like jazz, and some sound very little like jazz. The stuff that sounds very little like jazz, I tend not to refer to as jazz.

Or are you thinking more about people you've seen play in the Bay Area? Is it that in the improv music you're talking about, intuition plays a larger role, and in jazz there's more rigorous music theory and instrument training? How do methodologies differ?

Ha Ha - rigorous instrument training is something that can be a contentious subject. Basically the people I know playing improvised music come from a variety of different backgrounds. There are people that play improvised music that are also professional traditional jazz musicians, and can play standards, swing, etc. There are people that come to improv from a classical background with conservatory training. There are people that came to it from rock and metal and have those "chops." There are also people that don't have any training in music theory or instrument training, though usually those people are electronics people, not sax players or drummers or another traditional jazz instrument. My personal bias is that knowing music theory and knowing how to play one's instrument make one a better musician overall, just like practicing. I knew a guy who once told me that he avoided practicing drums because he thought it made him a worse drummer. Let's just say, my drum teacher didn't have a high opinion of this guy's musicianship.

Definitely in traditional jazz there are certain skills (the Jordan who is not banned can speak to this better than I can) that are expected from musicians. With improv this isn't the case so much. Improv is really into "extended techniques" - playing one's instrument in an unconventional way. Having some repertoire of these extended techniques might be the one expectation of working in improv that doesn't exist in the jazz scene.

We established that new improv music borrows frameworks from rock, but do they borrow from other musics besides rock and jazz, such as modern composition?

Modern Composition = definitely.

just want to share this mega annoying song from my country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUxIltlbSUI

Sounds like an Albanian or Slovenian Eurovision entry. :)

When is the last time anyone had to listen to Kenny G? He doesn't even get play on adult conmtempo stations anymore.

xposts - Playing instruments in new ways part of jazz instrument technique, though.

true.

thing is, 90% of all music is just boring and inspires no real kind of emotional response at all.

and then i'd say about 5% of it inspires a really positive instant "OMG i love this" and about 5% of it triggers the ARGH ARGH GET THIS THE FUCK OFF MY STEREO hulk smashing response <--- that kind of passion, in either direction inspires further thought and probing to find out why certain things trigger passion

hatred, as unpleasant as it is, is still a far more interesting emotion than boredrom

weird, i never really see the term 'EFI' - looks a bit too close to ECM which is a whole other thing - is it, like, american arts council funding speak?

"non-idiomatic" is just so much punchier

also this thread's question is impossible to try and develop without bringing in constructed versions of other ppl's taste to justify yr own i fear ~

i don't read this thread as being about "other people's taste" at all. it seems to be almost entirely focused on one's own taste. why on earth would you compare?

thing is, 90% of all music is just boring and inspires no real kind of emotional response at all

http://www.icongrouponline.com/health/jacket/0497000709.jpg

not true at all!

there's a hell of a lot of music out there.

my 5 or 10% covers quite a large piece of ground

xp thomp - I heard "non-idiomatic" before I heard the term "EFI" - I'm not entirely sure what the chronology is of those, and who uses which one to describe what they do. I hear "EFI" the most from people in the, heh, EAI camp as a means of differentiating their music from that of the improvisers that still play drum sets, saxophones, and upright basses in more or less the conventional manner and more or less play notes on these instruments.

"5% of it triggers the ARGH ARGH GET THIS THE FUCK OFF MY STEREO hulk smashing response <--- that kind of passion, in either direction inspires further thought and probing to find out why certain things trigger passion"

I've yet to see rigorous scholarly analysis inspired by the meow mix theme song, except in the context of weaponization.

i like the meow mix song - it's uplifiting.

can someone hum it to me i have never heard it

this whole 'european' thing is blowing my mind - are there americans who say 'yeah we play european free improv'? that would be great, if there were

I think Americans tend to say they play "free improv" -

It goes: meow meow meow meow
meow meow meow meow
meow meow meow meow
meow meow meow meow