Man, they just play so many different genres.

I don't have last.fm, but I imagine I wouldn't be too high up there.

Why do you think certain cultures have shared folk music heritage and songs that practically everyone knows? Aren't those canon?

Then why do so many people not care about exploring and delving into music?

Well you don't know why I bolded and called you out on it. If you're going to say most people here have boring taste then you can't just back into a hole when someone asks you to say what that means and define it. That just leaves it to other people to guess. For example, my guess is that you have a strong anti-canon bias and that you view the sign of non-boring taste as listening to lots of things that other people haven't listened to. Really being strongly anti-canon is no better than being strongly addicted to the canon. There is a reason why certain things become canon.

That's canon it's just more regionally limited. The west has been more strongly connected intellectually for a longer period of time such that the canon is more broadly stretched.

I don't really know what you're trying to get at with this question. Yes, that's what the canon is. It seems like you are agreeing with me but I'm not sure...

It seemed to me like you were agreeing with lacuna that other cultures don't canonize.

what? that is just my view. it means i am am bored of canonical discussion and almost never want to hear anything about said artists for a long time. quite a bit of my favourite albums are from the canon - so if i show any strong bias otherwise it's because of the nature of the forum. if that's bad, so be it. wouldn't it be fucking boring if you hung out with your mates talking about the exact same things for, what, half a decade now? i'd rather talk to batman about what nicki minaj is doing on roman reloaded (which btw is quite fun, will) than most of you about led zeppelin

remember when people used to hate on the radiohead thread for just listing favourite albums over and over?

pauldrach - my whole tirade began w/r/t the forum. if someone has lived in some sort of a musical vacuum and has no exposure, sure you can introduce him/her to a canonical work and it'll be gravy. this is not the case for ddders, they clearly have a love for music and have already explored the canon but 6 years on and we're still talking about the summer of love and all of that. surely there's something very odd about continually choosing to live vicariously in a certain period of time, forever. you lose touch with culture and, to an extent, the reality of musical growth. borrowed nostalgia for things that never happened.

george - everything you say is accurate but i'm speaking more in regards to popular culture and not classical music traditions of the world. classical music has its essence in tradition and is bound to be more conservative than popular culture (pop music, for lack of better term). again, i'm not saying one thing is better than the other, just that a lot of western figures are more universally revered than some of their eastern counterparts. there isn't just one reason for this, the advent and influence of western civilisation has much to do with it as well, amongst other things like english language music having wider accessibility because of english being the lingua franca. i didn't entirely mean to say obsession/fetishism is a western phenomenon, but the looks of things makes it appear so, for the most part.

the non-bold part of this clears up a lot for me as it relates to understanding your attitude sometimes on this forum and i don't really blame you for getting bored with those types of discussions. also i agree with the bold 100%.

When talking about the canon I am not simply referring to pop/rock from the 1960's and '70's. Quite on the contrary it can be very new music in my opinion, if it generates enough hype in the press. "In Rainbows" or "Merriweather Post Pavilion" certainly are established items of this forum's canon. I agree that it's close-minded if you only listen to music from a certain era but noone on here (except maybe Neg Creep and a couple of guys from the instrumentalist part of the forum) really does that.

Also I am still exploring the canon. There are some genres (eletronica for instance) whose canons I'm largely unfamiliar with. At the same time I'm delving deeper into styles I already know. Both is fun.


Now this is just bullshit. Today there is both very conservative pop music and very eclectic "classical" music around (classical hereby referring to non-pop music in general).

......

obviously when i am speaking of classical versus pop i meant in general, and not as an absolute. there is evolution in every genre but because more people are making pop music there's bound to be more variations in the genre than classical. are you really going to tell me that there's more development in classical now than in the first half of the 20th century?

No, I didn't want to say that, and I actually didn't say that either. "Classical music has its essence in tradition and is bound to be more conservative than popular culture" is what I disagreed with and still do.



This is true though, but not really related to the post of you I referred to in any way.

Fair enough. It's why I often don't participate in much music discussion on here anymore because there isn't that much new ground being covered (and I myself have very little time to take in and listen to new music given my own listening requirements). Having nothing to say I say nothing. Most of my musical interests now involved ranging more back in time to listen to stuff I haven't heard yet. To clarify I don't have any particular nostalgia for that period in history and I don't think many people here do which is why I find it a puzzling criticism. Most people participate in those discussions when they do because it is one of the few areas of large shared cultural experience.

But the history of 20th century western classical music (and going back into the late 19th century) is one of in large part rejection of previous tradition. It's what made the development so fascinating. Honestly I'm a very poor person to talk about classical music post the 1950s but you may actually be making a pretty grave mistake in the assumption that there isn't a whole bunch of crazy development still going on. It just isn't particularly well known by most people.