Also be nice, everyone. This is for funsies not fightsies.
Mine is that Prince is suuuuuper overrated and merely a meh songwriter at best.
Also be nice, everyone. This is for funsies not fightsies.
Mine is that Prince is suuuuuper overrated and merely a meh songwriter at best.
Music has always been heavily influenced by the physical spaces it occupies and the people who occupy that space. From classical symphonic music to EDM to stadium rock, all music relates to these spaces and adapts to the experience of their audiences. And the modern space is, disproportionately, headphones. And the modern audience is, disproportionately, a single person.
In other words, nearly all the modern music you listen to was created as an expression of capitalist atomization.
Yeah music made for headphones is more and more common. Lorde's first album "Pure Heroine", for example, is straight up meant to be listened to on headphones. A lot of the spacial effects don't sound right on speakers.
An example of this is bass panning from one ear to another, or switching from ear to ear/channel to channel. ("Buzzcut Season" off of that album does this.) Doesn't work well on speakers, bass isn't spacial, your brain can't really tell where it's coming from. Its how something like a subwoofer in the corner of a room or theatre can work. But with headphones, where each ear is fully isolated from the other (if there's no crossfeed involved) and you have an entire driver centimetres from your ear, it can produce a wonderful spacial effect.
I think the panned bass thing is a good example, yeah. Another big one is little intricacies being lost in large rooms. For example, jazz clubs traditionally being less reverberant so things like intense bebop runs were still intelligible and therefore able to be popularized whereas that stuff becomes like mush in a lot of really reflective spaces. It’s why so many bougie theaters have spent so much money on giant movable wooden panels for their walls and ceilings. I think a lot of modern metal music has a similar dynamic with headphones.
Yeah a lot of headphones can lose that sense of space or become super wide, and sound very unnatural with regards to details, with music made to be listened on speakers, because there are no reflections, at all. The drums on metal and hard rock go to mush quite often. The Harman target can help, but still.
And as you said, listening in a room full of reflections is no better either. Just another extreme. And treating rooms is expensive unless you're fine with old egg carton boxes everywhere.
Your take is amazing and I can't believe I never saw it that way before. :order-of-lenin:
david byrne writes about this in the first chapter of his book "how music works". more about the first part than the whole atomization thing but it's still really interesting
of course david byrne
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There’s a loooot of music that I just didn’t get until I heard it performed live. A lot of 50’s rock music sounded super cliche to me until I played in a cover band whose leader was real good at picking hard dance tunes and some of that shit can really get you going with the right band.
I always thought folk jigs and reels were really mid, then I was at a beach while a local band jammed Louisiana folk music and got everyone in audible range dancing. Higher energy event than any concert I've ever been to
I'm not really understanding this, how are the prevalence of headphones related to the capitalist atomization?
Prior to the advent of recorded audio, music was something people performed together, often as a family or community. Yeah, there were orchestras and professional singers, but the dominant way that people interacted with music was much more ephemeral and communal. Over time, more focus has been placed on music as a form of consumption. It became a marker of personal taste and identity, and importantly it did so in the way that all commodities do over time: in an increasingly individualistic manner.
I think the most immediate way to see how this processed had worked in the recent past is to look at the gentrification and corporate consolidation of music venues. But I think the whole thing about headphones is kind of a combination of these two phenomenon. Music is driven by its space and headphones are literally the driest space possible. And music is also increasingly individualistic under capitalism, so some music dovetails with capitalism better than others
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Wouldn't headphone era also happen under communism?
Maybe, but part of the reason headphones are prevalent is the death of space and time and money for art and community. It's much easier to go to a live concert when the ticket is $5 and you can take a streetcar to the venue. It's an inevitable tension, but there's a diversity of goals if people also engage with live music more often.
Sure, just not to the same extent. It’s about the prevalence of individualistic consumption more than anything.
Might not be so dominant