So, I've decided to create a music blog. This is mostly because I've found myself putting musical thoughts on either my LiveJournal, where a lot of people either don't care, or even if they do just care they TL;DR it; or by talking at a few friends on IM. Not that they seem to mind, but I do feel like I'm just kinda talking to myself sometimes, through no fault of theirs, I just do tend to come out with a lot of text at once and be all, so, what do you think? I'd not really have a reaction to that if someone did it to me.
Thusly, I've created this blog to be a place for me to post reviews, rants, thoughts on music in general, my changing tastes, and mostly long boring posts that will appeal to few people other than me, if any. As it says in the info box at the top this is mostly for me to have a place to collect all my musical thoughts, but if people do end up reading it and commenting I hope I can get into good discussions about things, and get new recommendations for music to listen to.
So, I'll start out with a short rant. On the University of Sussex last.fm page someone posted a thread calling post-rock 'pretentious' because it purposefully lacks melody and meaningful lyrics. He cited Mogwai and Sigur Rós as examples of this, saying that they were pretentious by thinking they could not include melodies and still call what they do music. He attacked Sigur Rós specifically for ( )'s lack of lyrics (all the singing in it is actually gibberish) and lack of song titles. This seems to be a common criticism of post-rock.
I think it really kind of misses the point. The general stated point of post-rock (in a musical sense, not in any sort of meaning sense) is that it is music that uses rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes. Lacking a melody and meaningful lyrics are just manifestations of those non-rock purposes. It seems to me that the pretentiousness here is on the part of the critics, by demanding that post-rock have melody and lyrics they're saying it's not good unless it conforms to their narrow definition of what rock in general should be.
It looks like a larger problem of not being able to admit you simply don't like something, but having to find something objectively wrong with it, so that everyone decides it's bad. If you don't like that post-rock doesn't have obvious melodies, then simply don't listen to it. It's fine to simply not enjoy it. But don't claim that lacking melody makes it pretentious, because it only makes you the pretentious one.
For those who do like post-rock, especially post-rock with a post-popiness to it as well, check out Efterklang's newest album Parades. It is definitely one of the best albums of 2007.
About Me
- Lowell
- London, United Kingdom
- Graduated Philosophy student living in London, generally doing nothing and thinking about everything.
4 comments:
Hooray! What the internet definitely needs is a place for me to waste time while pretending to work. Make sure you post often!
As for your rant: I don't listen to much post-rock, or, I probably do and don't realize it. My taste in music is generally based on if I enjoy the sounds or not.
I haven't listened to much Sigur Ros, but there is this one song I like, I don't know the name of it. I think it is cool to sing in Hopelandish or whatever. Good times. I'll have to check out Efterklang.
This blogger thing has no threaded comments. D: It is a new and strange world.
I don't actually listen to very much post-rock either. I like Sigur Rós, but from what I've heard of theirs I actually don't much like Mogwai. I just had the Efterklang album recommended to me recently and it's really very good.
The thing about this is that I don't tend to like post-rock, but I wouldn't call it pretentious either. I feel about it similarly to how I feel about 70s art-rock. I don't listen to it because lack of structure tends to make my brain twitch, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize there is merit in it for other people.
Interesting. What you're saying here reminds me not only of Kelefa Sanneh's The Rap Against Rockism from a few years ago but also the recent dust-up Sasha Frere-Jones started in the New Yorker, A Paler Shade of White about the whole you can't dance to indie rock thing. We talked about categories the other day and I dunno, there's ways in which they're useful and ways they aren't, but one way in which they are, as you say, is in defining what the very purpose/project of the music is in the first place and then hopefully not judging the music by some standard it isn't even trying to measure up to. Unfortunately those rockist-type critics, in my experience, are too busy trying to be Lester Bangs to get that part. (They're almost as bad as the Paulettes, the movie critics who slavishly followed Pauline Kael.) I like my music to have melody and interesting lyrics, but I'm pretty upfront about that—and I don't penalize music that isn't doing that. I just don't listen to it.
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