Quote:
Originally Posted by daveT
fans of rap may very well believe he is good or bad. All I qualify as music is that it sticks with basic miusic theory a five-year-old could understand. If you walk up to a piano and play only the white keys you are playing in the key of C. I have incredibly low standards for a definition of music.
Actually, you have pretty 'high' standards of what music is. Watch some interviews of John Cage or other modern classical performers and see how they define 'music'. Better yet, see what they consider 'music' and what they compose. And then you have to start defining 'compose'. I think that what Kanye does as a producer, as a rapper, qualifies as music. What the RZA did on 36 Chambers is music too. They are musicians plain and simple. It may not fit within your definition of music, but I think you are being incredibly myopic then. I could be wrong, I pretty much grunched the Kanye discussion, but yeah. Check out Merzbow or Jandek. Is the former just noise but the latter music? Do you have to be in a key discernible key or can you just make sounds?
As for Lady Gaga, I think she's awesome. She makes really really good Europop/Modern Disco (Italo disco?) with a bit more of an edge and self-aware artistry. I think she can be appreciated as pure pop music but that that's just one dimension of her art. I think that knowing her influences, the musical (punk, cabaret, disco) and artistic history (Warhol, Situationist, Performance Artists and fashion designers) from where she came, and all that, really adds depth to her. And I think that anyone who says she makes dumb music is completely missing the point and probably hates 'pop' music anyway and really shouldn't be passing judgment on a genre that they are biased against.