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 Originally Posted by surviva316
Homework assignment for several posters on here (most especially ongbonga):
1) Provide some sort of criteria for what makes music good, much less what makes one set of music more "good" than another set of music.
2) (I admit that it gets tricky here) Name a single piece of criteria that you mentioned in part one that is not subject-dependent. For example, if one of your criteria is "entertaining" then it doesn't qualify because things are only entertaining insofar as they entertain a given subject; things can't be intrinsically entertaining because that makes no fucking sense. As another example, you might say it is emotionally effective in part one, but it should he quite a bit obvious why that doesn't qualify for part two (something intrinsically effecting emotions? What?).
I wasn't watching this thread closely before (I mean, it's a fucking coldplay thread, amirite?) so I missed this, but I'll take a stab at it.
The definition of "good music" is clearly a very personal thing, but in the end it always comes down to what clicks with you, and it's not always that would have matched your personal definition before hearing a new song. Often it ends up being whatever was playing when a good memory is formed and has very little to do with the music itself.
Then for a more general determination of good music, I guess you'd have to go with the popular opinion of a band/song. Album sales are an easy way to look at it, but bad opinions should count as well. If a band can sell a 10 million records to 10 million fans, but at the same time they make 50 million other people want to puke every time they think of them, I don't think that you can call that a great band in general. The problem is that we have no way to count how many people dislike something. You can only go by how much shit people talk about a band. Biebs sells a lot of records, but based on how much shit people talk about him, it's pretty safe to say that his music isn't that great.
As for my personal definition, if I had to boil it down to one thing, good music has to be played and sung from the heart (most pop music is not, so that's the genre I generally have the least respect for). I think this is why so many bands start great and tail off. At first, they are filled to the brim with whatever feeling it is that leads them to express themselves with music and gives them a certain edge. Once they find themselves in their music and get the opportunity to get it out to more and more people, they lose that edge, but continue to go on. They get formulaic and what they play comes more from that formula than their hearts.
Beyond that, it's style which to me needs to not be overly polished, you don't want to lose the feeling. I like either a good laid back groove (reggae), a beautifully crying guitar (blues), or aggressive crunchiness (hard rock). The best music to me is when those can be mixed (Buju Banton, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, White Stripes, Black Keys) or when done with great technique.
And holy shit that ended up long and rambling!!
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