Is it possible to have broad/deep taste in music without being curatorial?

I added the word 'deep' in the title to imply having tastes that go backwards in time as well as to many different genres and sensibilities in the present.

I'm using the word 'curatorial' to imply 'not really liking something fully', 'not being truly engaged', etc. What k-punk said about Sonic Youth. Neither of which need to be bad, of course, and by all means defend curatorship, or the idea of it, or a version of it, or whatever.

yes

are you asking because you don't know anyone who likes lots of music fully? (and what makes you so sure?)

there is no such thing as 'deep' music taste

My suspicion is that with access to vast electronic archives of music - whether on your own hard drives or on streaming services - we might be coming to a point where everyone is a curator and there might be less and less of a gap between 'properly liking music like you do/did as a teenager, experiencing it in the now' and 'collecting and maintaining lots of different music'.

'Idea of going out and spending your allowance or wages from first job or nicking just one or two records and playing them obsessively may now = a nostalgic fantasy' is another thing that's floating around in my head and prompting this thread.

@sleepingbag everything you like is necessarily 'in the present' and never actually 'going back in time' - you mean?

why do you think teenagers set the standard? teenagers are immature, not done growing.

Sure. In fact I think you often 'engage' a kind of music most fully when it's hitting you fresh after a period of listening to something totally different. So it makes sense to own lots of different kinds of music.

xp Sure, I'm not partisan on either side

yes

what a silly question!

this is what you call a zero sum fallacy

whether on your own hard drives or on streaming services - we might be coming to a point where everyone is a curator and there might be less and less of a gap between 'properly liking music like you do/did as a teenager, experiencing it in the now' and 'collecting and maintaining lots of different music'.

most normal people who listen to music on the internet just throw on a Pandora station or w/e. Just because you post on a message board full of people who have like legitimate arguments about who "the Big 4 of Sludge" are doesn't mean that the rest of the universe are digital media hoarders

Is it possible to have broad/deep taste in music without being curatorial a tool?

no

how many hoes can I fit in my cabana without being curatorial?

you're a curatorial

it's very important that other people like the same shit i do tbh

I don't even know what you mean by "curatorial" and how it differs from "enjoyment" or whatever?

i have never heard the word "curatorial" used the way you are using it

looking forward to all tomorrow's mookies

i read it as "inclined to draw lists and value judgements even tho you don't understand what you're talking about"

i have never heard the word "curatorial" used the way you are using it

― not some dude poking a Line 6 pedal with his dick (sarahell), Thursday, August 15, 2013 10:17 PM

i think it has something to do with link blogging

LOOK AT MY TUMBLR

OF LINKS

i miss you

i definitely know some curators who don't know what the fuck they are talking about

i think that's where the adjective comes form

i wd reword the thread question as "In general are 'fans' tragic wankers?" and then i wd sat "yes" and then there would be a 10000 post thread about this on ILM but i can see why you'd want to downplay the angriness

yes, but the term implies someone whose job it is to select, arrange, and present cultural objects/works - unless the question is, "is it possible to have broad deep taste in music without being a professional" - then I don't understand the question

is it possible to have a broad/deep taste in ilx threads without being curatorial? i think so.

i feel like there is something interesting to discuss here, but i don't know what the thread is about really

how do you cure a tori amos fan?

"taste" is the enemy of art

how?

art is the physical manifestation of taste

What does curatorial mean as a pejorative? Like, people who self-identify as curators in music blog cultures are douches? I almost understand this question and think it's interesting but. Please halp.

'we might be coming to the point where everyone is a curator'

I don't know the answer to this question but I am def a curatorial dude wrt the way I approach and consume music in the year 2013

I immediately assumed this thread was about ten years old.

Yes, it is possible. I find that for me I can usually only really respond passionately to a limited number of musical genres or styles or whatever, but those can be broadly scattered in time and place (as well as aesthetically).

'Idea of going out and spending your allowance or wages from first job or nicking just one or two records and playing them obsessively may now = a nostalgic fantasy' is another thing that's floating around in my head and prompting this thread.

Replaced by being a broke marginally middle class adult obsessively streaming specific songs or albums that comes as a package every month for less than $6.00/month, or from youtube, or from a free legal/illegal download. I do like physical media, but I can't afford it anyway.

I'm reading "curatorial" as partly about lacking strong emotional involvement with what you are listening to. Like, thinking of music more in terms of taxonomy and rankings.

(I'm not going to read a k-punk blog post to find out if I'm wrong.)

The Day Lady Died
By Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Yeah, I get what is being asked here. I've been worried that I haven't been bonding with the records I accumulate since I've been able to accumulate so many at once. Not due as much to digital resources but more because I've worked at a record store and my collection grew quicker than I had time to consume as I used to, back when I'd obsess over 30 second samples of albums I wanted to buy then I'd save up buy it and drill it into my brain for the next couple of weeks.

"taste" is the enemy of art

― http://valawyersweekly.com/files/2009/12/important-ops-logo.jpg (Noodle Vague), Friday, August 16, 2013 3:35 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how?

― not some dude poking a Line 6 pedal with his dick (sarahell), Friday, August 16, 2013 3:41 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lot of wazzocks spend so much time worrying about being tasteful they eliminate all sorts of possibilities from their process or their engagement

I remember back in my more 'scenester' days where I'd actually see some highly lauded album sitting in the used CD bin, and then another album that wasn't as highly regarded, but one that I was more in the mood to hear 'right now', and I felt obligated to buy the former because I felt like I was committing a sin of poor taste or something.

fuck that shit nowadays, if I see a Soul Hat cd and I wanna buy it so I can listen to "Bonecrusher" again, fuck it, I'm doing it.

this is what you call a zero sum fallacy

Oh, totally. Should probably have worded title 'In what ways is it possible' etc.

I don't even know what you mean by "curatorial" and how it differs from "enjoyment" or whatever?

I'm not even sure that there is a difference, but, like, the idea that there might be is one I seem to bump into quite a lot

"how many hoes can I fit in my cabana without being curatorial?"

and when i'm nasty like ms. jackson am i being janitorial?

sorry, i just had to do that for some reason.

Yes. I think I love a wide range of stuff, but my overall scope/taste/knowledge is limited.

idk how "curatorial" could ever be used in the negative sense. in other art fields it's taken for granted that it's a manifestation of love of that art form. no one ever accuses art galleries or festival organisers of being "too curatorial".

I dunno, some kind of specific energy that pop music has? Which, say, things in the British Museum don't have, so curatorship not a problem there, but is with pop music?

I think I have a pretty broad range of "deep" musical taste by the thread's premise, and at the same time the Spotify era has kind of added a wider "curatorial" layer on top of that for me, i.e. there's a lot wider variety of music for me today that I'm willing to just give a few spins in the background while doing work without caring if I ever really get into it. This is largely just the result of economics -- I couldn't afford to be as much of a true dilletante when I had to buy CDs.

"reach out", "at this time", "curatorial", and self-loathing

idk how "curatorial" could ever be used in the negative sense. in other art fields it's taken for granted that it's a manifestation of love of that art form. no one ever accuses art galleries or festival organisers of being "too curatorial".

― lex pretend, Friday, August 16, 2013 4:32 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. "curation" in its root is about "taking care of something"! in it there is an aspect of appreciation, acceptance, acknowledgement of the object in question, often on the object's own terms

I have always found that an annihilative forest fire fertilises the soil and clears out the deadwood. But on the other hand I am glad that people with a curatorial inclination have pointed me towards lots of amazing 20th century jazz albums over the years. But just the idea of piles of endless, dusty fucking records makes makes me want to prime the stihl saw.

idk how "curatorial" could ever be used in the negative sense. in other art fields it's taken for granted that it's a manifestation of love of that art form. no one ever accuses art galleries or festival organisers of being "too curatorial".
― lex pretend, Friday, August 16, 2013 4:32 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. "curation" in its root is about "taking care of something"! in it there is an aspect of appreciation, acceptance, acknowledgement of the object in question, often on the object's own terms

Really oftm. There are entire courses of study in "Museum Cultures" that interrogate this very proposition. How art is presented, and more importantly what art is chosen to be displayed in institutions large and small is an extremely contentious area. Curatorial decisions lead to a lot of inside baseball chatter about private donors, corporate sponsors and the ego of the chief curator themselves, among other factors. Taking for granted that curators and institutions are doing it for the "love of the art form" is extremely naive.

^
MFB otm

wait you mean a market is a market. feeling so naive rn

things are political, u crazy.

i don't know what this thread is about either, but going off what i understand 'curatorial' to mean, the point is to present something substantive in a way that connects. i mean like everything else people are mostly terrible so the word becomes mostly terrible.

Clicked on this thread with trepidation but it was worth it if only for Whiney's Big 4 of Sludge.

Just realizing that Spotify and Youtube listening is taking some of the fun out of things precisely because the curatorial aspect of being involved with music is more easily lost. Curatorship can be a negative if taken too far, but whether you write about music or not, a record collection defines an aesthetic in a way that, I think, provides some kind of clarity about things.

Wanting to actively be MORE curatorial in, say, Spotify listening by starring tracks, using playlists, etc.

Working definition, "properly into it" is what I am, "curatorial" is what you are, if you listen to things I haven't heard of and I feel a little inadequate.

Yeah absolutely

I am definitely biased toward teenagey "yay" excitement about things. It's part of being happy to be alive, then again most people in my family are perpetual teenagers.

I guess "curatorial" can mean three or four different things. To me it conjures images of Mr. Fanzine who collects everything in (x) genre. I'm sure mp3 means that we see a greater number of manic youth buying as many mp3s as they can - as they might with movies, games, etc. - to me this isn't "curatorship".

However, I have a sister who grew up in the eighties and nineties and she and her friends used to hit up all the stores and grab GIANT piles of cassette tapes, whether they were good or not. I'm a 70s kid, where ALL of your measly paper route / lemonade stand goes to buying records - I was horrified by her trunkloads of TAPE! Nice to hav someone in your life who knows everything mainstream in the 80s/ 90s, tho.