There is no such thing as challenging, difficult, or deep music. I find it just as easy to listen to a Schoenberg or a Merzbow as I do contemporary pop music.
If you've ever found a song to be a challenging experience, you're a weirdo. You don't understand music. I can't think of a more accessible art form than music. There's nothing complex about it at all. It's quite literally the only good thing thing humans have made.
You artless sell-outs with your "2 deep 4 you" and your "pleb" and your "normie"
It doesn't exist. If you can't appreciate the avant garde while being able to appreciate pop music at the same time, you're a fuckin' fagola.
reply to this post and OP will die tonight
What?
>>65151207
Best thing i read on /mu/ ever since i first joined it
>>65151217
I'm OP. And I'm suicidal so who gets the last laugh now?
Still you, but fuck you.
>>65151269
give me a way to contact you, let's be friends.
>>65151283
I don't know dude you might try to kill my family and I love them too much.
>>65151207
I'd agree that nothing is difficult to passively listen to. However if you're a musician who tends to pay attention to and understand what's going on rhythmically and harmonically, then listening to something with complex chords, time signatures and polyrhythms could be described as a challenging experience.
>>65151207
I'd actually tend to disagree. Immediacy is an important component to some music and it's why pop music, and especially *good* pop music, has that immediate attraction to it. It sounds good on the most honest level.
However, that doesn't mean that if music is challenging it's bad. For example, when I first listened to free jazz artists like Albert Ayler I didn't 'get' it because it's the opposite of immediacy. But what brought me into the world of free jazz was the focus on timbre and limitless expression which is the complete opposite to pop music, although it is still challenging music.
There doesn't need to be one strict definition to what music should be.
>>65151207
look at this special genius
I actually have some personal experience with this. I went through a period of really intense avant-garde listening about 5 years ago, where I basically did nothing but download and listen to modern classical, serialism, new complexity, musique concrete, electroacoustics, free improvisation, chance music, etc etc etc. almost all of my waking hours for about a year. Basically I was 100% inside my own head, pathologically trying to escape any notion of form or sonic structure. I also maintained a disdain for anything danceable during that time so I had some sort of conceit about music as a purely intellectual pursuit.
Anyway during the tail end of that addiction I heard Phish for the first time and something clicked and I was able to listen to music with my body for the first time. In the intervening time I've grown and matured in my appreciation for groove, seen a hundred live shows and danced my ass of at most of them, and taken a few deep dives into dance music from the 60's and 70's and 80's that I had previously missed out on.
I also started listening to music a lot less than I had been. Even though I'm on a pretty serious deep funk kick right now, I probably only listen to 2 or 3 hours of music a day on average. But here's the point I'm trying to get to with all this: even though I don't listen as much now, I'm way more into music now than I ever was in my obsessive avant-garde phase. Looking back on that period, I'm not sure I was ever into the music at all. Listening to jarring soundscapes for many many hours in a row can really turn your perception inside out and that feeling was what I was really chasing. During that same period I was also drinking alot of cough syrup, experimenting with research chemicals, only sleeping 4-5 hours each morning and smoking weed whenever I was awake. The constant barrage of nonstandard musical forms just happened to provide an altered state of consciousness that complemented that lifestyle nicely.
>>65151862
For me, that understanding of a song, no matter what it is, is instantaneous upon hearing it. It's learning a song is where it gets to be a challenge. But being a composer, I never learn to play other people's songs. I find that to be incredibly pointless and boring.
The process by which any art and the parameters in which it is made is completely uninteresting to me. It's the product and whether it's good and competently made that matters (with obvious exclusions of stealing ideas and heavy sampling. That goes for /mu/'s autistic man-child music god Kanye Kardashian). I know a lot of people value the process, and I catch a lot of shit for this, but yeah to me it's artistic death to analyze it like a science.
>>65151954
This, pop music is like chocolate, it goes straight for the pleasure centres of the brain. Many other styles require repeated exposure before you 'acquire' the taste for it, I don't think there's a problem with describing that as being more 'challenging', because many people would give up on it after the first listen.
>>65151989
Shut up I'm like literally retardo I just don't understand why people think music is so sacred and why people wear badges for liking certain things.
>>65152072
Music is about enjoyment on a base level, of course. It's the extent to which this enjoyment reaches us at first though which is the difference between pop music and "challenging, difficult" music. Pop music hits us within seconds, more challenging work forces us to engage with the music and always requires some level of discomfort before the enjoyment finally reaches us.
>>65152034
Not that I wasn't listening at all, I was still having fun discovering different composers, experiencing the different feelings their music could bring, all the usual stuff. And at the time I definitely would have objected to the suggestion that I wasn't doing it primarily for the music. But looking back I'm pretty sure the music was secondary to the trip I was on.
And I definitely wasn't analyzing it really or making an effort to pay close attention to what I was listening to. Even though everything I was listening to would be considered challenging or inaccessible by most people, it certainly not experienced as such by at the time, although I did not have a sophisticated ear or a lot of musical knowledge, I wasn't really attempting to digest any of it I was just letting it wash over me. I certainly did appreciate it although my appreciation was completely different from what a music phd would experience listening to the same thing.
>>65152041
When you say you never learn to play other people's songs, why not? I think that as a composer to helps to incorporate another perspective into your own music. Nothing can be formed entirely on your own.
>>65151954
OP here
I just want to go down on record and say I never suggested such music is bad. For me, the weirder, the better. My point is that all music is accessible, and that there isn't such thing as complex music. By complex I mean difficult to understand.
I'm not a genius but I've never had a problem understanding any art ever. The concept seems so alien to me.
>>65152236
And what I was saying was going against your "all music is accessible argument". Someone who listens to pop all their life will be challenged by more experimental, weirder music don't you agree?
>>65152209
I just find the idea of learning somebody else's song to be a waste of time. Time I could be composing or working out structures with theory. Most of the songs that I would learn (for pandering to a crowd's sake) are simple enough that I could play them having just heard it. The influence I get from other music happens from just listening to it.
I am sort of a weirdo in that I started composing before I learned any actual songs.
>>65152269
I guess once you've heard grindcore and free-jazz in your ipod while blasted out high on weed, booze, and mescaline while looking at Jackson Pollock paintings at the MOMA, nothing really tickles your brain anymore.
