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I finally read all this.
I think individualism is inherent in music, as well as a longing to escape from individualism.
When someone writes a piece of music, the connotations of the sounds are dictated my multiple things- connotations given from personal experiences past and present and universal connotations.
When listening, the same process happens.
When I listen to Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, I think of children sleeping peacefully. This is partially from the universal connotations of the music- it's very peaceful sounding and delicate. Part of this is the romanticize of my own childhood, hearing it during Christmas time as a child- which was always very happy and warm in my household with lots of baked goods and festivities. And it was always a sleepy time. Always dark at 4 or 5.
When I hear other more popular pieces from the Nutcracker, I feel mixed emotions- because I both romanticize it from early childhood but I hate the commercial use of those pieces.
The individual connotation has a lot to do with personal taste and how we view aesthetics.
But of course universal connotation is important as well. Regardless of knowing the story of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, or having seen the Fantasia version, everyone hears the megalithic power of the music I think. And that's another part of the allure of music.
While we love music for our personal reasons, we're drawn to music for it's unification of both our individual and communal selves. We think through this unification we can break our own personal isolation. We see music as a superior form of communication to normal speaking- that through the primitive means of musical motifs, we can express ourselves far more than we can with words.
We keep throwing our individualism (whether at a punk rock show or on facebook) at each other as a way to escape I think. If we can share who we are with others, and others with us, we believe we can be freed from our own prisons.
In subcultures, this results in sort of a dimwitted tribalism. . . people group with others they feel are like them, but it's a failure of sorts to defeat ones own isolation.
But I don't know where I'm going with this anymore. I don't really know what the answer is to any of this. I like what I like in art and music, and I'm attracted to people who like similar things. Though I've realized over the years that people's similarities in taste (especially in music) may have nothing to do with each other. For some reason taste in film, television, and literature seem to be more universal among groups of people, and I tend to relate people more on that platform. Music is very personal to me, and I'm ambivalent about that.
I like Sonic Youth and I like the Fall. But I've always liked music because of the way it strikes me.
And this new wave of lofi is annoying. I've made lofi music, but that's because of low income and inexperience at recording.
There's a certain fetichization of style over substance in music today. I'm not talking from the intellectual progressive type view, but from merely a compositional view. There are so many bands writing shit music and trying to dress it up by making it sound cool.
Guided By Voices Bee Thousand was a good album because the songs were good, and the sound and the performances fit the songs themselves.
The Ramones and Misfits made good music because they wrote good songs, and the way they performed them from the vocal stylings to guitar timbers fit the music.
Too many musicians seem to focus entirely too much on timber. To me timber should be present in the songwriting process because it is inspirational, but the quality of the recording shouldn't be considered, nor should the timber be thought to stand on its own. I can make my voice sound really cool and I can make my guitar sound really cool, but that doesn't mean shit if I only write rubbish.
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