ThePhanastasio

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not weirdly?) this is not entirely dissimilar to my world view.

Your musical opinion, however, is somewhat dissimilar to what I believe.

I do legitimately believe that musical taste is 100% subjective (not some 99.99999999% nonsense) and wholly based on personal experience. As a young person searching for her place in the world, I was in a production of The Laramie Project, protested by a Mr. Fred Phelps, and met Judy Shepard (the mother of Matthew Shepard) prior to performing said play. It was at this point in my life that I truly understood that there is no true "right" and no true "wrong"; it's all based on personal experience. While I feel that my views align with "good / right" more often than not, I also acknowledge that I could be completely ****ing wrong.

I mean - what if Ke$ha was legitimately the most technically sound musician that had ever graced the Earth? I don't agree with this, but what if it was right?

At this point, I decided that "Damn all - I don't care what's right; I will entertain any notions to the contrary, but I'm going to go with what I feel first and foremost."

Honestly, that made me the most happy I'd been in a long while.

Basically what I'm saying is this: Don't condemn others because their tastes don't align with yours. Embrace yourself as an individual, and be accepting of the viewpoints of others.

And don't post to MB so drunk that you can't see your keyboard.

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MoonlitSunshine

Damn Straight. I've had a number of discussions about whether certain artists should be considered poets or musicians *cough*LeonardCohen*cough*, I definitely believe that if someone is primarily a lyricist and not a "musician", then it's really accompanied poetry rather than music.

Any chance you could elaborate on this particular paragraph in less... verbose language? I think one of the main reasons people don't like your posts is that because of the method in which you write your soliloquies, it comes across rather like you are intentionally speaking in tongues - disguising a lack of substance through the use of overly flowery language. I'm highlighting this paragraph as it seems to make no sense. Are you saying Music is regressing? Are you saying it isn't, which is proof that music did not evolve, as everything else is regressing? Are you discounting the entire subject on account of not believing in the concept of Evolution? Your posts leave many questions, and answer few. Perhaps if you made more of an effort to be clear people would be more happy to see you post.

Or hey, maybe you're just trolling, in which case, good for you. *pat*


I agree that there is no true sense of moral right or wrong (my own personal views extend that to a concept of morals being a form of unwritten societal law of mutual security), but I think you're extending the concept a little too much with this. The reason that morals etc. can be argued to have no Objective truth is because, there is no objective, universal standard to compare them to.

Taste in Music and Sense of Humour, for example, are even more subjective because they are part of a set of concepts that don't have order - that is to say, you cannot categorically rank senses of humour or taste in music, there is no mutually agreed order, like there are with, say, numbers. Noone can argue that 1 is greater than 2, because it is universally agreed that 1 is less than 2, agreed? Thus we have subjectivity, and my agreement with you that noone really has the right to say that someone's taste in music sucks, it's more that their taste in music doesn't agree with our own, but we will still maintain the right to tell people their taste in music sucks from the condescending heights of our own sense of superiority :P

However, Technical Ability is slightly different. It is possible to rank technical ability, because it is something which a) can increase over time and b) is measurable through the use of a number of different aspects of skill, depending on the instrument. It's an example of something called a Partially-Ordered Set in maths, if you're remotely interested.



The Gist of the spoiler for people who don't like maths is that because you can define technical ability by a combination of definitely ordered skills - how fast you can play, how cleanly you can play etc. etc. - there this a universal method by which you can at least semi-order technical ability. Using such a system, if would clearly be possible to prove categorically, without subjective personal bias, that there are far more technical artists than Ke$ha.

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starrynight

And generally I definitely prefer poetry on it's own than accompanied with music, the best poetry doesn't need propping up with something else.


And as for the human species, it's a mere speck in the universe. I think it's part of the ignorance and arrogance (which reinforce one another) that has made humans think over centuries that we are somehow the centre of everything.

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