In defence of "nice"

(Another example would be 'Gossip' which was on TV recently and is probably my favourite film of all time. It isn't a great film, I like lots of great films too, but it is a fantastically good film, and I use good here almost in the dungeons-and-dragons sense, it is a benevolent, kind, film, you can see everyone involved tried really hard to make it interesting and sexy and twisty and fun. When I see it it reminds me that I like the way life actually is, not can be, but is.)

I think the key thing here for me is the idea of music that willingly embraces the idea of itself as supplementary - a track like 'Hot in Herre' is a "party track" sure, but it wants to be the party, at the very least it wants to get people sandwiching because, yaknow, it's Nelly. Whereas 'Real Things' really IS background music, and I think that's a wonderful, generous thing for a record to be. I can't imagine it on a dancefloor, its place is in McDonalds or Next, and a huge part of why I love those places is how utterly wonderful records like this sound there.

In a funny way I think I'm almost calling for /less/ ambition in music, that there be more successes on limited terms, and fewer failures on grand ones? I am sort of willing to defend this as an iconoclastic statement in hopes of kickstarting the thread, even though I am not sure I believe it.

(Alternately it might be kinda funny if no-one ever posted here at all, I could use the thread as like a kind of blog as I think my way through this)

(I think I agree with you [which may be due to my current superfragile state of mind or may not] and will try to be a bit more loquacious re. this when I have not just got up)

I think in a broad sense you're right, Gravel. For a long time I'd consider mediocrity the enemy, especially mediocre indie bands with inexplicably devoted fans. The stuff I liked, of course, was all completely extreme in its brilliance (or badness). The argument I used to vehemently put forward was "why waste your life listening to something average?" But lately I'm thinking all these superlatives are wearing very thin, almost meaningless. A world in which everything is Classic or Dud doesn't seem very useful.

It's difficult to talk about liking non-essentiality without getting into a logical vicious circle - once you start talking about a song's virtues, you're immediately moving towards describing it as non-mediocre. But this is mainly a problem of the context of your relationship to the music, and I think when you talk about Next or McDonald's you've hit on something important.

Instead of an appreciation that's based on the Artist, who represents an unchanging measure of badness or goodness and can be judged, scored and slotted into their appropriate place in whichever canon you happen to carry around in your pocket, I'd prefer an appreciation based on the Song, which would be contingent, situation-specific and fine-tuned to the subtleties of mood we're all subject to. Very roughly speaking, it would mean a move away from the kind of Platonic criticism that praises the eternal Forms of Good and Bad (and leaves no real space for Pleasant) and a move towards a criticism which is based on Where I Was Standing and How I Was Feeling. Actually I haven't described what I'm talking about very clearly at all, but I'll keep thinking about it.

It's roughly the idea that, at any one moment, any record at all can be absolutely right, absolutely appropriate, absolutely the best thing in the world for that moment, without needing to make any claims for its importance in the scheme of (an imaginary) eternity.