Bad Isn’t Good Enough

V. Bad Music

Before we get to a conclusion, I want to take a second to talk about something interesting that happened in the super great FOWR album club a few weeks back.

As you probably know, I’m a pretty opinionated guy, and I don’t have any problems with expressing the cores of those opinions. Like when I suggested that recording a pure funk record in the year 2012 was wasteful of time and resources. But what I want to talk about is a comment that I actually dismissed from that whole discussion. There was briefly a suggestion that you can’t call music bad unless it does not function properly (i.e. tuning, tonality). I didn’t even respond because I felt like it was a simplistic view of things, but now I realize it’s the entirety of what we’re talking about here.

So I did say to listen to as much Zs as you can physically handle. I’m going to assume that most people are going to make it most of the way through Acres of Skin, or stop in the middle of Gentlemen Amateur. Maybe for the more perseverant sorts, it was in the middle of the title track somewhere. If you listened to all of it, good on you: I didn’t have the constitution for that at first.

I’m also going to assume that at a point it was unpleasant to listen to or deal with. This too is expected. Like I said about Stupid Hoe, it’s hard to force that kind of destruction of western musical ideas. Zs not only forces it but succeeds. It is, in a bizarre way, the opposite ends of the spectrum leading towards a similar end point, with radically different intentions. Nicki’s just doing Nicki (or Roman or whatever), while Zs are dealing more in highly detailed architechture, and yet both lay waste to the idea of decency and of music, as it’s known.

It’s because that we can only talk about music as it’s known when evaluating things that I’m going to use the end of this five page diatribe to propose redefinition. Bad is a powerful word, a quick way to evoke negative thoughts without any deeper thought, but still base and useful enough that to eliminate it from language is irresponsible. So, I’m going to suggest that there’s a new definition of Bad, and specifically when it comes to Bad Music.

Here is the FOWR official definition of Bad Music:
Art in Support of Undesirable Ideas.

Art and music are one in the same. I would argue that music is the highest form of art and science, but there’s other people that have written about that. This is a music website. We’re going to assume you feel similarly.

Support can imply either financial or ideological support- the idea that receptive listening gives an idea a foothold in the consciousness of the listener.

Undesirable is where subjectivity comes in. This is the vital key, to be able to understand why who you are defines what you do not like. I am bored of the idea that something can be bad in a vacuum, and similarly bored of the idea that ‘I don’t like it’ is a valid opinion. Strike at the reason and conquer it, for this is how you learn about yourself.

Ideas implies everything, from economics to philosophy. If what you hear objects to a personal code, then the complaint is valid. The benefit is that as the tools available for the interpretation of the world expand, they bring opportunities to revisit music that at the time could be seen as distasteful.

This is really my goal here. I feel bad about the way music discussion has been developing, and all I’m trying to do here is expand perceptions of what music means, and how to talk to people about it. Music is the most beautiful thing humans have made, but in the days of information it’s too easy to lose sight of the realities of the world within entertainment. Music gets lumped into the idea of entertainment, but it’s so much stronger than that. I would rather spend time trying to convince people of this than sit around and angrily bark.