| |
|
Now, to try to tease worth and meaning out of Uncle Retrosepctive's cri de coeur:
So, we have a poster who doesn't like pop just for the sake of it
Now, I find myself once again wondering whether people who read Barbelith actually read Barbelith. Doing so might be a great step towards its maturation. Hysterix actually said:
At any rate, the idea of actually listening to something "just for the sake of it" is appalling and idiotic to me, and in some ways a bit self depricating.
So, what is this idea of listening to something "just for the sake of it"? Are retrospective and Hysterix suggesting that the reasons that we might give for listening to, say, Bon Jovi - that we love the music, and the lyrics really speak to us. So, by extension, one cannot possibly enjoy listening to either pop or "something", whatever that "something" is, and therefore one can only be listening to it "just for the sake of it" - that is, in order to listen to something, anything, to prevent one's ears healing over. So, pop is something akin to olestra, or chewing wood to assuage hunger - a process without nutrition.
Or, possibly, we are, as Jack suggested, talking about music having a favourable _moral_ or _educational_ influence - that one listens to Bon Jovi, or to Toil, in order to learn a new skill, or in order to become a better person. If pop (or anything else listened to "for the sake of it") does not provide this practical or moral education, then again one must be listening to it "just for the sake of it", because one could be listening to Toil and learning, say, needlework through its use of harmony.
So, what distinguishes music that one listens to "for the sake of it" and music that one listens to for some other purpose? Presumably, it must be some improving quality in either music not listened to for the sake of it or, in Uncle Retrospective's retooling (if you'll forgive the pun), music that is not pop, or that is not "pop for the sake of it". For example, listening to a song by DJ Bob Hoskins Going Mental in a Dustbin makes one 17% less likely to be abducted.
Interestingly, this distinction occurs in the aesthetic philosophy of ars gratia artis - art for art's sake - that is that art can be valued for no other purpose than itself. Oddly enough, the case against pop is usually that it is *not* for its own sake - that it is instead part of a mercantile process concerned little with the musical quality of the end result. So, it seems Uncle Retrospective believes that pop listened to for its own sake is unworthy because he subscribes rather to the idea that art must be socially or personally _useful_. Like Toil.
Is that about right? Alternatively, aesthetic enjoyment is a "sake", in which case the point is that one cannot possibly _enjoy_ music that HysteriX and Uncle Retrospective do not enjoy, and therefore that if you listen to it you are doing it for no reason at all, and if you claim to be enjoying it you are either mendacious or deluded. Is that closer to the mark? |
|
|
