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Comment by a-french-anon | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but this is peak plebeian. I means to me you don't know how to appreciate music on a deep level, that you solely listen to "greatest hits" or genres/artists too base to be able to (or too commercial to even want to) create an album with an overarching aesthetic vision; not even talking about concept album, just having purpose in differences between tracks while still cultivating a similar sound and atmosphere.

I know, I know, this sounds way too pretentious and elitist...

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let me flip it on you, i have entire albums i like as individual songs. but i don't put the record on the start, turn off shuffle and pretend to be of higher intelligence because i 'appreciate' the work the artist put in to it.

For sure there are albums that are like that, i just don't tend to listen to music like that. I listen to a song, i think "oh, i want to listen to that next", queue it up and forget i wanted to listen to it until it comes up and i feel good about hearing that song i wanted.

And definitely far from the greatest hits only - that's a pretty stretchy conclusion.

edit: the problem i have at the end of the day, is forcing EVERYONE to organize their music and listening like that because the artist says "this is how you must listen to music". Sometimes i know the song i like and i just want to pick them out instead of browsing through another layer of albums that hide the list of songs by an artist.

As I expanded in another reply, what warrants a reaction like mine is listening to most or all of your music in this way.

I mean, I won't force people not to put ketchup in all their dishes, including when going to a 1-star Michelin restaurant, but if that's not the dictionary definition of "pleb", I don't know what is.

aye, and i'm not interested in having a chef prepare a tiny aubergine steak with a splash of tahini and charge me $500 for the honour of eating his choice of how to virtue signal to his chef friends.

I don't necessarily listen to ALL of it at once, I will mostly be queueing up what i want to listen to next constantly and skip through what i don't feel like listening to right now (if the platform allows it easily, which i'm struggling to find again). On another day in another mood, that same song i skipped previously might be just what i need.

Almost as if i can choose my meal and my dessert independently every day depending on what i feel like eating.

edit: and occasionally, it may be a $500 aubergine steak - when i want it to be.

Thing is that the musical equivalent of that dish is Schoenberg, "music that's clearly designed for album listening" is another beast and overlaps a lot with non-intellectual elitist stuff.

About meal and dessert, I've never experienced a strong and justified coupling between these; actually, I always rinse my mouth with water between dishes to fully embrace the taste divide.

As far as flak, I think your point about album appreciation could be interesting if presented in a more constructive way. The tone of your comment comes across as somewhat condescending, which can make it harder for others to engage with the idea.

Sadly, I don't really think the question at hand is complex enough to be more constructive than the single sentence I used. But let's try: could you reduce a movie like "Taxi Driver" to a single scene and keep all of its value? I categorically state "no", but you could probably with sitcoms-with-background-laugh-tracks ("probably", my experience with them isn't very extensive).

Basically, some music is made to be digested in small, radio/club-sized pieces and I argue that most of it does so not to fulfill an artistic vision. There are some exceptions, using this opportunity to maximize "streamlining" (I mean, I listen to some Eurobeat, so I fully understand that) and St Exupery's famous "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away", but that's definitely not the rule.

Also, people already drew pretty good comparisons to opera and other stuff that loses too much by being listened on a single track basis.

There's a lot of cases where I've been offered up an artist's "greatest hits" or "latest hit" through an algorithm, and it got me curious enough to dig and discover their albums, and listen to them the way they probably intended. I think your comment is a narrow way to look at algorithmic suggestions, and it comes off elitist.

I was talking about music listening, which is a very different act from music discovery, in my opinion.

Addendum: elitism may have a very double-plus-ungood connotation in the current year, but I've never heard a valid, factual argument against it; which is even funnier when you realize the kind of people conditioned to react this way to the word have a similar filter for "populism".

It's basically one of the modern "witches" arguments.

To clarify, my point is music listening is ultimately subjective, and there's no objective, "correct", way people can experience and appreciate art.

That view itself is subjective and isn't shared by everybody.

All comments on HN are subjective.

and all those albums with filler "intro" and "intermission" tracks?

Sure, that also counts. If it is truly filler (for your value of "truly" and "filler"), of course.

I don't think calling them a pleb is right, it's just that not everyone cares as much about music. I could probably come up with 5 different things I'm sure you don't think as deep about and call you a "plebeian". This is why you'll get the flak, not because you're presenting some novel idea. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is a well known album that you can't just listen to in parts.

The "pleb" part is specifically about consuming music like one does McDonald's. And the problem isn't eating McDonald's, it's eating only McDonald's.

I've always found strange that judging musical taste (or lack of it) is so controversial compared to other forms of art. If you say that people who only watch MCU movies or haven't read more than Harry Potter/Twilight are "plebeians" (or whatever less offensive word you want to use... philistine?), you'll get way less outrage than by stating something similar about music.

In the end, I think the disagreement may stem from two points: "plebeian" is automatically seen as an insult, not a possibly accurate (if condescending) descriptor and the usual extreme relativism that caring about music is should as universal as caring about tractors.

And yet Money is aired alone on radio :-)

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