Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues (October 21, 2016) Album • Page 108

again, im going to ask, what is the objective side you speak of? what measures are you using to declare music objectively good? the answer i was given by craig was about "scientifically proven" conventions with wide appeal, which is in my opinion a take that crumbles under even the slightest scrutiny.

 

funny thing is i took him to a thrice show a few weeks ago and i cant imagine how he walked away from that comparing them to nickelback

 

I specifically wrote that post for you to see it haha I don't actually think that

 

god dammit

 

damn. thrice is one of the best live bands on the planet. i don't know how you come out of one of their shows unswayed.

EDIT: Oh

 

yeah they're so fucking amazing

 

Fuck really? Haha glad I found out now and not years down the road.

 

The slightly off-tune way he says graph kills me every time I watch it.

 

This discussion is awesome. If I have anything to offer (after some consideration), it would be this: As someone who writes music, I feel that my intent as the author is irrelevant and unimportant. I know what the songs mean for me, and they often stem from deeply entrenched personal experiences/beliefs/feelings, but when they are released into the wild, they are no longer mine. However my audience interprets my art is up to them. Although I'm usually more than happy to share what my songs are about, I actually prefer that the listener derive their own understanding independent of my own. In some cases, I actually prefer not to share what my songs about at all, in order to force the listener to find their own meaning. I think Glass Animals has done this before.

Now, I understand that this is completely anecdotal, and my audience, is much, much, much smaller than that of the artists that have been mentioned in here, but I think my belief about my own art informs my belief about artist's intent generally speaking. I wish for my listeners to come up with their own interpretations of my art, and therefore I find myself doing the same for the artist's listen to, thus rendering artist's intent relatively unimportant in my musical experiences.

 

i know many artists who dont like disclosing exactly what their songs are about because it takes out the listener interpretation. a ton of artists really value the listener's experience over their own experience and i really respect that.

 

If you listen to the song closely or check the lyrics later, he does say the name of the song in the song. It's not exactly the centerpiece of the song though.

You may have eventually figured out the pronunciation though is what I'm saying.

 

For those of you that have heard Pol Roger - how would you stack up the track amongst other album closers in the bands catalog?

 

Again? I don't think you asked me that before. (At least not today, haha)

This might sound like a cop-out answer, but I have discovered that it's far easier to objectively discuss full albums rather than single, isolated songs. Concerning a song by itself, it's far easier to speak in term of whether a song is catchy, relatable, "good-sounding," all obviously very subjective terms.

(I still wouldn't say single songs are void of objectivity, though. If a set of lyrics is complete nonsense, with no sense of rhythm or rhyme or purpose, where every line is apparently about a different topic, with no discernible level of cohesion, then yeah, I would have no problem saying those are bad lyrics. In my Poetry class in college, when my professor told me a poem wasn't that good, or a student who was a better writer than me gave me advice, I would scold them and say, "You aren't interpreting it correctly." I would take their advice and make the poem better. To give an actual example, I had a sonnet that perfectly utilized iambic pentameter, but had a lot of filler words in order to make that work. When my professor pointed out that a phrase I used, "seemed to be a semblance," was redundant, he wasn't wrong. It wasn't an opinion. And my poem actually became better with that line--and some other things--changed. Everyone who's read the before-and-after of that poem agrees so.)

Within a full album though, there are more objective factors going on, such as whether or not the different songs are using a formula. Naturally, I'm not saying albums are bad if every song has three choruses. But if every song starts soft and gets big, or if every song has a similar hook, or if every third chorus drop out for four measures, then those things stack up. Then there are also levels of musical, lyrical, or thematic cohesion throughout a record. Do the songs add up to more than the sum of their parts, or is an artist clearly trying to remake a successful single twelve times over? Do analogies of "fire" and "flames" appear throughout the album because the lyricist is building upon a specific motif or because they are incapable of writing about other things? Is this album clearly ripping off the melodies and structures of another artist?

(That last question is an interesting one, because to notice this requires the knowledge of the artist being ripped off. However, that would actually support my earlier comment, that learning more about the art form can give someone better judgment. For example, I'm actually a rather new JEW fan. Mae, on the other hand, has been one of my favorite bands for over a decade. Now that I'm digging into JEW's discography, I don't have such a lofty view of Mae's older albums anymore because I can tell how derivative they were of JEW's music.)

I could honestly go on, but in general I do thank you for questioning me and making me think harder about this than I often do.

 

What if, for example, though one of your songs was taken up by a hate group as an anthem for their cause through no fault of your own. Or say, for example, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA being used as a jingoistic rallying cry when it is expressly railing on such examples of warlike nationalism in the face of ignorance of the plight of Vietnam vets. Is it still entirely in the hands of the audience and your intent still irrelevant if that's the interpretation your audience takes from your song?

I'm not trying to say your argument is wrong, it's a nuanced issue but I just figured I'd bring up a counterexample.

 

Thats exactly what it is. A lot of the time, I'd almost rather not know what a song is about, especially if I've already attached meaning to it for myself. Now, thats not to say I don't care about the origins of the song, because I think that can be really interesting and informative, but it rarely affects how I regard art. I know the story behind the song Limousine by Brand New, and when I consider it with that lense I'm touched by it, but the lyrics to that song mean something entirely different to me.

 

It's so great.

 

i asked craig that sorry haha

lyrics are a whole different discussion however, im talking about the music itself. i think lyrics are substantially less important, if they are at all, than music itself when it comes to enjoying music.

i dont think anything youve outlined in regards to music is really an objective measure though. just what you prefer and want to hear which is informed by your own opinions and biases and nothing really objective at all. someone who thinks an album is too samey could be countered by someone who thinks the album has a strong sense of cohesion. its still subjective. someone who thinks an album is too all over the place might be countered by someone who admires its eclecticism.

 

Taking a piece of art as a piece of self-contained aesthetic material devoid of external context is a form of New Criticism which is quite different than the sort of referential historicism of earlier art critics. This is getting kind of into the weeds here into a sort of analysis of the merits of different forms of art criticism.

 

It's certainly interesting, and as you said, the scientific research into the appeal of song structure and musical theory is inconclusive with regards to constructing an objective view of what makes a song aesthetically and artistically significant. That's something I still need to do a good deal more research on before I can really refute your claim effectively that on a scientific level, music is entirely subjective. That would, however, make music different than other forms of art which, as Chase has pointed out earlier in this thread, are at least in part objectively measurable as aesthetically superior.

 

I'm not sure I can adequately rank the songs or anything like that, but I'd say it's definitely not as pleasing to me personally as 23 or Dizzy are, and it's about up to the level of Mixtape for me, and probably a bit above My Sundown. I think I'd still take Goodbye Sky Harbor over it if I could only listen to one.

 

"Pol Roger" is in the tier of "You Were Good" and "My Sundown." Better than "Sky Harbor" and "Mixtape," not as good "23" or "Dizzy."

 

Thrice are boring Nickelback are less boring

 

You Were Good is definitely below Sky Harbor and Mixtape.

 

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Ugh why you do dis to me