thesilentman said:
There's also the fact that I'm a violinist myself and good music is engrained into my bones. I hate pop music as it isn't musically sound. I can't listen to auto-tuned music and repetitive beats as my mind needs more. I NEED music with proper tone shifts. I NEED music with different takes on the scales. I NEED something that's rhythmically diverse. I NEED music that makes me feel.
I need them, as I cannot have my music any other way.
I essentially agree with this.
I define music as the evocation of emotion via sound.
I'm definitely guilty of being a bit of an "elitist" when it comes to music I suppose. It's one of the subjects I've learned to avoid in conversation, akin to religion and politics. I tend to find that I will view someone as, basically, an idiot if their musical tastes don't fit into that above definition. Or, at the very least, I see them as someone lacking any real sense of individuality, intellect and capabilities of complex thought or emotion. Yes, I know that sounds elitist as all fuck and makes me look like some kind of self-important prick, but despite that not being the case, this is why I avoid the topic altogether. I can come off as overly-judgmental and elitist when I'm simply trying to convey my emotional indifference to other's musical tastes.
Now I'm not talking about someone who passively listens to whatever's on the radio while they're driving, or someone who enjoys a beat to dance to that a particular pop or hip-hop or whatever song contains. I'm talking about people who actually
prefer that stuff over everything else and make a point to constantly play it or listen to it or have it somehow in their environment constantly. This is also why I avoid the topic altogether.
However, as has been mentioned, many people don't put much actual importance to the music they listen to. Even the people who're constantly on about it, going on about bands you've never heard of in order to sound culturally superior, or just people constantly on the search for "the new thing". Most of the people like this who I've met don't have any actual reasoning why they listen to it; it's just "sound". Sometimes it's just nice to have around in order to break up the constant silence that would otherwise be there. I can completely relate to that and have no problems with folks like that. I do the same thing from time to time, for various reasons. It's the average person who will suddenly start lauding the band that they like seemingly out of the blue when their speakers suddenly (and awkwardly) bust out with a song at way too high a volume - that's the kind of people who bother me. When they're drunkenly into a song that I can't attribute anything positive to or any emotional expression what-so-ever, and they go from "party down" to somber "I'm super into this"-bullshit mode - that's the kind of person/situation I could live without for the rest of my life.
I think it's a point of contention for me because I can cite
exactly how a song makes me feel or what sensation/emotion I perceive or am being made to feel. It may take me a good 10 to 20 minutes to explain something only a few seconds long, but that's one of the reasons I love music. It's one of the most pure methods of communication, rivaling the spoken word in breadth and depth. Problem is, I've met
very few people who understand it in the same or similar way, or can even just understand
what I'm talking about. Even if I initially keep my descriptions very open and general to establish some sort of mutual relativity, most of the time it's met with, at best, a blank stare. At times it's, "yeah man, I totally get that." and then a completely unrelated metaphor is attempted where I realize, "no, you absolutely don't get that; you don't care about the topic at hand and we've both wasted our time."
A well constructed musical composition, to me, is one of the highest forms of art and communication that we can do as humans. I love composing. I love learning. I love analyzing other compositions in order to determine what was done at that particular time, at that particular interval, to give me the sensation of anxiety/apprehension/fear/joy/tension/whatever the case may be. It is fundamentally interesting to me and is truly my sole passion. Sure, I have other skills that I've acquired over the years and refined with schooling and study, and applied them to jobs/career opportunities. But that's simply to live and make money to continue living. Music is the only thing that I really care about.