Objective quality in purely subjective things

[Valka D'Ur]

The 90s decaprio Shakespeare is an incredibly powerful great work of cinema.

But like I said, for some people if it’s outside your taste filter, greatness cannot overcome that. I wouldn’t ask you to identify great rap music let alone ask if you liked any of it.

Like for me, I won’t like all great works, and I won’t always recognize it even. Many of these things, like Shakespeare and most music genres, require a certain amount of training to perceive it as anything discernible.

But I have come to understand there’s like, a force that exists. A force of objective artistic greatness. And that force exists whether or not ones own preferences align.

I tried talking to chatgpt about it just to get a hint at what the averaged form of the total sum of online discourse can say about it, and … not much. It’s basically regarded as “there’s cultural values and subjective experience and popularity”… ok. Yeah, we know.

Why would you ask something that can't think for itself and has no opinions that weren't programmed into it?

The Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet is the first version of this play I saw. Of course it was on TV, after we studied the play in my Grade 10 English class, and since I'd enjoyed the play, I watched the movie.

This is one of my favorite scenes:

At the time I saw this on TV, it was before I started working in theatre, and before I could really appreciate what it takes to put on a Shakespeare play (the one I worked on was A Midsummer Night's Dream, years after working on West Side Story). But fast-forward to 1986, when I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism. I have a couple of dresses that are similar to the style most of the women in this clip are wearing (not the headdresses, though).

I've since seen this play performed live, and yes, the actors played the bedroom scene in the nude.

The first Shakespeare play I saw live, though, was Twelfth Night. A traveling theatre group from Vancouver did a performance in Red Deer. I was in Grade 12 at the time, and a couple of friends talked me into going. I didn't know what to expect, since we hadn't studied this one in school and I was going into it cold - had no idea what it was about at all. But it was easy to understand most of it, and I was glad that I was able to understand most of the jokes. And it made me realize the reason why so many people find Shakespeare boring.

Shakespeare's plays were meant to be seen - experienced in a theatre, or at least on a stage, rather than just read. That's not to say I haven't read some I've never seen. But I'd get more out of them if I could see a performance.

That performance of Twelfth Night was enough to get me hooked.

 

[Kyriakos]

This is an impossible topic for which my language faculties are useless.

But there is, meaningfully, better and worse art. Not in all ways and who knows why. You can have better technique, labor harder, and have all the inspiration and probably will make superior art, but sometimes make inferior art to a piece made by less of all those things. Better art by less technique, less effort, and less inspiration. It cannot be pinned down how, even if it can be helped and fostered, but ultimately, it just happens.

We have no way of interacting with art in a non subjective nature. Nor can it be broken down into constituent parts with definitely quality, merely a recognition that some things communicate more powerfully and meaningfully and Goodly than other things. Two 1-4-5 chord progressions based songs might result in one great chord progression and one boring one. There is no superior BPM.

Robots suggest music to us by mean regressions to categories and none of those categories are "good". If you only like the, what I am calling objectively better music in 4 genres in hopes it gives you the objectively good artist of a 5th related genre (already working within their world of "genres"), it will give you instead 4 mid but popular artists among those who also like your 4 preferred genres.

The educated will feel this tension between knowing objectively better purely subjective things exist, and knowing that they cannot exist, by definition.

How can we even talk about this stuff?

There are too many parameters - I did try to present this in my literary seminars. My own view is that the observer/reader of art by and large creates a special artwork, distinct from what the artwork they had in front of them "was". So if they were struck by it, it means they (for their own reasons) used the other person's work as a vehicle for/avatar of an important to them work they already carried with them (without realizing). It would be beating the point of art, to try to argue that if someone liked it so much, for them it should be worse just because another doesn't like it. A very common mistake, of course, is to think that just because you like it, others will too or should. Both errors stem from the same root, a lack of understanding that art isn't experienced the same nor is it experienced in correlation to where its viewers fall in one, ten, or a myriad scales.
The question of objectivity, on the other hand, clearly also can be raised, in regards to how the art is formed. In music, you will compose more intricate patterns, harmonies etc if you have taken music theory; in painting likewise with color theory, perspective and shadowing, and even in literature (which for many reasons is less tied to set theory) there are techniques related to specific effects. And then, while everyone can realize that a Caravaggio isn't something you can paint without serious knowledge, it doesn't stop drawings by children being also able to impress => the objective ultimately isn't antagonistic to the particular and subjective

 

[Angst]

I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED (not but kinda)

The educated will feel this tension between knowing objectively better purely subjective things exist, and knowing that they cannot exist, by definition.

here's a summary of the common belief within academia, and my own stance. lots is just resummaries of my rants elsewhere in these threads, i think.

it's also really messy but i couldn't stop writing

* *

1
most academics on aesthetics have abandoned the notion of universal objectivity in artistic value or quality. (ie, doing aesthetics as mathematics or physics, for example.) this is because all methods so far have been, to put it mildly, at best disastruous, and at worst, abject evil.

2
there's (reasonably) objective qualities/criteria as to a piece; material components, geometric shape, spacial relationship with the observer, unfolding over time. measurable through the same objective criteria as in the sciences.

3
however, there's very little predictability in reproducing the effect of a piece by virtue of the piece's qualities, in itself. ie a particular emotional or ambient response for the piece's observer, just isn't reproducable. people have tried forever, and the fancy new psychological models don't tell us much either (it may be at some point, but we're not there yet).

4
therefore, there is no universal code for what makes art "good".

5
this is the start of the long one. SO: HOWEVER: BUT: ETC: there is still a lot of aesthetic theory that describes what makes art work, and a lot of it is actually substantial. a parsing of what exactly "objectivity" means here is important. the distinction between subjective as in "an opinion" and objective as in an extra-human "rule" isn't really that useful here. art isn't physics. you can't describe the effect of art similar to how science describes a magma flow's innate (yet complicated) movement. a lot of historic attempts have done mathematical models and made leaps of inductive logic to claim universality (and providence, privilege, power, prestige, etc) of some method. regardless of some nietzschean analysis of the situation or whatever, the math is just often wrong when it meets the real world.

6
but this doesn't remove a semblance of objectivity. if you've ever dealt with the humanities (liberal arts, whatever), you'll notice that there's a lot of qualified discussion that is predictive, while not being measurably solid. SO. the distinction of subjective human taste (whose truth is arbitrary) and objective external world (whose truth is absolute), when it comes to culture, is a mess of platonism and enlightenment and modernism and whatever. at least the distinction between subjective and objective doesn't make sense when you take the material (point 2) and use inductive reasoning to treat it as a magma flow indifferent to humans and always having the same reaction. you have to basically abandon the distinction between (arbitrarily wrong) taste and (always true) capital K Knowledge. wholly so. instead, look into how a material objectively makes you feel. its rules are not (universally) objective, but what you feel is a present response in the world. what you feel is something you actually feel. when it comes to thinking a tree is an airplane, you're naturally wrong in the external sense, but it's true that you think this tree is an airplane. what you feel doesn't just disappate into thin air because you're wrong.

7
the thing is, simply, that art is not a science, but describing its properties and how you relate to it doesn't rob aesthetics of predictive power. because thing is, old aesthetics are often quite on point, even the very wrong ones that flew too close to the sun and claimed universality. their issue wasn't ever their description of technique - their issue was claim to extra-human essential, ideal truth. this is the supposed discrepancy of aesthetic objectivism vs subjectivism. within their own frameworks of creation and observation, the old masters are on god damn point. it's very predictive for educating people for the material process of creating something good. that's the whole point of skill. older "objective" aesthetics are really bad at trying to defend that trees are airplanes, but they are excellent at describing how and why the tree looks like an airplane for the very specific person involved. i don't know if the metaphor makes sense, but that's basically what's going on.

8
this is just my opinion now and/or not mainstream musings anymore. what many miss, including academics, is that art, as loosely as it's often claimed to be defined, is a mode of engagement. art is highly ritualized. the proof is in modern museums with all their "junk" (junk that i happen to like because it's just outright fun). museums are ritualized space where you can choose to engage with even perfectly ordinary things aesthetically. now, movements of avantgardism/progressive art/whateveryouwanttocallit is by definition hard to engage with this way, as its genre framing is chaotic and ill-defined - that's the point of avantgarde is to push the boundaries. which boundaries? the present known formal structures of genre we're acquainted with - genre frameworks are cultural, mind you, something we have grown into, and already know how to engage with. avantgardism explicitly tries to break with that, and we do not have the ritual disposition to engage with such material beyond "this is how it breaks with what i already know".

8.5
sidenote, by ritual, i don't mean dancing around a campfire or eating bread in church (well, both are included). it includes laying down in bed with a coffee and putting on a jazz record (and particularly, that the music uses the right material structure in the flow of material sound). if you don't want to call it ritual, call it something else. just use mode of engagement or whatever. the museum predisposes you to a mode of engagement: "you are now looking at art, and will engage with it through the mode of engagement that's looking at art."

9
i'm already tired of writing, but i'll try and finish the point. i'll go back to John Frow that i talk about a lot, and do a short further musing. he made a good book on this (literally named Genre) where he supposes that genre is the framework we use to understand literally everything. he thinks that because he's a literature academic so yea yea what the hell is this guy talking about.
- but -
the book notes a lot of really fundamentally important stuff when it comes to engaging with artistic material in general. this is an extension of the genre frameworks - the formal structures - i brought up before. basically, in order for art to be succesful, it needs an observer to recognize its formal structures, emitting a response. and the premise for recognizing formal structures is a predisposition of genre structures that are inherently present in our engagement with material. Frow brings up the point that any collections of materials in a "piece" or "text" or whatever will read fundamentally different depending on the genre framing. the introductionary point is that the very same "text" can read completely differently if it's viewed "as if" different genres. and some texts can just interchangably be used through different lenses of such predisposition. this is where the supposedly hyper-individualistic maxims of "objective" attempts at aesthetics get elevated to a broader, more predictive - and yes, social - system. this is where any aesthetics start making sense; they are very good at describing the pure material; they are very good at describing which formal structures matter within their genre.

10
all in all: you fundamentally have to abandon trying to explain art as magma flow (objectivity), but it's still objectively true that people have reacted to a thing a certain way. and, simply, when a number of similar-sounding songs are popular, you can approximate how the material flows and tie that up into a system that people like. just because it's temporally exchangable and culturally situated doesn't mean it didn't happen.

11
i want to get into the phenomenological principle of intersubjectivity now but i'm tired

 

[Gori the Grey]

What @Angst gives us here is excellent and both squares with my own thinking and helps make my own thinking more precise.

One of my reference points for this is Aristotle's Poetics, which has its own way of blending objective and subjective. He picks one genre: tragedy. (So in that he confirms Frow, whom I'll have to read--sounds right up my alley). Aristotle works out (by looking at examples of the genre) what aesthetic effect examples of the genre seem to be aiming at. Any aesthetic effect is naturally subjective to a large extent (will occur within individual people), but if tragedies are trying to elicit that particular subjective response in all members of the audience, we can say things about why some of them do it better than others (and that is something along the lines of an objective criterion for excellence in that genre).

So Aristotle discerns that tragedies are trying to elicit a response of pity and fear. That lets him say something about what will objectively make for a good tragedy. For example, the main character should be a fundamentally admirable person, because when bad things happen to bad people it elicits gratification rather than pity (and so that would interfere with the intended aesthetic effect). Also, there should be a reversal in circumstances and a reversal in thinking, and these should come in a particular order because the most agonizing state to be in is seeing how things could have gone better (reversal in thinking) only once you can no long do anything to bring that about (after the reversal in circumstances has occurred).

Anyway, working from these premises, he doesn't have any of our modern compunction about saying that Oedipus the King achieves the tragic effect more powerfully than any other Greek tragedy--and he can give objective reasons why that is true. Those hold, of course, as Angst's principles suggest, only for the original audience (who shares the baseline assumptions about what a particular genre is trying to do) or any later consumer who bothers to educate him or herself on those assumptions to a degree as to share them. The importance of which we've already had mentioned here, relative to Shakespeare and rap.

Maybe we can use the present rap-battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar as a case study. It involves two artists, recognized by their audience to be skilled in a particular genre, trying to outdo one another in that genre-- i.e. trying to be recognized as more perfectly realizing the aesthetic aims of that genre. It's a genre for which it may be possible to spell out the aesthetic aims with some precision. You are trying to compose a diss in words that conform to a certain rhythmic pattern and that use rhyme in inventive ways.

I was going to do something along these lines in my analysis of the beef anyway. I'm taking my time to acquaint myself with it (as readers of the other thread know). I'm only as far as J Cole's Seven Minute Drill, but I think there are some couplets in it that are better, objectively better at achieving what battle-rap is trying to achieve, than the relevant passages by Lamar in "Like That."

If you're all up for the enterprise, it's actually a benefit that in this thread is a participant who hasn't acquainted herself, and feels no starting sympathy with, the standards of excellence in this genre. If you're game, @Valka D'Ur, I can put questions to you like "if a battle rap is trying to do X, which of these two specimens seems to you to do that more effectively?"


Our work will be complicated by the fact that rap is a composite genre: music and lyrics. Already over in the thread devoted to the beef we have alternate opinions about the relative importance of lyrics and tune to a rap's aesthetic effectiveness.

 

[Kyriakos]

(translating) And what we expected to happen, did not, while what we regarded to be impossible, god found a way to force through.

It's the emblematic ending sentence of the Medea. Oedipus, indeed, has a far more archetypal tragic protagonist, since most of those are also partly to blame shortly before their doom comes about. Oedipous, had he left the Sphinx alone or refused the throne, might had lived the rest of his life without ever realizing he killed his father - let alone what followed. So yes, you can analyze and observe dynamics which - in some settings and under conditions - can aspire more logically to lead to a potent effect. But all that is equations within a system of someone else - the audience - and can easily be messed up in the transition, be lost in the connection.

 

[Hygro]

Holy smokes Angst. That was glorious.

This whole page is delivering. The thread is threading.

So here’s the riddle: the objective value of the art is more clearly recognized when you can, yes, bring the necessary context to the piece.

But from there, the greater the accuracy and fullness in sensory reception, the better the discernment. The less your own hallucinatory bias creates its own connection no matter how good, the better the full true beauty actually imprinted into and emanating from the art piece and the greater and more meaningful an artistic experience there is to be had.

Birdjaguar asks me how is my hearing. It’s pretty bad. But there are ways around it. When I have succeeded en my ways around it, succeeded in my ways around distracted attention, experience blocking fatigue, and so much more, when my senses are heightened and all that is left is the ability to engage the literally sound to the exact phasing overtones in their rawest most incredible, and sometimes even ugliest, forms,

It is in this moment my ability to judge the artistic value and experience is also its most accurate.

And interestingly, often more in line with critical acclaim or popular reception although that too is far from a safe way to know. (Indeed knowing very good eyes have seen a piece doesn’t transfer you any of the experience whatsoever, nor is proof their eyes weren’t off for whatever reason that one time).

This makes sense, our biases can collect of course but generally they diffuse and what’s left is the shared information that is real.


And as an aside, this crowd wisdom is particularly good at very cold things like “how many beans are in this jar”. Ask 100 people and the average will beat 95-100 of them. But crowds can collapse into mobs. So always following them is in the longer run also 100% a death sentence so to speak.

So it’s interesting that the same tool that allows a crowd to know facts has them converging on goodness, with the clearest sensing, least biased individuals who still have the needed context to “get it” the clearest and closest.

It’s an incredible phenomenon.

 

[Kyriakos]

It is indeed a nice thread

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm taking @Hygro's thumbs-up as an endorsement of my plan to use the D v KL rap battle as a case study in these matters.

Be forewarned that because of some RL commitments, I can only devote so much time to this, so we may proceed slowly, perhaps maddeningly slowly.

Let's take the lines that prompted the battle as establishing some of what constitutes excellence in rap:

Love when they argue the hardest MC
Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?
We the big three like we started a league.
Right now I feel like Muhammed Ali.

2:00-2:10

Baseline skill in the form involves at least these three things:

1) being able to write metrical verse
2) rhyming (and assonance)
3) metaphors, often drawn from pop culture

This passage is perfectly metrical (being perfectly metrical isn't a standard of rap, but it's nice to have an early specimen show what that would look like):

Love when they argue the hardest MC
Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?
We the big three like we started a league.
Right now I feel like Muhammad Ali.

1) We'll call it acephalic anapestic tetrameter. x x / x x / x x / x x /, in other words, but with the first two of those unstressed syllables omitted, so that each line starts on a beat (it's his breath between lines and the room for his "but" before the fourth line (which I omitted to make the layout clean)). (Alternately, catalectic dactylic tetrameter) (And we won't always use such technical terminology. "Four beat" will usually be enough. Here we use it just to call attention to the purity of these lines).

2) Solid rhyming, the ee sound closing each line (line 3 is assonance only, but rap allows that). And solid internal rhyming as well--we, three, fee (I'll pretty much always allow assonance as effectively an equivalent for rhyme). But also ar in argue, hardest and started. Notice how that internal rhyme drives "hardest" rather than "greatest," but that's a good thing because it draws on rap lingo.* (And, on reflection, it probably drives "Aubrey" rather than the metrically equivalent "Is it Drake? Is it me?")

3) pop culture reference: Muhammad Ali (the Greatest), so the idea of the verses gets across from contrasting sports. Some sports (basketball, say, where we talk about "big threes") can have a league; some sports (boxing) drive toward one solo champion. Subtle flex way of saying, there are three greatest rappers right now; I'm the greatest.

We might add (4) tone conventionally associated with genre: boastful and (5) subject matter conventionally associated with the genre: "I am the greatest rapper ever."

Here we might credit J Cole with a kind of 4b, also: not just fulfilling generic conventions as to tone, but stretching them as well. Rap boasts are usually in your face; here it's much more quiet--on every level: vocal delivery, conveyed through the logic of contrasting sports metaphors, rather than explicitly.

*and also, it occurs to me, because it allows him to make his "greatest" claim entirely implicitly.

 

[Narz]

How are you still not referencing the music? The music is the arena in which the battle is fought, without it it's like watching Gladiator w a blue screen in back, you showed yourself in your debate thread how flat most rap is without music

 

[Narz]

By the way, that song popping actually, nice sync up too w the video (ping pong ball flying up while music fades & drops)

Drake's verses at the end not as good tho, the energy goes way down on his verse

 

[Gori the Grey]

How are you still not referencing the music? The music is the arena in which the battle is fought, without it it's like watching Gladiator w a blue screen in back, you showed yourself in your debate thread how flat most rap is without music

Their contest involves their skills as lyricists. I don't think they compose the music, do they? (In the credits, this is all lost in a list of "songwriters." Maybe Drake does write his own tunes. Is there someone here who knows that?) (I understand his writing his own lyrics becomes one of the points of contention as the battle develops.) Anyway, if one of them "wins" the rap battle, it will be primarily because of his lyrics, so that's the dimension along which artistic skill is being measured.

In any case, at least for the snippet I've isolated--the music there doesn't do anything remarkable, and the words would be as impressive even without a musical beat (since they include their own beat, as I demonstrated).

Anyway, you're who I had in mind when I said:

Our work will be complicated by the fact that rap is a composite genre: music and lyrics. Already over in the thread devoted to the beef we have alternate opinions about the relative importance of lyrics and tune to a rap's aesthetic effectiveness.

So, we'll add a (6) to my above analysis: the music to which he raps has an agreeable "Dubbity Dubbity Bubbity Bup" sound.

Drake's verses at the end not as good tho, the energy goes way down on his verse

So we agree on something at least. J Cole wins First Person Shooter. He may win the whole damn thing, even though he bowed out early. I don't know. I've only listened as far as Seven Minute Drill. I'm told there are wonderful things coming, especially from Kendrick.

 

[Hygro]

Being metered is music. I don't regard the rapping part as not music. The supporting instrumental is important but should always be in support.

"But poetry" poetry when metered is musical, even if it is not music. Preachers preaching is musical even if it's not music. Some will take this very far and say the adhan is not music, but it goes to show how blurred these lines are. We don't consider a movie a music experience foremost but we're listening to music more than we're watching any single character. Rap as music is categorically music, it is total and "the music" instrumental isn't the soundtrack to a "not music" rap.

In most all vocal music, the vocals are the loudest and clearest part. This is important. No rules, but why the convention? Well we want to listen to the most interesting part of a piece, and 99 cases out of ... putting the vocals behind the instruments is disordered. It's "wrong", not in a thought provoking way but a failure at execution. Dance music can have the vocals more zoomed out and spread out, and accoustic sing-song makes it all the way in the front and center, but it's still going to be clear and win against competition.

Again, as art is, in part, an ordering of things, this is the "correct" order. The most interesting sound should be in focus. Usually that means loudest. Like the eye tracks movement, noteworthy movement on a less interesting sound (even though that increases its interestingness) is just drawing your attention away from what's good to focus on in service of something worse. Like, attention seeking. Ew. Contrast works in context. Out-of-placedness is not virtue.... except when it is.

One of the reasons rap instrumentals are so "boring" is because they have to be. The lyrics are central. Even basic ass pop minimalist southern strip club rap, the lyrics are central. That's a lot of brain power. The delivery of those lyrics is central. And the structure of the lyrics, as rhythmic, is central. But there's an order. Too much forcing rhymes no matter how clever to fit a pattern, too much emphasis on delivery when the lyrics are poor, too much clever lyrics that don't flow, it all fails. It's a balance, few have it. And the instrumental, you want it to slap as hard as it can or get as deep as it can, but when most rap voices are (deliberately) monotone to support the groove and lyrics, it can't sound too interesting, or you've lost focus on the real show and now you're too interesting for rap but you haven't left it for exploring how far instrumental-only music can go.

Generally people who can't follow rap lyrics in real time actively dislike "the sound". Not sweet enough. Too tart. The instrumental alone is slightly better because they aren't trying to shrug off a voice that isn't giving them the musical sing-song feeling they want. But they won't like the instrumentals either, because the intrumentals aren't made to be listened to alone.

Rap music is generally electronic music. It's sequenced, using samples and synths. But if you listen to the sound design, it is deliberately underwhelming. Many people who are prime to like rap for its danceability and synth based high energy nature, but can't follow lyrics well, will much prefer more official electronic dance music, especially melodic ones like trance. And people who can follow lyrics well will often still prefer rap, even if non-rap electronic music goes harder in 4 out of 5 categories, the incompleteness of not having the 5th category makes it for them a much weaker experience.

Not really an end to this post so I'll just stop here.

 

[Narz]

and the words would be as impressive even without a musical beat

You gotta make up your mind, you post a famous rap song w no beat & are like, no one would listen but no you're saying the beat is inconsequential

So, we'll add a (6) to my above analysis: the music to which he raps has an agreeable "Dubbity Dubbity Bubbity Bup" sound.

Such disrespect to the genre, again why would anyone listen to rap in a foreign language if the music didn't matter?

So we agree on something at least. J Cole wins First Person Shooter.

Absolutely! Not even close

 

[Narz]

Being metered is music. I don't regard the rapping part as not music. The supporting instrumental is important but should always be in support.

"But poetry" poetry when metered is musical, even if it is not music. Preachers preaching is musical even if it's not music. Some will take this very far and say the adhan is not music, but it goes to show how blurred these lines are. We don't consider a movie a music experience foremost but we're listening to music more than we're watching any single character. Rap as music is categorically music, it is total and "the music" instrumental isn't the soundtrack to a "not music" rap.

In most all vocal music, the vocals are the loudest and clearest part. This is important. No rules, but why the convention? Well we want to listen to the most interesting part of a piece, and 99 cases out of ... putting the vocals behind the instruments is disordered. It's "wrong", not in a thought provoking way but a failure at execution. Dance music can have the vocals more zoomed out and spread out, and accoustic sing-song makes it all the way in the front and center, but it's still going to be clear and win against competition.

Again, as art is, in part, an ordering of things, this is the "correct" order. The most interesting sound should be in focus. Usually that means loudest. Like the eye tracks movement, noteworthy movement on a less interesting sound (even though that increases its interestingness) is just drawing your attention away from what's good to focus on in service of something worse. Like, attention seeking. Ew. Contrast works in context. Out-of-placedness is not virtue.... except when it is.

One of the reasons rap instrumentals are so "boring" is because they have to be. The lyrics are central. Even basic ass pop minimalist southern strip club rap, the lyrics are central. That's a lot of brain power. The delivery of those lyrics is central. And the structure of the lyrics, as rhythmic, is central. But there's an order. Too much forcing rhymes no matter how clever to fit a pattern, too much emphasis on delivery when the lyrics are poor, too much clever lyrics that don't flow, it all fails. It's a balance, few have it. And the instrumental, you want it to slap as hard as it can or get as deep as it can, but when most rap voices are (deliberately) monotone to support the groove and lyrics, it can't sound too interesting, or you've lost focus on the real show and now you're too interesting for rap but you haven't left it for exploring how far instrumental-only music can go.

Generally people who can't follow rap lyrics in real time actively dislike "the sound". Not sweet enough. Too tart. The instrumental alone is slightly better because they aren't trying to shrug off a voice that isn't giving them the musical sing-song feeling they want. But they won't like the instrumentals either, because the intrumentals aren't made to be listened to alone.

Rap music is generally electronic music. It's sequenced, using samples and synths. But if you listen to the sound design, it is deliberately underwhelming. Many people who are prime to like rap for its danceability and synth based high energy nature, but can't follow lyrics well, will much prefer more official electronic dance music, especially melodic ones like trance. And people who can follow lyrics well will often still prefer rap, even if non-rap electronic music goes harder in 4 out of 5 categories, the incompleteness of not having the 5th category makes it for them a much weaker experience.

Not really an end to this post so I'll just stop here.

Saying rap instrumentals are weaker than say classic rock instrumentals is true, sure, but it misses the point & doesn't imply that the music is anymore inconsequential or secondary than any other genre.

For instance, listen to this track below & pop it open on YouTube & skim the comments, @ least half of them are from non-French, implying that people like the BEAT & THE VOCALS with ZERO comprehension of the lyrics (to avoid overlong intro skip to 0:20).

Universal Even @Valka D'Ur might not hate it.

I love good lyrics but to say hip-hop is not really proper music (just poetry with a lil boo-dee-boo-bap) is ridiculous. In the J-Cole & Drake track why is J's part superior? It's the ENERGY, I don't remember a single bar (may remember a few on a 2nd listen). It's like that corny quotation (they won't remember the words you said but they'll remember how you made them FEEL).

Edit : for fun here are the lyrics (can translate them to English) https://genius.com/Accord-parfait-100-hip-hop-lyrics they're pretty but you can know that without even knowing that if you know what I mean

 

[Narz]

I was thinking a bit about why I'm so goofily passionate about this debate (which should be in the other thread but I don't think Hygro will mind) and I'm thinking it may have something to do with my childhood.

From 1995-1997 I was at a boarding school where we weren't allowed to listen to music, new kids would come in like smugglers & bring the latest music with them (acapella). So I knew a lot of lyrics before I'd ever heard the songs. I could sing All I Need (Method Man, Mary J) before I'd ever heard it for instance. So when I got out & heard everything properly with the music I think it just hit me harder.

Or maybe I was just really bored last couple days & seeking escapism (or both + other stuff, I dunno, battling is fun)

Which goes to show that there's really no escape from the subjectivity of appreciating music. If I'm hopped up on caffeine, a good sleep & a good mood, mediocre can become great & in a sour enough state epic can become just meh (and mediocre is just vile). And sadly because of the way our brains are wired, with enough exposure any piece of art will lose a little bit of magic.

 

[Gori the Grey]

You gotta make up your mind, you post a famous rap song w no beat & are like, no one would listen but no you're saying the beat is inconsequential

That's not what I said in that case. (In fact it's pretty close to the opposite of the point I was making there.) That was just to establish that he wasn't singing. But I have said (as Hygro says more elaborately above) that for this artistic form, the lyrics are far more important than the music. You are aware that the first music for rap was people playing a record backwards to make a scratching sound and that just that little of a musical accompaniment is regarded as sufficient for the form, no?

And in any case, remember: this was selected as a case study on a question from aesthetics because the participants are actively trying to outdo one another. When people weigh in on who won this rap battle, once the dust settles, is the winner going to be the one whose tunes were better or whose disses were sickest? So we're isolating the part that contributes most to the aesthetic effect of this genre.

Or let's try it this way, Narz. The sub-genre of rap we've decided to examine in order to explore Hygro's opening question is battle-rap specifically. Would you venture to judge which of two French rappers had won a rap battle if you didn't speak French? I could venture to say which of two rappers had won a rap battle even if I only saw their lyrics and didn't hear their tunes. It would be a little tentative, because I would want to know something about how they had adapted their lyrics to the underlying tunes, But I could make a judgment.

 

[Narz]

hat's not what I said in that case. (In fact it's pretty close to the opposite of the point I was making there.) That was just to establish that he wasn't singing.

Yeah I know, and even tho I stand by my stance that it's not exactly "just talking" you made a point. However, you inadvertently made the point that listening to rapping without music is like eating a raw potato, no one's gonna do it.

But I have said (as Hygro says more elaborately above) that for this artistic form, the lyrics are far more important than the music.

When people drive by another car w a booming system or a house party what moves them (or annoys them if they hate rap), it's the beat, no one thinks, wow that's some epic poetry happening in there, they hear the music, they feel the vibe, they might hear some wisps of lyrics.

You are aware that the first music for rap was people playing a record backwards to make a scratching sound and that just that little of a musical accompaniment is regarded as sufficient for the form, no?

And babies babble before they talk, everything starts somewhere. It's a good way to create something new & I'd imagine practicing matching one's voice to a bizarre and unpredictable rhythm was a good way to build up skills back in the heyday.

And in any case, remember: this was selected as a case study on a question from aesthetics because the participants are actively trying to outdo one another. When people weigh in on who won this rap battle, once the dust settles, is the winner going to be the one whose tunes were better or whose disses were sickest? So we're isolating the part that contributes most to the aesthetic effect of this genre.

I'll give you this, for a rap battle yeah, lyrics edge out the music but most rap isn't battle rap and unless the rappers are given the exact same beat the music will still matter.

Or let's try it this way, Narz. The sub-genre of rap we've decided to examine in order to explore Hygro's opening question is battle-rap specifically. Would you venture to judge which of two French rappers had won a rap battle if you didn't speak French? I could venture to say which of two rappers had won a rap battle even if I only saw their lyrics and didn't hear their tunes. It would be a little tentative, because I would want to know something about how they had adapted their lyrics to the underlying tunes, But I could make a judgment.

I like this experiment. It's late & I'm trying to wind down cuz last few nights been up til past midnight woken by kids @ 5:45 but maybe I'll actually try this out.

I can't promise my choice will be the consensus choice (and who 'wins' a battle without clear scoring is subjective regardless) but I still think it is possible to judge (based on tone, vocal quality & again, of course, the music).

Reminds of an experiment I dreamed up during a chess tournament once, I thought it'd be cool to have a few (maybe 10) non-chess player experimental subjects to walk thru a chess tournament hall & try & guess who was going to win or lose any given chess game based on body language alone.

Oh & I haven't forgotten I still have to get my kids to dance to xzibit, you kinda punked me in that settle a debate thread so I @ least have to win that battle.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Oh & I haven't forgotten I still have to get my kids to dance to xzibit, you kinda punked me in that settle a debate thread so I @ least have to win that battle.

You have to run a fair test. You have put on the karaoke xzibit and say, "Hey, kids, let's dance to this." Then allow for the possibility for them to say, about a minute in, "This is boring. Let's listen to "Let it Go."

I'm not trying to punk you, Narz.

 

[Narz]

You have to run a fair test. You have put on the karaoke xzibit and say, "Hey, kids, let's dance to this." Then allow for the possibility for them to say, about a minute in, "This is boring. Let's listen to "Let it Go."

So if they dance for 1 min 1 sec I win, it's not really fair as Disney has a bigger marketing budget but that's more generous than I was thinking about, I saying "lets dance" would be leading too much

I'm not trying to punk you, Narz.

I don't mean in a mean spirited way

 

[Gori the Grey]

that's more generous than I was thinking about, I saying "lets dance" would be leading too much

Well, you know your kids. If by your saying "let's dance," you know they'll dance past when they're bored, just because they think it's what you want, then you shouldn't say it. But the very fact that you mention this tells me I can trust you to run the experiment fairly and report the results honestly.

So if they dance for 1 min 1 sec I win

Yes. But do keep that experiment going even after that, and if they do ever indicate boredom, note the time-stamp.