Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues (October 21, 2016) Album • Page 104

Agreed. I think it's cool to know what songs mean or are supposed to do, but I'm the one who decides if that works for me or not

 

Tristan and Minty are we still friends I'm sorry if I've come across poorly

 

When I was a little kid reading Calvin and Hobbes I was shocked when I figured out that Hobbes wasn't a real tiger, and then I was like fuck it I'm gonna pretend he is anyway

This has been a look into my roots

 

For sure. I enjoy background stories and stuff but the song is still the song. A song should be able to hold up without knowing the artists intent.

 

Of course! No worries.

 

I do believe they're entirely subjective. If someone says they prefer Rihanna to Mozart, I don't think they should need to justify their opinion to anyone. But there you go.

Anyway onto your other point. There really is no such thing as a "demo version" of a song the way we talk about it. What end up being songs are really just musical ideas in a "constant state of progress" as Jim puts it until they eventually decide to put it out. It wasn't the band's fault that the demos leaked, but they did leak, and as a result we have another set of "versions" to discuss, even if they never considered distinct versions in the eyes of the band. It's unfortunate for the band but once they get leaked, they are considered as different versions because they're something we get to listen to, and we can't "unhear" them once we have heard them. Just the nature of the beast I guess. But I get your point that the song isn't "the song" until the band puts it out into the world and calls it done. But this is just another example of the real world being out of the hands of the band and their aritstic intent.

 

Sure no problem, if people didn't rub up against each other in a cacophany of misunderstandings then this wouldn't be the internet would it, lol.

 

I do prefer Rihanna to Mozart

 

Same. By a lot

 

Not much of a Rihanna fan but even as a classical musician I do find Mozart to be pretty boring, so idk

 

With you 100%. Opinions can be wrong. There's a really scary trend with people feeling so "entitled to their opinions" that they basically become "entitled to being wrong," regardless of evidence that should prove it so.

In music, this is a hard case to make because of the amount of people who argue that music is 100% subjective. But even for the people who fall on the wholly subjective side, the conversations get ridiculously frustrating because those people often tend to still speak in objective terms: "This album is bad" or "That song was produced terribly," which are by no means subjective statements.

I'd really love to see more people being philosophically consistent. If you think art is subjective, then talk about art subjectively. If you say, "I think this album's bad," and someone asks you why, then you can respond, "Because that's how I feel" and the conversation's over. But if you say, "This album is bad," and someone questions you, you should be prepared to back up your statement with reasons and evidence.

 

I do prefer Shostakovich to Ed Sheeran by far though, so there's that

 

I asked an artist I saw in concert a few weeks ago about the meanings of the songs he'd written. Basically got told about three different songs that I'd interpreted them incorrectly.

 

"Opinions" are only wrong if they're not opinions at all, i.e. someone stating false facts as "opinions"

 

I've always thought of Ed Sheeran as just a poor man's Matt Nathanson

 

I think a lot of people speak flippantly online with an implicit "I think". That's most likely down to laziness a lot of the time though. And an opinion can be wrong if it's centred around a fact or something that could present itself as a fact, such as "I think the Earth is flat". But art? To me, if you enjoy it then you enjoy it, and that's all that really matters to an opinion.

 

I'm not sure you can always divorce a song entirely from artist's intent though. For example, the extremely vague Contemporary Christian pop song which basically just replaces feminine pronouns with "Him", which I think you and I would both agree isn't up to the same aesthetic merit of other songs, but that notwithstanding, only becomes a Christian song when you take into consideration the artist's intentions. And to a subset of fans, that artist's intentions supercede the outside view of the song as generic and vague and elevates it to a reverent status in their mind.

I don't know it's a complex issue referring to issues of art philosophy I'm by no means an expert in, but I think it's interesting to consider how artist intent relates to the aesthetic value of a piece of art. That's all I was trying to get at.

As far as the subjectivity vs. objectivity issue, there are objective measures of a song's aesthetic value which are measurable, song structures, chord progressions, etc which have been proven scientifically to be appealing to a wider subset of listeners. To submit that music is purely subjective is, to me, wrong.

 

Around here I think it's just a matter of semantics, if someone's saying an album is bad I just assume they mean they don't like it

 

I like Nathanson but can't stand anything I've heard from Sheeran

 

So much wrong in this post. So little time. I'll just say wide appeal does not make a song objectively good. At all. Horrible argument

 

What the hell is going on in this thread?

 

That's exactly what I mean haha. I love Nathanson, can't stand Sheeran. He gets a lot of credit from the mainstream for practically "pioneering" what Matt has done for years..

 

Yeah, but that's often the difference between offending someone or not.

 

thats what I'm trying to figure out.

 

Yep, totally agreed

This is very true haha