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Is there such a thing as bad music?

#22
Mitchell Royce said:
Fun Fact: Heavy Metal, the music enjoyed and fervently defended by masses of western adolescents and people from cold countries, was used as a means of torturing Afghani and Iraqui prisoners.
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:D:D:D

There's a really funny story in a Clancy novel about some counterterrorist guy pushing a football into an extremist's arms just as he's expiring. "Pigskin". The mark of Iblis. :D

That's right up there with some of the "suicide lyrics" stuff. :)
 
#23
Michael Jewels said:
You can listen to music that's badly played, but I don't think there's really bad music out there, just music a particular person doesn't care for.
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Oh there is definitely bad music. I've even played a lot of it :D

Take any begining musician, are you going to claim the music (noise?) they make on day one is good?

Then take your average incompetent musician, many years into playing. They are still out of tune, still out of time, still can't even get to the end of a song without stopping somewhere in the middle and still saying absolutely nothing with the caterwaul they are making. Is that good music by some standard? Of course it's not.

It may be hard to draw a hard line between total incompetence and good music that overcomes technical limitations, but there is a difference.
 
#25
i like tictacs said:
Technically, composition-wise, execution-wise, etc? I say absolutely yes. I know there are some of you who are going to say it's 100% subjective and absolutely anything can be considered good, but lets hear why you think that.
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No offense, but I think it's a useless question. I don't think you have a snowball's chance in hell of establishing that there's anything remotely resembling objective standards for what constitutes good music. Nobody who claims it's *not* subjective, AFAICS, has offered anything that could be used as any objective basis for that determination.

Let me turn it around on you: let's hear why you think there are any objective standards at all.

Personally, I'm content to like what I like, dislike what I dislike, and be indifferent to what I'm indifferent to. I'm not under the illusion that my preferences coincide with bedrock objective reality (whatever that may be), and I can live with subjectivity.
 
#28
Michael Jewels said:
Very well said, Mitchell ! :)

You don't hear of people being tortured with Debussy. :D

Mike
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Well - that's an interesting point....:hmm:

So I can remember attending an (adult education) music appreciation class , many years ago and one of the pieces we studied was Bruckner's 8th Symphony - which most critics consider to be his most full-realised work (he died before finishing his 9th!)

This has a very slow 3rd movement which in the right hands can be the most sublime music every created - I have a live recording of Von Karajan conducting this with the Vienna Philharmonic which is some of my favourite music ever!

But this movement is at least 30 minutes long and as I say very slow and some conductors can make it so slow as to come to a full stop! ;)

Anyway - this class of adults who had come along voluntarily were played this slow movement and declared it to be the dullest thing they had ever heard and in fact declared it be like torture!!

The funny thing is at the time (late 1980s) I mostly agreed, although I liked a lot of Bruckner's music - but now having heard many different versions and listened to it many times I have completely different view!
 
#31
Is there such a thing as bad music?

Well, of course. But what is good or bad? It's highly subjective, so that will mean different things to different people.

There's an old line about beauty that I love...

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...but we can all pretty much agree on ugly."

Still, there are those that can find ugly, beautiful in it's own way. And so it would seem that what is good music to some will be bad to others and visa versa.

There's a lot of music I find to be bad, yet it sells a million copies, so some must think it's good.
 
#36
bryan bailey said:
Good music - Enjoyable things played by people playing instruments doing it because they enjoy playing music.

Bad music - People who do nothing musically and just are in for 'da money. *cough cough MAINSTREAM RAP cough cough* **
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By your logic there is no bad music. People on major record labels selling millions are always doing something musically, that's why they're selling millions.

It is impossible to have someone that does "nothing musically" be in a successful band. Remember, mainstream artists were once local artists as well.

The ONLY difference between mainstream artists and local artists is the mainstream ones WORKED their ass off to get where they are.

It doesn't matter if you're the best musician in the world, you will get nowhere if you do not put forth the hard work and do not start treating your band like a business. This is the music industry, not the music charity. Welcome to capitalism.

Yes, even Brittany Spears is doing what she loves, music.
 
#37
Excuse me, I beg to differ. Britney Spears isn't doing "music". She's doing "dance". All her music is written for her by other people, and she can barely lip sync to save her life. She's very talented, in a way, but I wouldn't consider her contribution to be "music". IMO, and with all due respect, and all that stuff. :)
 
#39
Another philosophical attempt: There is nothing in this world that we can be 100% sure of. Bertrand Russell showed us so (even though he was not the first to think of that, but the one who developed and popularized this thought) and as far as I know, no one has proven him wrong.

Thus we can neither answer this question with a "yes" nor with a "no".

BUT, we can and must work with probabilities. And I think because of various highly plausible indications, that, no, there is most likely no objective measure of quality for music. Even if you take a non-musician and let him beat your bass, and 100 people agree that the results are awful, somewhere, someone might like it; possibly me. :D

Is this argument settled now? No, we approach it differently by altering our definition of the word "objective". If by "objective" we mean "that which a selected group of people or their vast majority agrees on", then the answer can be a yes. For example: If 90% of all musicians say Britney Spears sucks, then that is objective by this definition.
Of course, this definition bears problems, but it is pretty much the definition we use most often in everyday contexts.

Thus it is, as everything else, a matter of definition.

Now the argument is settled. :bassist:
 
#40
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Look at how many dudes like ERBs, and how many other dudes hate 'em? Make music for music's sake, and enjoy it while doing it, whatever it may be. Heck, I was in a Blue Man Group type band at once, and it was actually kind of cool. Noise, but cool.

Ray
 

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