Irish Boy wrote:
Quote:
IB why does music have to be complex in order to be enjoyable?
I don't think it has to be. The best analogy I can come up with is this: an author can write a really good book using only short, simple sentences. Ernest Hemingway made a career of it. It's hard though to capture every nuance of what you're trying to get across. It's best to have every musical device available to you. If you limit yourself to the simplest possible idiom, you may produce some good things, but you are naturally limited. Most of the great composers are considered great because they found the musical language, as it existed at the time, to be stutifying, so they expanded it. I see the past half-century as a step backwards in this regard. Furthermore, I don't think most bands choose to be simple because they think it's best; I think they choose to be simple because they don't know any better.
I have a small confession to make as well; I am a huge AC/DC fan. Go figure.
Irish Boy you sound like me twenty years ago, except I was arguing the merits of jazz vs "popular" music. But you shot yourself in the foot with this last admission. Unless you can provide a detailed, technical reason for your affinity for AC/DC, you're judging their music on how it makes you feel, just like everyone else you've marginalized with your argument.
Yes, rock and roll is a limited art form; it's just three chords and a bridge. But look at the diversity of composition, the staggering number of compelling statements made with JUST THREE CHORDS AND A BRIDGE. If you don't think it takes genius to accomplish this, then you really don't know as much about music as you claim. Not only that, but you're barking up the wrong tree when you say that John Lennon killed classical music. He didn't. He killed soft 1950's style popular music, i.e., the Patti Page, Nat "King" Cole variety of pop and the "flavor-of-the-month" pop of Fabian and Bobby Darin. Classical, or so-called classical, music has always borrowed from "ethnic" or "popular" idioms, i.e., Schubert's waltzes or Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue." Are those composers any less "legitimate" because they "diluted" the art form? What may have sent classical music into the "blind alleys" was the inability to successfully add rock into the lexicon. When you dismissed rock lyrics in an earlier post, I immediately thought, "what about opera?" Would you argue that opera is superior lyrically to "pop" music? Then I would say take a closer look at the libretti of those operas you hold so dear. They're freakin' soap opera plots, no more intellectually meaty than a typical episode of "Desperate Housewives." You say Wagner, I say "Harry Potter."
I am a reformed jazz snob. I played saxophone in jazz and funk bands for a number of years. I used to get caught up in these silly, pointless arguments all the time until I realized that all I was doing was trying to sound superior to the person I was arguing with. It's a waste of energy. Music is such a subjective matter; no one person's preference or reason for those preferences takes precedence over anyone else's. If it speaks to you - for whatever reason, whether intellectually (Apollonian) or emotionally (Dionysian) - it's all good.
Lighten up, Francis.
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