'Boring' Music

1. What, to you, makes for 'boring' music? How do you define it?
2. Is boring music necessarily a bad thing?
3. What is the most boring music you like?

one mans boring is another mans slice of audio perfection.

i guess a lot of people would say the easy listening stuff i love is boring ..
but they are rong rong rong.
well that, or young.

i don't think "boring" is ever a thing that bothers me about music or most other art tbh, but then i think boredom usually resides within

Very minimal long ambient droney stuff is boring to me.

It's meat and drink to me

spoon

Spoon might be the most boring band that I like.

if i had any inclination to describe something as boring it wd probably be meat and two veg rock bands with no hooks or swing but even then i wdn't say "boring" so much as "shit"

"boring" tends to imply the listener has missed something, imo. it'll never be a particularly bad criticism because it's so vague and tells you so little.

we talked about this recently, didn't we?

The 40 Most Boring ‘Classic’ Albums by challopsy critics

JAZZ v CLASSICAL

For me, boring music would be something where you spend the whole song waiting for something good to happen (unexpected melody, catchy chorus, clever lyric, something interesting going on rhythmically) and it never does.

I don't really mean ambient/drone/minimal stuff because that's music that puts you in a pleasant or interesting place and leaves you there for a while. I'm fine with music where nothing happens if I can immerse myself in the sound, what's boring is when things do happen but the 'things' are all disappointing.

1. What, to you, makes for 'boring' music? How do you define it?

i suppose i define "boring" as "that which fails to engage interest or provide pleasure, and in so failing, in fact causes suffering". boredom is an unpleasant kind of inertness, the sense that the passage of time has slowed so as to inflict and prolong a dull sort of anguish.

i remember that, when i was a child, certain activities and entertainments seems unendurably, even catastrophically boring: waiting in line, stirring something on the stove, watching black and white dramas, or listening to most classical music. these things weren't just unpleasant in their boringness, they were brutal, all but violent. as an adult, i'm slower and more open-minded, so boredom doesn't oppress me in the same way, but it's still distinctly unpleasant.

no one likes to sit through a boring meeting or class, to wait for seeing eons in a government or doctor's office. if we had something nice to do in these situations, if we could somehow escape the grinding, low-level misery that characterizes our entrapment, we wouldn't be bored. it is the quality of unhappy, frustrated stasis that makes the mere passage of time "boring".

2. Is boring music necessarily a bad thing?

on the one hand, yes, for the reasons described above. boredom is necessarily unpleasant. it exists only in displeasure. but it's possible that music we find in some way boring might provide other rewards, rewards that make the endurance of boredom worthwhile. i rarely find this is true with music, but when it comes to film, i'm often willing to trade a bit of boredom for subtle intellectual or aesthetic pleasures. therefore, i'm at least open to the idea that music might allow similar exchanges.

3. What is the most boring music you like?

well, i don't like boring music, but by other's standards, a lot of the droning, psychedelic noise music i like would probably seem quite boring.

What is the most boring music you like?

http://www.roir-usa.com/store/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/morton-feldman-for-philip-guston.jpg

... not that it is boring just it lasts for an unconscionably long time

oh it's v conscionable

i've got some stuff that's near silent or micro-soundy that might be boring to people who don't have a rich inner life, i dunno

i mean i agree with contendo that boredom can be this physical, panicky pain, especially when you're a child, but i think all us over-stimulated mfs shd do our best to unlearn that sensation like an unwanted phobia

I wonder if 'boring' can really function as an aesthetic device in music the way it can in other arts - is there a musical equivalent to what's being done with boredom in e.g. Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni?

music without rhythm is boring

http://www.kayrock.org/posters/large/each_one_teach_one_insert.gif

^ the first half might be the most aggressively boring music i love. wonderful combination of grating noise and obsessive repetition. like boring a hole.

eeps, sry, huge

Put it this way: Some people think "Krautrock" is boring (I am meaning the track on Faust IV), but I always thought it great...

What kind of fool thinks that's boring?

... or invisible, can't see it here (xp)

The music I can say is objectively boring is music that refuses to do anything new in any category.

New or distinctive to the artist.

pink floyd

I like em, but man, that drummer is so boring

He's the star of "Live at Pompeii", at least what the director obviously thought.

The music I can say is objectively subjectively boring

typo

I wonder if 'boring' can really function as an aesthetic device in music the way it can in other arts - is there a musical equivalent to what's being done with boredom in e.g. Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni?

Satie and Cage were both interested in boredom. There's the famous quote from Cage: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

STOP! STOP! IT'S INTERESTING!!!

If only we could be boring.

lol xp

I did go and see a recital of a Morton Feldman piano piece and (several hours later) was complimented by one of the people on the door for having sat through the whole thing.

Just remembered another Feldman anecdote, watching one of his later pieces I noticed one of the violinists in the orchestra saying to another violinist, "I've never been so bored in my life".

During the performance? Ha.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-fU3rj-h41lU/T7KH_gx85aI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/Mme-QqSF65s/essential-zen-boring.jpg

Just remembered another Feldman anecdote, watching one of his later pieces I noticed one of the violinists in the orchestra saying to another violinist, "I've never been so bored in my life".

hah! I saw a large ensemble feldman performance and spotting some performers that were bored out of their minds was definitely pretty fun.

i don't think "boring" is ever a thing that bothers me about music or most other art tbh, but then i think boredom usually resides within

― we're up all night to get picky (Noodle Vague),

otm

I tend to find music boring if the 'point' of it is not present in the music itself.

e.g., have listened to most of Julian Cope, found the music itself boring, was told that he was interesting and that the ideas in the lyrics were interesting, but I couldn't get very much out of the actual sounds coming out of the speaker.

That moment - the sound coming out of the speaker and into my head - is the moment where music turns out to be exciting or boring (for me: this is v.v. subjective and I wouldn't claim otherwise). Any interesting things that happen outside of that moment don't suffice to make the music itself interesting.

The music I can say is objectively subjectively boring

typo

― we're up all night to get picky (Noodle Vague), Friday, April 26, 2013 10:45 AM (1 hour ago)

As objective as possible perhaps? I mean, I guess top 40 radio does say otherwise. I just feel like those with distinctive sounds start trends, those that don't follow them and end up killing them off. Boring because it's the same shit. Whether something is boring because it's really slow, or because it is folky, or because it's electronica- those are more subjective scenarios than what I'm saying comparatively.

I wonder if 'boring' can really function as an aesthetic device in music the way it can in other arts - is there a musical equivalent to what's being done with boredom in e.g. Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni?

Satie and Cage were both interested in boredom. There's the famous quote from Cage: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

yeah, I think Satie could have a theoretical closeness thanks to the intimate connection to Dada, but as the Satieisms and Dadaisms are transformed by Cage (and in turn with Feldman etc) the point seems more that the boredom is an inadequate reaction that we the listener should be breaking through. With the examples of Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni (and maybe I'm misreading them, let's have The Pale King as another example) I feel more that an important part of the aesthetic is that these long passages of either interminable detail or not much of anything are supposed to be boring, with no way out via that classic Cagean hyper-intensification of attention.

I don't know anything about Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni tbh. Why did they see boredom as a desirable aesthetic?

mm I dunno really. I guess for them, in my maybe dubious reading of them, that kind of stultifying stasis is something pretty fundamental to and constitutive of experience in general. But Cage and to some extent the post-Cageans would be much more optimistic with regards to those conditions for experience.

I think in many ways I'm in tune with Cage on this kind of question - maybe it's just because music is the thing I like best, but I feel that sound is so difficult to pin down that even the most rote generic genre exercises can have the germ of something really sonically exciting in them, and to me that kind of almost necessary impossibility of structural boundaries is a bit more muddled in other genres.

sry for 'theory'-leaning talk it's how I think, I'm stuck.

Calling Dorian.

I sometimes think of The Album Leaf as "boring" but, equally, love them dearly.

Dorian made a boring album now?

Yeah it's tedious as hell. Dropping soon.