Bad music  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Simon Frith (2004, p.17-9) argued that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:

  • "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
  • "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"

and "rock critical lists," which include:

  • "Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
  • "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."

He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p.28)

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Bad music" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools