30 October, 2009
Comfort is not a consideration
In a Guardian article about musical comedy, Chris Larner accidentally describes how I prefer to experience music – or rather, he describes its antithesis.
When you're listening to a tune for the first time, you play games in your head. How is this phrase going to be answered? How is it going to work? The trick of both melody and lyric writing is in part to confirm your audience's expectations, so they're comforted, and in part confound them, so they're surprised.
I want to be confounded, and only confounded. In the 'first-time-heard game', I don't want to be able to predict how a phrase will develop or be answered; if I can, I'm instantly disappointed and begin to lose interest.
This is partly why I like Lancaster band The Fuzzy Trees, and am less impressed by another local band, Mostly Hums – perhaps surprisingly, as the former solely play covers, whilst the latter write and record their own material. The distinction is that the former perform interesting, novel arrangements of ostensibly familiar music, whereas the latter perform (very well) new but boringly obvious, predictable music.
Guess which is more popular....*
*: Which isn't a consideration either: I don't have any pathetic prejudice about 'popular bad, underground good'. It's just about the music; for the reasons stated above, I do tend to prefer the obscure, but never because it's obscure.
Posted by Ministry at 12:20
| 232 words
