Taking Sides: New Music v. Old Music

yeah, deaf.

i wasn't suggesting that all 'lost' music was bad or didn't have any worth, but it's not mad challops to suggest that the majority of music from say the 40's that lasted/got reprinted/whatever must have had some merit to a reasonably large audience. i'm not sure you could say that with any confidence about every release made in the present decade.

i'm not sure you could say that with any confidence about every release made in the present decade.

i think precisely ZERO people would actually say that though, stop strawmanning.

how confident are people that their current favourite music will get canonised and 'last'?

but some merit to a reasonably large audience doesn't mean anything...

Now that everything from this decade onwards will be preserved in digital form and replicated for all eternity perhaps this tiresome debate will finally be laid to rest.

"Deaf" was good, I assumed it was deliberate, honest.

It's not challopy, but it leads you to another argument that says goodness of music is predicated on audience size and that is kind of challopy, or not an argument that most people would use when they tried to define "good". It's just nit-picking at words, maybe, but saying something is popular doesn't quite imply the same as saying it's good.

Well, the stuff I liked 'back in the day', whichever day we're talking about, isn't stuff I'd play now.

The 'discovery' route involves stuff I haven't heard before, from any 'age', including the 'present'.

There's a school of thought that says...

It wasn't a 'hit' at the time, because there were better versions around at the time. After the event, and music having changed, people go back for more of what they liked, and some bands who weren't good 'enough' at the time, are found to be 'good enough' now.

to flip darragh's argument around, darragh do you really believe that only the best music from the current era will be remembered in 10 years time? I mean REALLY? you're living in this era and surely you can see the amount of stuff you consider worthy which isn't going to be given a jot of interest in a few years?

x-post otm, the present changes peoples view of the past constantly.

not strawmanning, but pointing out that there is some type of quality control mechanism that filters in over time, even if one doesn't agree with the process.

xp to NV- popularity is an indicator, it's neither the best nor is it the definitive- that changes depending on the person. for most people, it's a reasonably good indicator?

anyway- old music was better, because they played their own instruments.

darragh do you really believe that only the best music from the current era will be remembered in 10 years time

judging by the larry gogan show's rendering of the early 90's, i would doubt it.

older music was better, they played each other's instruments.

Not to mention the fact that this debate is equally irrelevant to vast swathes of music pre-1945 or so, especially as who knows what masterpieces were lost in wars/fires/religious purges.

So it's vaguely applicable to 50 years of musical history, if you're an idiot.

My old man always steps in with his "The Sun is the most popular newspaper in Britain" argument at this point which I don't wholly agree with but it makes some kind of point.

i often wonder what music from the last 5 years will be canonised and fondly remembered in another 20 30 40 years time.

Can't wait for that 2030 John Sim time-travelling drama 'Watch Me Crank Dat'.

noodle vague forget that sun argument, we can cite the nazis.

Nazis still popular tho so they must've had something.

their work has stood the test of time unlike say east timor massacres

or the faddish 90s rwandan genocides

we all thought it was cool at the time

The Nazis had good old tunes you could whistle.

One argument for old music would be that there was tighter quality control back then, most of the times you had to have some skills to get your music recorded and distributed by record labels, whereas these days everyone can put their music online, so it's harder to separate pearls from shit.

"Pol Pot? What was all that about eh? Remember when he was in that Spangles advert?"

http://friendsoflowtherpavilion.co.uk/tinc?key=bBtho9et&id=8&size=l

it was easier to impress people back in the day before the internet made everyone super-intelligent

Tuomas is right about old music tho, that's why every piece of vinyl/CD ever released is a much-treasured statement of artistic beauty still worth hundreds of pounds to collectors today.

You read my argument well.

where is

THE REAL DIRTY VICAR

???

Okay then. For starters, "having some skills" is not a guarantee of being "good". Classical musicians playing, for example, Varèse need mad skills, and yet the resultant recording would have the majority of listeners going "AAAAAAAARGGGGHHHH turn it off hohohoho call this music I could do better than that?" Secondly, record labels put out huge amounts of product on a "suck it and see" or "maybe those crazy kids will dig this" or "fuck it we can write it off against taxes" basis. Don't think most of them were too bothered about "quality control" so much as "will this make money". Thirdly, whether there is more stuff out there today than yesterday has no basis on separating pearls from shit because that's a job for you as an individual listener, not some bell-end of an A&R man ripped to the tits on coke and hooker-bots.

This thread is may more aspie and retarded than the last time we did it.

That post helped how?

Thinking about Varèse has made me ponder the number of 20th century composers whose music has survived not because it's widely popular but because it's narrowly popular with a small cadre of people who rate it. Most of those people would probably like to say that the music is "Good" meaning something other than (more than) popular. It seems like "popular" is too loose a word here to be any use as a synonym for good.

Popular is the only objective measure for "good" though. Everything else is subjective.

that's why nobody's used it! xp

that's bollocks! (not xp)

there's nothing objective about listening to music

Proove me wrong then.

(x-post)

Popular is the only objective measure for "good" though. Everything else is subjective.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 3:26 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

popularity is generally a measure of how popular something is

xpost to Darragh

I appreciate you're saying popularity can be an indicator of being good rather than actually being good but I think that amounts to the same thing and I don't agree for the reasons stated.

"explain to me what words mean"

popularity is just another filter, the root problem is in defining one type/era of music as 'good' against another.

Which is why I was saying that "good" pretty much amounts to nothing more than somebody trying to pretend that their subjective taste is an objective value.

Exactly.

well ok then

Now that everything from this decade onwards will be preserved in digital form and replicated for all eternity perhaps this tiresome debate will finally be laid to rest.

well, no. There will always be people who love digging up obscure old music, just as there will always be people who love unbelievably cutting edge new music.

I meant a different tiresome debate.

obscure music, now that sucks

New Or Old Rock?

Dave Thompson v VOICE OF OUR alt.GENERATION RYAN SCHREIBER