| spemanig said: What is important and influential to the industry is provable. Album sales, fan base size, similar sounds, those are all quantifiable. It doesn't matter what's important to you personally. When over a dozen of the highest grossing musicians in the industry link the genesis of their signature sounds and subject matter to one album, that's influence, and that's irrefutable. I can't take anything else you're saying seriously, though. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Theory isn't subjective. Saying that albums aren't organized the way MBDTF is not a subjective statement. If you don't understand what that means, even after having it spelled out, then you obviously learned nothing in your theory courses. What I'm talking about is organisation and optimization. That isn't an opinion. Those are facts. Those are based off literal numbers. Saying statements like "12-tone music has a whole host of cool music theory concepts built into it" makes that lack of theoretical understanding abundantly clear. 99% of modern music has "a whole host of cool music theory concepts built onto it." That's like saying baseball has a "whole host of cool physics concepts built into it." What makes music good is quantifiable. Theory is literally the analytical study of explaining why we like music. Theory has nothing to do with being simple or complex. It's the explanation of the organization of sound frequency and their relationship with each other. Theory is "how it all comes together." There are "scientists" who "create the perfect song." They are called popular musicians, and the "perfect songs" are the millions of popular hit songs. There isn't just one perfect song just like there isn't just one perfect equasion. These people make hundreds of millions of dollars creating sounds that are crafted to be pleasing, and any basic harmonic reduction can tell you exactly why. That's theory. I guarantee you they haven't because you clearly have no understanding of what that statement meant judging by your response. It is a provable fact. It either is, or it isn't. That's theory. This isn't a statement of "well MBDTF sounds pretty to me." It's an efficient, organized, optimized album, to the degree of which none have come close to replicating in all the thousands of albums I've listened to. That's backed up by harmonic and reductive analysis. This is math. Does that mean there can't be another as tight? Of course not, but that's the point. There hasn't been. At least none that have even come remotely close to having the exposure, and therefore influence, that MBDTF has had. Who's to say someone else would have? It doesn't matter. They didn't. He did. It doesn't matter if someone else would have done it eventually. It doesn't matter if someone else did it first. That's what influence is. Him specifically doing it is what striggered that change. It doesn't matter if he's a product of his time. Obviously he is. Obviously his style is a product of his own influencers. Obviously his music is a product of his own influencers. 808s didn't come out of his ass. That sound came from his effection for synthpop and electropop artists of the 80s like Phil Collins, Gary Numan, TJ Swan, and Boy George. But they don't matter unless you're a music hystorian who cares about that stuff. They didn't have the platform he did when he dropped 808s, so they didn't gain the magnetude of exposure that he did with 808s. Drake is one of the biggest musicians of the 2010s. He's probably a more popular musician than Kanye right now. Is he as important or influential as Kanye though? Of course not. Drake didn't make the wave, he rode it. Kanye was a tsunami. All this "it's just an opinion" stuff is moot. It's like saying that you can't say Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, The Beetles, Michael Jackson, and Queen weren't the most important and influential musicians of the 20th century because "I personally liked Greenday better, so they were more important and influential musicians to me." That's cute, but that's not what this is about. |
I don't really understand your becoming so rude about this. I have remained polite in my disagreements with your points, and I hoped you would do the same (rather than trying to tell me that I "clearly know nothing"). I'm sure you know quite a bit about music theory, but I assure you I do as well, and have been learning it formally and informally for a very long time. I can't prove that to you via writing anymore than you can prove yours to me, but let's just give each other the benefit of the doubt.
I could be wrong, but from your initial comment ("and see how people react"), it seemed like you clearly wanted someone to disagree with you so you could have a debate about it, so I did. If that's not what you wanted, I apologize. Obviously, we fundamentally disagree about some aspects of music, which I think it good. I enjoy disagreements, because it gives me a chance to evaluate what I think. However, I think it's pretty arrogant to think, let alone say, that you know what you're talking about and someone else knows nothing, especially when we've never met, and our interactions consist of about 5 posts.
I'm assuming you aren't interested in hearing most of my counterpoints (no pun intended), but I would like to clear up one thing. Your final paragraph seems to indicate that you completely missed my point. I never said that any artist can be considered the most important or influential just because of personal preference. What I've been trying to say is that no one singular artist can definitively labeled the "most" anything. I wholeheartedly agree with your list of 20th century musicians who are very, very influential and important. Someone could easily suggest, however, that Miles Davis belongs in that list, or maybe Led Zeppelin, or maybe someone else I'm forgetting. And which one of those artists would you say is the singular most important or influential? I'm arguing that It's impossible to say, because there are degrees of subjectiveness. That's what I'm saying--not that personal preference trumps any and all analysis or data.
