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Grex > Music1 > #84: The Worst and Most Annoying Music | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 134 responses total. |
md
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response 25 of 134:
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Jan 21 18:49 UTC 1994 |
Re Mahler: What annoys me about Mahler is the vulgarity. The
emotion is cheap and excessive, the effects are tawdry. Someone
once said the reason why so much Mahler sounds like movie music
is that Korngold and the other early composers of film scores
knew Mahler's music and realized that its general sound was well-
suited to the new medium. Precisely.
But mere vulgarity has never stopped me from liking other kinds
of music. Shostakovich is one of the most vulgar (and most
Maherlian, I'm told) of 20th century composers, but I enjoy many
of his compositions. What is it about Mahler's particular brand
of vulgarity that annoys me so?
Re Pachelbel's Canon: The music itself doesn't annoy me, I
admit. It's just that a piece so slight and inconsequential
can't possibly support the veneration it's been accorded in the
past twenty years or so. No one with an ounce of taste seriously
thinks the music has any qualities. When music critics and
theorists talk about it at all, it's generally as a joke and an
embarrassment. When the remakers of "Father of the Bride" needed
the quintessentially trite symbol of phoniness to play at the
daughter's wedding, guess what they chose? But everybody's
listening to it. Why? Because, well, because everybody's
listening to it. I'm thinking like, the Glitzsteins and the
Baguettes both had it playing at their houses over the holidays,
and Libby Glitzstein is a gourmet cook and Bill Baguette is a
full professor of sociology at the university, so it *must* be
good music, right?
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remmers
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response 26 of 134:
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Jan 21 20:00 UTC 1994 |
Okay md, when are you going to take your inner snob on a walk down
Tin Pan Alley and have it do a number on ragtime?
Oh, and do you think that the popularity of P's Canon might have
some influence on your disdain for it?
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md
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response 27 of 134:
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Jan 21 20:13 UTC 1994 |
Ragtime is fun. But it isn't *that* much fun. I mean, all
the talk about Scott Joplin having achieved a permanent place
the in the pantheon of composers, right there between Beethoven
and Brahms, leaves me scratching my head.
It isn't the popularity by itself, or the inconsequentiality by
itself, that influences my disdain for Pachelbel's Canon. It's
the combination of the two. It's people talking about something
that isn't even *as* interesting as Ravel's Bolero, as if it were
an example of very high - almost sacred, in fact - art. Btw, when
I talk about Pachelbel's Canon, I mean of course the Canon in D.
Or so it's called by the aficionados, as if there were some other,
inferior canon - say, the Canon in F. Preposterous.
But I'm just being grouchy, and anyway, there's no arguing about
tastes.
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vidar
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response 28 of 134:
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Jan 21 21:48 UTC 1994 |
Light-Speed Polka. I can stand most other Polka' s, but not those
that move to fast. They're to hard to dance to.
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skeez
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response 29 of 134:
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Jan 21 22:40 UTC 1994 |
I cannot stand droning Metal songs which are the same monotonous chords all the
way thru, and have a couple words, which cannot be understood
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shaymu
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response 30 of 134:
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Jan 21 23:34 UTC 1994 |
Meat Loaf-I'd do anything for love (especially the video!)
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vidar
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response 31 of 134:
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Jan 22 00:11 UTC 1994 |
Hum. Howabout Killing the Beavis & Butthead with Cher "I got you babe"
/
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skeez
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response 32 of 134:
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Jan 22 00:30 UTC 1994 |
B & B suck
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vidar
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response 33 of 134:
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Jan 22 12:59 UTC 1994 |
That's what I thunk.
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chelsea
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response 34 of 134:
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Jan 22 15:31 UTC 1994 |
I like Pachelbel's Canon and because I like it I wish it wasn't
played to death behind wine and automobile commercials and piped
into Target stores and recorded by *full orchestras*. For me
it's a gentle *chamber* piece that's simple and folk-like. It's
predictable and balanced and warming. It's something like the
Mr. Rogers effect. The fact that your neighbor, the gourmet likes
it, doesn't at all alter my feelings about the piece. As it should
be.
Likewise, I don't give a ninny whether Mahler is fashionable or not.
Fashion has nothing to do with his ninth. It's too personal for
fashion. I'll take a risk here and share something of this personal
reaction and I'll explain why and when I listen to the hour-and-a-half
that is Mahler's Ninth. I work almost 10 hours a day with people in
pain, very real physical pain. Death is there all the time, not
in the immediate sense of their dying on the spot, but of the news
of what the future holds. There is anger, confusion, grief, and more
anger. When I need to make sense of this I listen to Mahler's Ninth,
all the way through. Skipping to the final movements doesn't work.
I don't believe in a god and afterlife. I believe in death as an
end. Mahler's Ninth may be vulgar but then so is death, so it all
balances out.
I don't know enough about music to discuss it on an intellectual
level. And knowing that Sam Shepherd likes Ravel's Bolero wouldn't
allow me to enjoy it one whip more than I do, which is not at all.
See, when you aren't looking at music with an intellectual eye you
can be outrageously forgiving and enjoy it because it works, on a
very personal and simple level, just for you.
Maybe the hosts of those cocktail parties simply like P's Canon.
Maybe they haven't studied how the entire piece is so simply
constructed that it's musical child's play. Maybe they haven't
heard the snide comments made by the cynical intellectuals. Or
maybe they have but like it anyhow, publicly, in your face.
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msu
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response 35 of 134:
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Jan 22 17:36 UTC 1994 |
I hate any Weird Al Yankovic song after the 2nd listening.
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vidar
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response 36 of 134:
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Jan 22 22:45 UTC 1994 |
Doesn't that happen to everybody?
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skeez
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response 37 of 134:
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Jan 23 15:30 UTC 1994 |
Re# 35 yes.....ugh. Um, I really hate both of "
<scuse me> The versions of "Whoot <or whoop> there it is", And I hate any
jodeci stuff, I hate all those stupid take offs of Boyz II men also.
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vidar
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response 38 of 134:
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Jan 23 15:49 UTC 1994 |
Uff da?
/
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carson
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response 39 of 134:
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Jan 23 19:32 UTC 1994 |
re #37: There are SO many versions of that song. There's the "Whoomp! (Addams
Family)" and JUST THE OTHER DAY I saw "Whoomp! (Si Lo Es!)"! Give me
a break! The worst part is that Billboard STILL ranks the Tag Team
version in the top 10 (broke a record last week)! Why would anyone who
DOESN'T own it yet decide to buy it NOW and WHY are there SO MANY of
them?
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robh
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response 40 of 134:
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Jan 23 20:24 UTC 1994 |
Re 36 - Nope, I still listen to my old Weird Al albums (I have all of
them) and still enjoy them. Acquired taste.
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vidar
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response 41 of 134:
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Jan 23 20:45 UTC 1994 |
O gods.
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md
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response 42 of 134:
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Jan 24 17:01 UTC 1994 |
Re #34, chelsea: I certainly wasn't discussing music on an
"intellectual" level. I don't like the *sound* of Mahler's music.
It annoys me. For all I know or care, his symphonies might be
rigorously planned and developed, in such a way as to provide a
feast for musicologists and other intellectual types. In fact, I'm
told by Mahlerians of my acquaintance that that is precisely the
case. But I can't get that far with it, and have no desire to. My
ears won't let me.
As to Pachelbel's Canon, there is absolutely nothing wrong with
being "outrageously forgiving and enjoying music because it works,
on a very personal and simple level, just for you." I do it all
the time. Everyone does. When someone observes how shallow and
vulgar disco music is, I'm not anxious to argue or defend myself;
I just smile and shrug and pop another Donna Summer CD into the
player. Nothing personal.
[Btw, I invented the Glitzsteins and the Baguettes. I was trying
to imagine how the "Canon in D" might have been elevated to its
present "immortal classic" status for others, not for me. It
didn't happen for me at all, obviously.]
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md
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response 43 of 134:
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Jan 24 21:00 UTC 1994 |
And another thing [md shakes a finger at chelsea], I'm *not* a
"cynical intellectual"! I'm dreadfully unhip, in fact, to the
point of being innocent and childlike oftentimes (and I've grown
to like it that way, thank you -- or at least to accept it as
something that I couldn't change if I wanted to). And I have
never in my life told someone that I didn't like the music they
were playing, much less made "snide comments" about it to them or
to anyone else. That is, if someone asks what kind of music
annoys me, I'll say Mahler for sure; but if you're *playing*
Mahler on your stereo when I'm there, you won't hear a peep from
me about it. Not that you could hear a peep anyway, over all
that noise.
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chelsea
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response 44 of 134:
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Jan 24 21:35 UTC 1994 |
Well, I'm sorry Michael, but I tend to think of you as an
intellectual and when I start thinking of someone in those
terms I can't seem to help myself. ;-) And what's this
about there not being any Baquettes? Gawd, and I was liking
them already.
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vidar
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response 45 of 134:
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Jan 25 01:49 UTC 1994 |
this item is to discuss annoying music, NOT to bore us with the 50 miute
lecture on your abused childhood, or whatever you're talking about.
Stay on Topic.
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rcurl
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response 46 of 134:
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Jan 25 05:43 UTC 1994 |
You start :). The most annoying music I know of is *any* of the music
used on Morning Edition, or All Things Considered. They use little
snippets of music to separate topics, and the music is not only
totally irrelevant to the topics covered, but the snippets are also
totally out of musical context. They aren't even music; they are
tonal noise. I've stopped listening to both programs essentially
because I got sensitized (like alergic) to these musical irrelevancies,
and I felt a tinge of anger whenever one occurred. Time to leave!
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vidar
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response 47 of 134:
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Jan 25 17:29 UTC 1994 |
The most annoying music that I have heard lately is W4 106.7 Fm's
Hit or Miss country song that they played last night. I don't know
the title, but it was definately a miss.
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skeez
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response 48 of 134:
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Jan 25 23:50 UTC 1994 |
Anything by Snoop Doggy Dogg. His generic, loopy, hazy little stolen P-Funk
beats are a shame. If I wuz George Clinton, I would be pissed off to the
highest level of pisivity with Doggy. At least Dre knows that one is ok, but
Snoop just can't get the message.
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vidar
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response 49 of 134:
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Jan 26 02:21 UTC 1994 |
There are a lot of musicians/singers like that.
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