"Bad Music"
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, 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)
Read more about this topic: Simon Frith
Famous quotes containing the words bad and/or music:
“We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)