This is an idea that's so foundational for my musical outlook that I'm not even sure how to clearly articulate it. But basically, it seems fair to me to say music (and maybe art in general) is created to be enjoyed / appreciated. As such, our goal in listening to it should be figure out how to do so. When we can't, we're missing out and should want to fix that rather than gloat about our superior taste.
Maybe that assumption about why music is created isn't--or wasn't--always true. But even if you want to say that it can serve other functional roles (e.g. ringtones, tearing down bourgeois assumptions about what music is, keeping teens from loitering outside a 7-eleven), you can surely admit that "music is created to be enjoyed" holds true for most of what we consider "music" in our current society (maaan). If you are interested in music for those other roles it can have, you're certainly reading the wrong blog.
The boring Anthony Fantano-type response, though, is that Music Is Subjective™ and everyone has their own tastes, so you shouldn't force yourself to like things when in fact everyone is going to like some music and dislike some music. And that's obviously all true. But missing out is still missing out, regardless of how inevitable it is. So while you shouldn't worry too much about not "getting" a particular artist or whatever, I just don't see why you wouldn't want to be able to appreciate more things. Why take pride in not appreciating something when it exists solely to be appreciated? (Not that it can't be fun or even beneficial to try and articulate why you don't like certain music, but that's another post.)
Another truism-based response: Everything Is Political™ and so we shouldn't recklessly praise and support music without thinking about its impact in the external world. But I'd note that "enjoy / appreciate" doesn't necessarily mean "praise and support" (and I think it would need to for this objection to work). Also, granted, that is certainly a necessary consideration for everyone, but it's not the focus of this blog. (I mostly leave the more nuanced thinking on this dynamic to the geniuses over at Pitchfork.com.)
One more less fashionable objection might be that in order to determine what is aesthetically good / worthy of appreciation, one must also be able to determine what is bad--meaning some music must not be worthy of appreciation. And while I could just fall back on the old "nothing's objectively aesthetically good, it's just subjective opinion" line, a slightly more satisfying response might be say that there are practically an infinite number of reasons you might think a work of music is good--so even if that does suggest that other works are not as good in a particular respect--it doesn't mean you couldn't find other reasons to appreciate them. That said, I also don't see why my approach should prevent you from deciding that you like one work more than other (although it admittedly makes that harder).
I feel like I still haven't made it totally clear why I think this is so important, but oh well. This is a blog post, not a treatise. Just try to lighten up and enjoy things once in a while, I guess!
Edit: I guess one more important clarification is that I'm not saying you should actively seek to enjoy as wide a variety of music as possible if you aren't interested in doing so (my own listening habits are pretty narrow at the moment). I just find that this is a helpful way of looking at things when you do run into music that you don't immediately like.
I wrote something a while back (suspendedreason.com/2016/07/08/generic-fit/) that made similar-ish arguments in support of the ways music is made to serve many people & roles:
ReplyDelete> In explore-exploit models, exploration is costly; no one can explore thoroughly every area of his consumption. Instead we prioritize, and generic-fitting goods allow us to get value out of unexplored, non-prioritized areas. The literary critic might, knowing nothing of fashion, simply buy extra-large shirts and 36×30 jeans at Target. The quality of “two legs of equal length” is a distilled property of pants which applies, purely and truly, to a very wide consumer base. For most people, there is no significant compromise of fitness in buying a pair of pants with two legs of equal length. Then there is specific sizing and cut — the average of human proportions, from which most people vary (and to varying degrees). This critic could get more value out of clothing which fits him more precisely, which are more suitable to his body type or skin tone (specific rather than averaged), but has decided that cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t pan out: the exploration time required to gain this marginal value (taking measurements, reading up on fashion theory, or experimenting with new cuts) isn’t worth it. Nevertheless, there still exists a base value of owning pants and shirts or eating a meal: generic products provide this value without the cost of exploration.
Extrapolate here to the accessibility & genericism of pop music. Even if we aren't poptimists--and that ideology comes with plenty of hangups--we can agree it isn't that a Top 40 song (like a Nicholas Sparks novel) is *failing* at being great art. It's succeeding at being accessible, generically enjoyable art, for its target demographics.
I think the way out of the relativism that "it's all subjective, mannn" seems to imply is shifting instead to there being many goalposts. This lines up with your comments about persona-driven vs non-persona-driven music, too. A lot of the music hardcore music fans like is music that's really good at hitting the goalpost of "being interesting to hardcore music fans." It'll also likely--because of mutually exclusive choices, and the tradeoffs of triage--be very bad at the goalpost that is interesting/stimulating-non-hardcore-music-fans.
"Bad music" --> == "music that can't knock-it-down on any of the goalposts I care about," or, more universally, "music that doesn't knock down many of the goalposts human beings generally seem to care about"
These reductionisms to the building blocks makes these points feel basic, which they are. But maybe refactoring the baserock is what dense urbanism needs anyway.