Do you think too much pop/rock music can be a waste of time?

[Florestan]

This is not true. Nowadays the social/cultural capital of proudly listening to classical music and deeming most popular music inferior is practically nil (except maybe in tiny niches but in them there would be not much gained because it would probably be a presupposition for entering the niche).
As your remarks show, quite the opposite is true. One is immediately confronted with the charge that one only wants so feel superior and that it is not about the music. This is the far more common stance today, even among those who listen to classical music as the debates in this forum indicate. The socially appropriate stance is to be open for almost everything, to have a very wide, eclectic taste for all kinds of music. Anything else is narrowmindedness or even elitism.

Indeed. I find it extremely amusing (and saddening at the same time) that we have come at a point when one should be either ashamed of having good taste and be a cultivated person because that automatically makes him an arrogant prick and an elitist asshole, or afraid of expressing one´s views on the matter for fear to be labeled as such --- all the while bad taste and lack of culture are not only rampant, but also promoted and encouraged by media. And while good taste and cultural refinement are under such constant pressure and attack, it is precisely people who still possess or try to acquire them that are blamed for being narrowminded and prejudiced.

Boggles the mind of any sane person, really.

[Madiel]

It's begging the question to equate classical music appreciation with good taste and popular music appreciation with bad taste.

Seriously, does anyone, regardless of their preferred genres, listen to music that they consider bad? I doubt it. Everyone thinks their choice of music is good, unless they have some strange masochistic streak.

The problem comes when people turn their subjective preferences into some kind of objective standard and begin telling other people to conform to that standard. The most likely way for that to happen is to hang around with other people whose preferences are similar to yours for long enough, and then start thinking that because you all like similar things that these are the right things to like.

But they're the right things to like only in the sense that they are the things that give you pleasure to listen to. To tell someone else that they ought to listen to the things that give you pleasure instead of the things that give them pleasure is to miss the point of listening to music. In response to the original question in this thread: I think listening to too much pop/rock music is capable of being a waste of time if you don't enjoy listening to pop/rock music. If you do enjoy listening to pop/rock music then hell no, it's not a waste of time.

This doesn't mean that people can't share music with each other and encourage others to try something new. But it has to be done in a spirit of offering things to those who are interested, and with an acceptance that the response won't always be a positive one.

Because ultimately, what's the consequence of someone rejecting "good" music in favour of "bad" music? Basically nothing, unless you are so invested in having the rest of the world agree with you that you can't cope with diversity of taste. Possibly it increases the chances of you being at a party with music that you don't enjoy, but that's about it in terms of practical consequences. We're not dealing with scientifically verifiable facts that mean that there are adverse consequences if someone believes the wrong thing, we're dealing with individuals making choices about their preferred auditory experience and the primary goal is simply to respond to that experience.

[The new erato]

People who listen to classical music aren't superior, but they are very lucky for having found an virtually endless oasis of great music.

Well put.

[71 dB]

Indeed. I find it extremely amusing (and saddening at the same time) that we have come at a point when one should be either ashamed of having good taste and be a cultivated person because that automatically makes him an arrogant prick and an elitist asshole, or afraid of expressing one´s views on the matter for fear to be labeled as such --- all the while bad taste and lack of culture are not only rampant, but also promoted and encouraged by media. And while good taste and cultural refinement are under such constant pressure and attack, it is precisely people who still possess or try to acquire them that are blamed for being narrowminded and prejudiced.

Boggles the mind of any sane person, really.

Liking classical music does not quarantee one has good taste. I think the concept 'good taste' is often misundertood. Some people think commercial = bad taste and non-commercial = good taste. There's maybe correlation, but I don't think it's that clear or simple.

I like the music of J. S. Bach AND Katy Perry. Do I have a bad or good taste?
I don't care about the music of Verdi NOR Lady Gaga. Do I have a bad or good taste?

I have stopped worrying about how good or bad my taste is. The only thing that matters is how much I enjoy the music I listen to.

[Madiel]

The socially appropriate stance is to be open for almost everything, to have a very wide, eclectic taste for all kinds of music. Anything else is narrowmindedness or even elitism.

I would say the socially appropriate stance is to be open to other people listening to almost everything.

Seriously, all it takes is to convert statements like "heavy metal is crap" into "I don't enjoy heavy metal" and the problem is solved. Yes I'm looking at you Florestan. You could have expressed all of your opinions about what music you like and don't like in language that would have made it clear that it's your personal response, but all of your language choices went the other direction, to treating your views as cold hard facts about the music instead of facts about your own response to the music.

I don't like heavy metal much. My nephew is deeply into it. He tells me about bands he thinks are great, I listen to things from time to time, I let him know whether or not it does anything for me. All of this is perfectly possible without telling my nephew he's some kind of talentless idiot for liking heavy metal, because I don't think he's a talentless idiot. I think he's a kid with signs of having inherited the musical talent that runs through the family who has found things in heavy metal that are very appealing to him. I don't feel the need to invalidate his choices just because they're not my choices.

[Florestan]

It's begging the question to equate classical music appreciation with good taste and popular music appreciation with bad taste.

I trust you won´t deny that (1) there is a lot (and I mean *A LOT*) of bad taste pop/rock music and (2) it is exactly this type of pop/rock that is mainly promoted by the media, while the more sofisticated genres are just as niche as, say, Hugo Wolf´s Lieder in the classical realm.

Seriously, does anyone, regardless of their preferred genres, listen to music that they consider bad? I doubt it. Everyone thinks their choice of music is good, unless they have some strange masochistic streak.

True. But just because someone who is completely ignorant of Ray Charles thinks Justin Bieber is good music does not mean that the latter is not way worse than the former and does not invalidate the fact that Ray Charles is good music and Justin Bieber bad music.

The problem comes when people turn their subjective preferences into some kind of objective standard and begin telling other people to conform to that standard.

That was actually the principle of education for about two millenia: to make (young) people learn and appreciate what other people --- much more knowledgeable and educated than the former --- deemed worth learning and appreciating. 

Fortunately, we live in an enlightened age where just because some literature professors have a subjective preference for Dante, Cervantes or Flaubert does not mean that they should make other people, especially such impressionable people as children and teenagers, to conform to their supposedly objective standard and read them. Why, who are those gentlemen to tell a 15-year old that Homer is better than a Donald Duck comics? They just want to feel superior to the poor boy or girl.

(NB: I don´t imply that you hold the position targeted by the sarcasm in the second paragraph above; I don´t know what you think on the matter. It´s what I inferred from some other posts here.)

[Florestan]

Seriously, all it takes is to convert statements like "heavy metal is crap" into "I don't enjoy heavy metal" and the problem is solved. Yes I'm looking at you Florestan. You could have expressed all of your opinions about what music you like and don't like in language that would have made it clear that it's your personal response, but all of your language choices went the other direction, to treating your views as cold hard facts about the music instead of facts about your own response to the music.

You must have missed the part where I said that I was a heavy metal fan 20 years ago, and for quite a few years, and quite devoted, actually --- I grew my hair long and wore leather jackets, military boots and T-shirts featuring my favorite bands. So you see, it´s not that I trash heavy metal from an ivory tower. My opinion on that kind of music is based on personal, first hand experience.

I don't like heavy metal much. My nephew is deeply into it. He tells me about bands he thinks are great, I listen to things from time to time, I let him know whether or not it does anything for me. All of this is perfectly possible without telling my nephew he's some kind of talentless idiot for liking heavy metal, because I don't think he's a talentless idiot. I think he's a kid with signs of having inherited the musical talent that runs through the family who has found things in heavy metal that are very appealing to him. I don't feel the need to invalidate his choices just because they're not my choices.

And you also put words in my mouth. I have never said that whoever makes, or likes, heavy metal is an idiot, talentless or not. I will repeat here what I´ve said so that you can read it in plain English: for all the claims to profundity and quality, a lot of heavy metal music is vulgar and stupid; this does not mean that the musicians themselves, or their fans, are themselves vulgar and stupid; and there are of course exceptions, one of them being our own Andy.

EDIT: And actually, as the saying goes: if you´re not a heavy metal fan at 20 etc. 

[Madiel]

I trust you won´t deny that (1) there is a lot (and I mean *A LOT*) of bad taste pop/rock music and (2) it is exactly this type of pop/rock that is mainly promoted by the media, while the more sofisticated genres are just as niche as, say, Hugo Wolf´s Lieder in the classical realm.

I won't agree to it because I don't even know what it means. What makes taste bad? Not enough variety between bars? Autotune? Offense against Christian morals? You're going to have unpack that statement a hell of a lot more.

There's a fundamental problem here in assuming that there is some single set of goals that all music ought to aspire to. There's not. This is pretty obvious even within classical music.

The only measure of whether or not music is objectively "bad" that makes any kind of sense to me is to say that music is bad if it fails to achieve its goals. But that first involves working out what the goals are. And sometimes the goals aren't the same even from one piece to another, never mind across entire genres.

Sorry to drag my Tori Amos fandom into one of these discussions again, but the last time I got to meet her in person I talked to her about this very point. I told her that one of the things I loved about her work was how each album had a slightly different musical language, a different set of "rules", and that a big part of the experience was coming to understand the "rules" that were operating. She got pretty excited about this because that's what she's aiming for, to explore something different each time.

To me, music is only bad in any kind of objective sense when it fails to live up to its own internal logic. Not some logic that's been imported from a different piece of music. All of the great innovators in Classical music that we praise were breaking a previous set of rules and establishing a new set, writing pieces that worked on their OWN terms, not on pre-established terms. It feels to me like most statements about pop music being "bad" are essentially complaints that pop music doesn't behave like classical music, but who the hell ever said that pop music was trying to behave like classical music and doing a poor job of it? Much of popular music is drawn from a fundamentally different set of musical values, with African or African-American origins. Criticising it for failing to follow European principles of dramatic sonata form development is a bit like criticising a half hour TV sitcom for lacking the kind of character development one finds in a 2-hour drama.

[Jo498]

Seriously, does anyone, regardless of their preferred genres, listen to music that they consider bad? I doubt it. Everyone thinks their choice of music is good, unless they have some strange masochistic streak.

I do start (and sometimes finish) books that I consider bad or at least mediocre. I have also watched movies on TV I should have switched of far earlier. Sometimes for social reasons, sometimes for boredom, weakness of the will or whatever reasons.
Not so much with music but as I am exploring music I obviously cannot listen to favorites all the time and sometimes will not know whether it is bad.

I also think I am able (maybe not in all specific cases but generally) to distinguish between "dislike" and "bad" or better, to have nuanced reactions and verdicts. E.g. some 19th century academic painting, like the Pre-Raffaelites is close to kitsch and I cannot say that I really like this stuff. But the skill of those painters is absolutely stunning and I cannot help admiring that. Similarly, I might recognize and appreciate the virtuosity of some electric guitar solo in a heavy metal piece (or something like that) without wanting to listen to the whole piece ever again.

[Florestan]

@ Orfeo

Too many strawmen and missed points. I give up. We can still be friends, though. 

[Madiel]

I do start (and sometimes finish) books that I consider bad or at least mediocre. I have also watched movies on TV I should have switched of far earlier. Sometimes for social reasons, sometimes for boredom, weakness of the will or whatever reasons.
Not so much with music but as I am exploring music I obviously cannot listen to favorites all the time and sometimes will not know whether it is bad.

I also think I am able (maybe not in all specific cases but generally) to distinguish between "dislike" and "bad" or better, to have nuanced reactions and verdicts. E.g. some 19th century academic painting, like the Pre-Raffaelites is close to kitsch and I cannot say that I really like this stuff. But the skill of those painters is absolutely stunning and I cannot help admiring that. Similarly, I might recognize and appreciate the virtuosity of some electric guitar solo in a heavy metal piece (or something like that) without wanting to listen to the whole piece ever again.

Okay I should have been a bit more nuanced. Exploration does inherently mean you're listening to stuff without knowing what you're going to think of it beforehand. I was thinking more about whether or not one keeps returning to it.

Music is a bit tricky to compare to other arts because we repeat listening to the same piece of music in a way we're a lot less likely to do with, say, books or movies. It is of course possible to re-read or re-watch things, but it's not the norm in the same way that hearing the same piece of music again is considered "normal". We kind of only expect to return to books or films that are our top favourites. With music I'd argue we expect to return to most things that we kind of liked.

[Madiel]

@ Orfeo

Too many strawmen and missed points. I give up. We can still be friends, though. 

Given that almost none of my last post was written with any specific statement of yours in mind, and it was very much about expressing my own philosophy, I haven't got a clue which strawmen you think I was knocking down. I wasn't aiming at any targets.

[Florestan]

Given that almost none of my last post was written with any specific statement of yours in mind, and it was very much about expressing my own philosophy, I haven't got a clue which strawmen you think I was knocking down. I wasn't aiming at any targets.

Offense against Christian morals, pop music not behaving like classical music, African folklore vs European sonata form... Strawmen and/or missed points all of them, within a post which directly quotes one of my own. Nevermind, though. We have had this discussion before. Let´s agree to disagree and move on. 

[Jo498]

I think the deepest disagreement is really whether there are only subjective preferences (and then one can take averages or find out majority preferences etc. for something somewhat intersubjective) or whether there is something objective about aesthetics. And one develops taste NOT by generalizing subjective preferences but by being educated or educate oneself with the recognized "Great Art/Books/Music" as examples of aesthetic excellence and align one's subjective preferences with the standards given by this tradition. (Sure, this sounds traditionalist and stuffy but it WAS (roughly) the majority position for two millenia or more, Homer was already a "classic" for Aristotle and his contemporaries and never lost this status. And the artistic fruitfulness of the last two millenia demonstrates to me that this position only seems overly conservative. (For the little I know about Chinese Culture, they were even more traditionalist.) Music is an exception, admittedly, because the oldest "Classic" is probably Palestrina, a very short time ago compared with Aischylos or Praxiteles) but I do not think the general point suffers from this)

I think the latter is true but I admit that it is not the same kind of objectivity found in e.g. physics and that it is hard to spell out what kind of objectivity it is and I myself cannot offer a complete account (and a complete account would amount to a philosophical dissertation). But I am (almost) content with a weaker position, namely something one could call historical-contextual objectivity. This means roughly, taking into account the human condition, the cultural history of a certain field of arts (here music) we can say that objectively Beethoven is better than Dittersdorf (to stick with a popular whipping boy).

But now I obviously have a problem. Because while Beethoven > Hummel and Beatles > Justin Bieber (for formal nerds, this is not supposed to imply that we get a well-ordered set, I could not say Mozart > Beethoven or vice versa), Hummel and Beatles might be incommensurable. How should I compare them because the music arises from different cultural contexts (and therefore follows somewhat different criteria about what constitutes good music)? I do agree that this is difficult.
However, I think one can "go one level up" and have the context of "human music" (or maybe "European music of the last 700 years" or so) instead of "Viennese Classicism" (for Hummel and Beethoven) and "anglo-dominated popular music 1950-2016" (for Beatles and J. Bieber) and get some more general criteria that would at least in principle allow a comparison between a Hummel concerto and a Beatles song. It is obviously still not easy because the genres are rather different.
But it is not per se nonsensical or completely futile.

[Florestan]

I think the deepest disagreement is really whether there are only subjective preferences (and then one can take averages or find out majority preferences etc. for something somewhat intersubjective) or whether there is something objective about aesthetics. And one develops taste NOT by generalizing subjective preferences but by being educated or educate oneself with the recognized "Great Art/Books/Music" as examples of aesthetic excellence and align one's subjective preferences with the standards given by this tradition. (Sure, this sounds traditionalist and stuffy but it WAS (roughly) the majority position for two millenia or more, Homer was already a "classic" for Aristotle and his contemporaries and never lost this status. And the artistic fruitfulness of the last two millenia demonstrates to me that this position only seems overly conservative. (For the little I know about Chinese Culture, they were even more traditionalist.) Music is an exception, admittedly, because the oldest "Classic" is probably Palestrina, a very short time ago compared with Aischylos or Praxiteles) but I do not think the general point suffers from this)

I think the latter is true but I admit that it is not the same kind of objectivity found in e.g. physics and that it is hard to spell out what kind of objectivity it is and I myself cannot offer a complete account (and a complete account would amount to a philosophical dissertation). But I am (almost) content with a weaker position, namely something one could call historical-contextual objectivity. This means roughly, taking into account the human condition, the cultural history of a certain field of arts (here music) we can say that objectively Beethoven is better than Dittersdorf (to stick with a popular whipping boy).

But now I obviously have a problem. Because while Beethoven > Hummel and Beatles > Justin Bieber (for formal nerds, this is not supposed to imply that we get a well-ordered set, I could not say Mozart > Beethoven or vice versa), Hummel and Beatles might be incommensurable. How should I compare them because the music arises from different cultural contexts (and therefore follows somewhat different criteria about what constitutes good music)? I do agree that this is difficult.
However, I think one can "go one level up" and have the context of "human music" (or maybe "European music of the last 700 years" or so) instead of "Viennese Classicism" (for Hummel and Beethoven) and "anglo-dominated popular music 1950-2016" (for Beatles and J. Bieber) and get some more general criteria that would at least in principle allow a comparison between a Hummel concerto and a Beatles song. It is obviously still not easy because the genres are rather different.
But it is not per se nonsensical or completely futile.

A most thoughtful post. I agree completely with all the points you've made.

[The new erato]

I like the music of J. S. Bach AND Katy Perry. Do I have a bad or good taste?
I don't care about the music of Verdi NOR Lady Gaga. Do I have a bad or good taste?

I have stopped worrying about how good or bad my taste is. The only thing that matters is how much I enjoy the music I listen to.

I like some rather unsubstantial stuff, but I hope I don't have illusions that it is the crap of genius. I don't see any problem at all in enjoying inferior stuff. We need that side in our lives as well.

[Madiel]

I think the deepest disagreement is really whether there are only subjective preferences (and then one can take averages or find out majority preferences etc. for something somewhat intersubjective) or whether there is something objective about aesthetics. And one develops taste NOT by generalizing subjective preferences but by being educated or educate oneself with the recognized "Great Art/Books/Music" as examples of aesthetic excellence and align one's subjective preferences with the standards given by this tradition. (Sure, this sounds traditionalist and stuffy but it WAS (roughly) the majority position for two millenia or more, Homer was already a "classic" for Aristotle and his contemporaries and never lost this status. And the artistic fruitfulness of the last two millenia demonstrates to me that this position only seems overly conservative. (For the little I know about Chinese Culture, they were even more traditionalist.) Music is an exception, admittedly, because the oldest "Classic" is probably Palestrina, a very short time ago compared with Aischylos or Praxiteles) but I do not think the general point suffers from this)

I think the latter is true but I admit that it is not the same kind of objectivity found in e.g. physics and that it is hard to spell out what kind of objectivity it is and I myself cannot offer a complete account (and a complete account would amount to a philosophical dissertation). But I am (almost) content with a weaker position, namely something one could call historical-contextual objectivity. This means roughly, taking into account the human condition, the cultural history of a certain field of arts (here music) we can say that objectively Beethoven is better than Dittersdorf (to stick with a popular whipping boy).

But now I obviously have a problem. Because while Beethoven > Hummel and Beatles > Justin Bieber (for formal nerds, this is not supposed to imply that we get a well-ordered set, I could not say Mozart > Beethoven or vice versa), Hummel and Beatles might be incommensurable. How should I compare them because the music arises from different cultural contexts (and therefore follows somewhat different criteria about what constitutes good music)? I do agree that this is difficult.
However, I think one can "go one level up" and have the context of "human music" (or maybe "European music of the last 700 years" or so) instead of "Viennese Classicism" (for Hummel and Beethoven) and "anglo-dominated popular music 1950-2016" (for Beatles and J. Bieber) and get some more general criteria that would at least in principle allow a comparison between a Hummel concerto and a Beatles song. It is obviously still not easy because the genres are rather different.
But it is not per se nonsensical or completely futile.

The biggest problem with this is that different generations have not agreed on these assessments at all. There are names that are famous now that were heavily out of favour in some other period of "classical" music that had different values. There are names that were extremely famous at some point that are now relegated to footnote status.

And different countries don't agree. I'm reminded of a recent discussion about Sibelius, but he's only one example of a phenomenon where a composer is wildly popular in one part of Europe and largely dismissed in another. I struggle to find the objectivity in such assessments. I can't help feeling that they are culturally driven. At some point I read an interesting article about the Bach revival in the 19th century which discussed how Bach aligned with the cultural values of 19th century Germany, as an explanation of why he became adored after a couple of generations of relative neglect.

[Madiel]

Offense against Christian morals, pop music not behaving like classical music, African folklore vs European sonata form... Strawmen and/or missed points all of them, within a post which directly quotes one of my own. Nevermind, though. We have had this discussion before. Let´s agree to disagree and move on. 

On at least one of those things you've misunderstood my intent/I've not conveyed my intent, but I haven't the energy to take it further.

[Florestan]

I read an interesting article about the Bach revival in the 19th century which discussed how Bach aligned with the cultural values of 19th century Germany, as an explanation of why he became adored after a couple of generations of relative neglect.

You probably mean 19th century Prussia, or Prussia-influenced German states. When Bach's revival began there was no Germany. Austria, the largest and most culturally rich of the German states, actually remained alien, and often hostile, to Prussian "cultural values" for a very long time. (Okay, this is nitpicking, I know).

Anyway, dozens of Bach's contemporaries "aligned" with those values yet it was Bach that was singled out. I doubt that this has nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of his music.

[Karl Henning]

It's begging the question to equate classical music appreciation with good taste and popular music appreciation with bad taste.

For one parenthetical thing, there is the recurring cinematic motif of the clever villain who loves classical music . . . .