Originally Posted by Anteater

Do you know the difference between Westcoast-AOR, yacht rock and soft rock...or anything about the musicians, producers, songwriters, etc. who dabbled in those areas? You'd be surprised at how influential all of it is. Daft Punk won Grammys riding all of that music's coattails after all.

The reason I give you a hard time is that I was a lot like you when I first joined this forum almost a decade ago, but broadened my criteria and learned how to discern the value of different genres based on criteria unique to the genre as opposed to having some pretentious "objective" standard of what an album "had" to be in order to be "good". Go look at the first "Top 100 Albums" thread I did years ago and compare it to a lot of the stuff I review now. The me back then shat all over a lot of what I listen to now because I didn't know any better (nor did I ever really give them a chance to begin with), and I didn't have an open mind.

You can't judge smooth jazz or yacht rock like you'd judge grindgore or jazz. Not because they are better genres, but because what makes a yacht rock album "good" is not going to be what makes an experimental jazz album "good". They operate by completely different production styles and differ in every other criterion you can think of.

But Frown, you approach music like you made up your mind ahead of time because you've already decided you don't like the aesthetic. And that's fine, but you limit yourself by doing things that way...as a listener and as a musician.

Just my two cents.

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.