Most-tolerated Genre?

[Introspective]

Most-tolerated Genre?

Think back to when you where a kid, did you hear a song you liked and think 'oh yah that genre is so right for me' lol NO! You liked it for some magical combination of tones and lyrics of sequence of notes that worked together.

That us a really great point. To think of music as not having genres is being very childish.

It's not nuanced, it's not filtered, it lacks any level of understanding or categoization, it's just a facile "this is good, this is bad."

Sorry. That's a jerk thing to say, I realize, and I'm not just trying to be mean. but... it IS a good point. I can certainly understand the pushback against microgenres, they are usually absurd, and often there's tons of overlap, but that's only because genre, upon closer inspection, is itself an oversimplification: it might be better to think of music as having "traits" akin to "tags," but that gets tedious fast. Genres are imperfect, but they sure as hell exist and they have utility. I can dismiss whole swaths of music that i would be wasting my time trying, if i had to wade through everything WITHOUT genre.

[ghettosynth]

I find that people with a tolerance for a broad range of music are not normally people with any real passion for music.

That's a very general statement that you have taken to mean something more specific, for no reason.

Let me know when you've constructed that contrapositive.

[Uncle E]

That us a really great point. To think of music as not having genres is being very childish.

It's not nuanced, it's not filtered, it lacks any level of understanding or categoization, it's just a facile "this is good, this is bad."

Sorry. That's a jerk thing to say, I realize, and I'm not just trying to be mean. but... it IS a good point. I can certainly understand the pushback against microgenres, they are usually absurd, and often there's tons of overlap, but that's only because genre, upon closer inspection, is itself an oversimplification: it might be better to think of music as having "traits" akin to "tags," but that gets tedious fast. Genres are imperfect, but they sure as hell exist and they have utility. I can dismiss whole swaths of music that i would be wasting my time trying, if i had to wade through everything WITHOUT genre.

Plus, DJ's are often trying to stay within their little microgenres and don't want to play one artist multiple times. The irony is that a lot of DJ's are label whores and don't realize that artists will release on the same label under different names.

[ghettosynth]

Genres are labels that we apply to a cluster that is formed based on attributes of the music. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, it provides a useful tool for communication. Even the excessive lableing of the 90s. House is a broad genre, I love house, but I don't love everything that's labled house.

That said, there is nothing stopping people from expressing their preference in terms of a different set of attributes/features that would lead to a different clustering, even a trivial clustering of "like", "don't like." It's absurd to assert that one must be loyal to some particular feature set based cluster, this is where genre discussions go wrong. Moreover, many pieces will straddle genres. Long winded arguments about whether a track is house or techno are tedious. Some tracks will fit well in either type of set and will be perceived as belonging to that genre in that context.

I gave a good example, I like minimal music, across many genres, I dislike busy music, across many genres. Some genres have very little room for minimalism, e.g., Tehano music, Polka, Happy Hardcore. So I tend to not like those genres. My appreciation for minimal isn't universal, as should be expected. Minimal is a feature, I like/dislike other features as well and any attemp to build a usable model of this over many people will undoubtedly lead to incorrect predictions for some people. There are a couple of HHC tracks that I find charming, most likely because they're connected to some experience. This kind of apprecation is tough to model because we all have different experiences that drive our taste, and if that's not enough, they're not static.

So again, all models are wrong, some models are useful.

House is worse. There is house that I love and House that I hate.
We have to add descriptors like Deep House or Tech House or Jazzy House
...and still everyone is a little different.
How about this kind of retro-inspired-classic-house-that-is actually new :
https://youtu.be/lo3xQwELXzE?si=HqfQYiQecaVKHHPf

Yes, also, I'm a fan, takes me back. Something, for me, that I find interesting regarding bombadil's statements is that, while I don't have a very strong connection to music that was popular while I was in high school, I have very strong feelings that "music was better then" with respect to house music.

I think a lot of what people called house later, e.g., "main room house" is not, IMNSHO, house. So see, I sound like that guy.

[VOODOO U]

I thought about it and have come up with the answer to what is the most tolerated genre. It's music for video games.
Think about it, you're playing for a long duration, maybe even hours, listening to the same music play over and over and over.
Legend of Zelda comes to.mind as does Super Mario Bros.
Then there's pinball.

[Uncle E]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLfxPiNkBVA

[zerocrossing]

I have a new techno album out today! <background sound of toy horn>

I was trying to show it off to a friend of mine, but his comment was "I've really got to be in the mood for techno."

...and I was like: THAT IS FAIR. It's true. It's repetitive and downright tedious to listen to techno if you're not in the mood. ...but then it occurred to me that I am very rarely not in the mood for techno. It's one of my "comfort foods" as far as genres go.

Which got me thinking...

What would you say is your "most tolerated" music genre? ...What style of music are you least likely to skip just because your mood is off at the moment?

I don’t think it has anything to do with tolerating a genera, but more about the context. Things like Trance are clearly made for dancing in clubs. Listening to it outside that context is like taking a date to a Chuck E. Cheese. It’s not the right place. You may like listening to it because you make it, and even listen to it for enjoyment, but it’s internally referencing your past experiences. You fill in the lack of context.

There’s lots of genres that are like that for me, mostly dance music. I can’t stand the sound of Ranchero music coming out of a passing car, or even out of a restaurant’s sound system, but we went to a festival in Mexico last summer and they had a live Ranchero band and it was awesome.

OTOH, a lot of rock, starting in the late 60s, was made for the LP record to be played back on hi-fi systems. Because of that, it generally works. Some stuff was still made as party music, radio car hits, stuff like that, but for really sitting down and listening to music, that’s the genera that always delivers for me in a home listening situation. I mostly like progressive stuff, psychedelic 60s, art rock. Late Beatles, King Crimson, Hendrix, Police, U2, Prince, Radiohead, Primus, Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Material. I can listen to that just sitting down in front of my stereo. Ambient too, especially when I’m working. Trance? I absolutely hate it, but I bet if I was dancing in a club while tripping on molly with a cute girl in a faux fur dress, I’d love it.

[ghettosynth]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLfxPiNkBVA

I got about two seconds in before stopping the playback. Hopefully youtube won't recommend anything more like that.

[vurt]

Your assertion is without evidence; regardless, context dependent does not only mean emotional state.

The evidence is there for all to experience, you're just too lazy/disinterested to go and look.

People prefer different music for different activities, e.g., driving, dancing, working, etc.

Why should that involve different genres? You persist with this absurd notion that a genre can only satisfy a single need/desire. I listen to exactly the same music whilst doing any/all of those things. The one time I might want to put on something a little more specific is on a lazy Sunday morning but, even then, I will still turn to Post Punk music, something like It's Immateria's Life's Hard and Then You Die or Fischer-Z's The Iceberg Model, or maybe John Watts' Thirteen Stories High.

If you'd even looked at the links that I provided, this should have been obvious.

None of them are relevant to this discussion. They are about the population at large, most of whom have far less interest in music than we do, so of course they are going to conform to statistical norms. As a subset of that data, KVR members are likely to inhabit only the top 1% slice of that data, perhaps an even narrower slice than that, but all at the top end of the scale. If they had restricted input to people with some kind of threshold, say a collection of more than 500 albums, the results would undoubtedly have been very different. As it stands, none of the interpretations are going to reveal anything meaningful that we can't observe for ourselves.

Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not arguing with you.

Certainly not effectively.

There's nothing to argue with. That's why I posted the links, you should read more.

You should think more. Honestly.

I find that people with a tolerance for a broad range of music are not normally people with any real passion for music.

That's a very general statement that you have taken to mean something more specific, for no reason.

People like grannie songs. That's why he made them, I reckon.

I read somewhere recently that someone who spent time in India with The Beatles said that ballads just fell out of McCartney's head all the time. I can't imagine ever being able to write a ballad so it makes sense to me that the opposite might also be true. But the cynically conceived songs were the ones he wrote to prove that he could write something other than ballads. He said he wrote Back in the USSR as a specific response to a journalist saying he could only write ballads.

Exceptions test the rule. How can an exception prove a rule as it is ipso facto an 'exception?'
In the original Latin, of course.

In a legal sense, exceptions prove that a rule exists. For example, from wikipedia:

Dog! You people are f**king dumb. It's a proverb, like "a watched put never boils" or " a poor workman always blames his tools". It is not axiomatic, you don't need to look it up in Wiki-f**king-pedia, FFS. It's largely meaningless, except that it sort of fits every now and then. It's like trying to have a conversation with 8 year olds sometimes.

I've got nothing to add to this debate, but as a point of order, Led Zeppelin didn't release any singles in the UK, so StH would've made the top 40 on imports alone.

According to their Wikipedia discography, it was a promo single, so they probably gave it away.

One imagines a young antipodean chap, perhaps called 'Jones' or something, making his first fumbling forays into the seduction of a young lady. The scene is set; the lights low, the candles lit, a nice meal is cooking, the piss bucket has been emptied over the side of the barge.

Our protagonist, seeking to complete the picture, turns his mind to the soundtrack for this soiree of passion, but then stops.. He turns to the object of his desire, the apple of his eye, his Venus, and pipes up with;

"CONTEXT IS OF NO IMPORTANCE IN MUSIC. WE WILL BE LISTENING TO HEADHUNTER BY FRONT 242, YOU f**king IDIOT."

Honestly, I wouldn't want to f**k anyone who had a problem with that, although I'd have Killing Joke's Fire Dances on for anything as primal as coitus, not F242. Context is important. And it would have to be loud! That said, I'd probably not get past Fun & Games before I was done, so maybe I could just put a single on.

hope she doesn't need the loo in the night

She wouldn't be staying the night, she can use her own f**king loo when she gets home.
.

you old romantic!

[vurt]

im on my phone, so that's as edited as it's going to be.

[Introspective]

Juat for the record, I love (good) trance, and listen to it on its own merits. ...and I have never been to a club. Ever. Never seen trance live, in fact.

[donkey tugger]

you old romantic!

He's the Barry White of 'industrial'

[vurt]

the walrus of grrr

[donkey tugger]

the walrus of grrr

I'd like to hear him do a duet with Rochdale's finest, Lisa Stansfield;

"Eeeeh Bonesy, you know I've been round t'world, looking for me baby"

"Well, that's f**king stupid, you f**king idiot"

[Bombadil]