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Old 2007.07.01, 09:18 AM   #56
zach
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Location: Seoul, Korea
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Originally Posted by justriiingo View Post
^zach: i.e neo-SR/TJ dissenters, stop complaining?
Hehe. Kind of. More like "all dissenters, accept that her ideas are never bad, just different from your idea of good." In the end, music is subjective, a highly personal experience.

Music criticism is a precarious task, poised between the horns of a dilemma. On one side, every person has musical ideas that you don't (using the impersonal "you" here). Even "nonmusical" people have musical ideas from which you can be enriched if you are an active listener. The problem is that the brain instinctively rejects the unfamiliar, or that which it can't easily understand. Many people consider this instinctive reaction to be "dislike." But if you really want to listen critically, you must first mentally accept the unfamiliar and give it a fair chance. Consider that your negative initial opinion may stem from the sound feeling unfamiliar (unfamiliar = uncomfortable = mental reaction of dislike). After you get past that, you can decide to dislike it. Musicians and critical listeners are generally weirdos because their brains are broken; they have broken their brains of their instinctive listening habits.

For that reason, I think the more time you spend critically listening to new music, the less music you dislike.

I see far too much musical criticism that attempts to take one person's opinion and make it prescriptive. Don't get me wrong -- musical criticism is vastly useful for every artist and appreciator of the art. But although there are many things about music which can be discussed somewhat objectively, most criticism seems to degenerate into a debate based solely on subjective opinion being presented as objective fact. Subjective opinions are useful criticism, as long as they are understood to be just that.

</nerd>

ps - really easy way to start an argument: describe KSK using typical genre terminology
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