An interesting opinion on the importance/unimportance of opinions, authenticity etc.
In My Opinion ..
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
by 18 Comments
An interesting opinion on the importance/unimportance of opinions, authenticity etc.
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He’s got a point, but I think it’s quite funny how he pre-empts his opinion with a long rant about people having opinions on the internet! But yes, this notion of authenticity in songwriting is well overdue being dismantled a bit. Mmm, I think it goes a wee bit too far though, to start bringing racism and homophobia into it.
And I have to disagree with him on one point that he just throws out there near the start of the article: “Music just isn’t as good as it used to be… Bullshit. OK ? Go and spend an hour on Bandcamp instead of replying in all-caps to other people’s Twitter posts. Done. Moving on.” Nah, I don’t buy it. I’m firmly in the “music used to be better” camp, and I doubt even five or six hours browsing Bandcamp would be enough to convince me otherwise.
TBF, he also recognised and flagged the irony of giving us his opinions, rant notwithstanding…
I can accept that music is as great now as ever, just maybe not the music that most males in their fifties and sixties are into
I think it is, @dai or it could be that I have access to more of it and (a little) more disposable income than I had in my twenties. So I get to explore a little further and act on others (AW) recommendations.
I buy a lot of music via Bandcamp. I hear a lot of excellent artists that way. Generally, I only buy physical artefacts, but a few artists are so talented that I weaken and buy digitally if that’s all that is available. I find that I play the physical discs much more often, as I don’t wish to have to fire up a load of extra tech to hear music – the hi-fi is in the living room, so that’s where the music is played. My impression of the current state of popular music in general? There’s just as much great stuff out there as ever there was; but there’s a massive amount of really awful crap out there as well, far more than ever before, simply because the production and distribution facilities are so much easier to access these days. The arithmetic mean of musical quality is therefore swayed in a negative direction by the sheer proportion of shite on offer, but set that aside and there are folk making music today that’s just as glorious as it has been at any time in our lives.
I’m sorry, I seem to have accidentally derailed this thread by talking about whether music is as good as it used to be, when that isn’t even the point of the initial post! Oops. I’m ITCHING to expound on my view but I’m checking myself, because we’ve done this debate to death already, haven’t we? The debate can’t possibly go anywhere. I shall lower my rapier with a polite gesture of submissiveness and I’ll go back to my 1973 LPs!
Nonsense! Just start a new thread! Get it off yer chest!
Are you still itching, Arthur? Could be the heat…
I’ve got a sweaty rash.
Come back Moosey, we have a job for you.
What’s the difference between “in my opinion…” and “just saying, like…”?
The latter is more irritating to the reader…
In your opinion, (like)
Arf!
It’s an interesting article, thanks for posting.
Reading it made me think of the song I’ve been listening to a lot since it came out last week; Full Of Life, from the new Christine & The Queens Record.
He’s more or less literally just taken Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and sung over the top of it. An incredibly familiar piece of music, more or less unchanged, nicked wholesale. And yet, there’s something so beautiful and moving in those vocals, and the whole thing sort of fits together like it was always meant to be.
When i hear the word “authenticity” and it is taken to mean earnest folk rock preaching or skronky jazz, I remind myself authenticity is being true to oneself, and that means early Roxy Music, Frank Zappa, and Steely Dan are authentic, too. Gate keepers: go phuck yourselves, whatever gate they may be.
When I hear the word authenticity, I expect to hear crumhorns.
I am a subscriber to the “Folk On Foot” podcast series, where ex- BBC bigwig Matthew Bannister gets out and about for on-the-hoof chats with various UK folky-types.
A very enjoyable series except for the fact that from time to time they devote entire episodes to “The Official Folk Albums Chart Show”, where more and more often there are examples played where I find myself thinking “That’s not Folk! It’s Pop!”
It’s just an opinion, so it can be debated, disregarded or agreed with as one sees fit.