Re: [microsound] microsound as pop music

[Brian Redfern <bredfern@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The difference between art and pop is that art gives you something
strange, new, and not necessarily easy to digest. Sonic Youth doesn't
steal many fans from P Diddy. What pop gives you is something you know and
are familiar with. A genere could start out as an art form and become pop
simply by being around long enough to become familiar, like all the
pop-punk bands out there, punk used to be a very scary, intimidating art
form which was not easy to consume, but has been around long enough to
become familiar enough that popsters can bite some part of it to create a
mass appeal. There's a lot of gray area between art and pop, and sometimes
art becomes popular, like Zappa was a very successful artist, doing some
very strange music, but mixing enough familiar elements to make it
palatable to the non-initiated. Pop music is for people who like
tradition, who are fearful of risk taking and who are conservative, while
art appeals to the mavaricks who live on risk and the difficult and the
strange.

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Beni Borja wrote:

> 
> Andrei,
> 
> I'm certanly more partial to the populist view ( the majority is right) than
> to the elitist atitude ( "the learned""are right and the populace is always
> wrong) . But I don't think that's the case here.
> 
> When you're talking of pop music , you're  completely ignoring artists like
> Frank Zappa, Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth   and scores of others that were able to
> create music that due to "the non-instant gratification musical content
> their of work" "did not appeal to your sort of average cd buying Joe". Yet ,
> despite their limited sales, they we're able to have some degree of success
> and have a deep effect on hundreds of thousands of listeners around the
> world that had their ears open to new  harmonies and rhytms.This not
> mentioning the realm of jazz/improvised music , where for sure you would
> find artists from Cecil Taylor to Anthony Braxton, that are anything but
> "instant gratifying".
> 
> As for your claim that there's no way in hell that Xenakis or Stockhausen
> would have a chance of making the pop charts any time soon. You should
> probably take a deeper look at the charts, there's stuff on the rap records
> of the  Billboard top 200 that sonically  would make even the hardcore
> avan-guardist cringe.
> 
>  saudações,
> 
> Beni
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andrei" <andrei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "microsound" <microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 5:29 PM
> Subject: Re: [microsound] microsound as pop music
> 
> 
> > On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Beni Borja wrote:
> >
> > > I can't understand someone who sees aesthetic value on being
> "difficult"...
> > >
> > > If Stockhausen, Xenakis, Cascone or anyone whose work did not meet any
> sort
> > > of public recogniction ,despite a mega-buck marketing campaign, I would
> > > seriously doubt the artistic merit of such work.
> >
> > That seems like a very pop/mainstream/"the majority is right" kind of
> > attitude.
> >
> > I think you misunderstood me.
> > I'm not taking pride in being "difficult" and I don't think artists
> > considered "difficult" intend to be that way. It's all relative anyway.
> >
> > What I wanted to point out is that there's no way in hell that Xenakis or
> > Stockhausen would have a chance of making the pop charts any time soon
> > because due to the non-instant gratification musical content their work
> > wouldn't appeal to your sort of average cd buying Joe.
> > From my experience people who listen solely to pop music can actually get
> > angry if they hear something like Xenakis or Stockhausen. Many people tend
> > to think that composers of that type are full of shit and write that kind
> > of stuff cuz they lack talent or just to be annoying on purpose (!?).
> >
> > Maybe decades or centuries from now people will really get used to what's
> > now considered extremely dissonant and things like Xenakis will seem
> > average.
> >
> >
> > > Art was meant to comunicate something, wasn't it??  Not communicating is
> > > failure , not reason to be proud.
> >
> > On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Philip Sherburne wrote:
> >
> > > Yes, but to "communicate" something, you need someone prepared to
> > > receive or interpret it. Joyce's "Ulysses," for instance, may be
> > > communicating something, but only to those open to it. Ditto
> > > L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which to most readers would come across as
> > > gibberish.
> >
> > Right. Well put.
> >
> >
> > Andrei
> >
> >
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> >
> 
> 
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