I know this is a major taboo but I wanted to post something up about... gasp music! Anyway, I caught this article online about this whole Avril Lavine plagiarism issue. It is somewhat interesting when you do compare the songs.
PLEASE BE WARNED THE FIRST VIDEO/AUDIO COMPARISON HAS SOME BAD LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY. So no 5 year olds in the room while you are watching this!!!
Article
And now back to our regularly scheduled dialogue...
I know this might approaching a dead subject but I am still aggravated by some of Woodford's comments. Perhaps that was his goal; that we would take his arguments and use them as a spark for greater dialogue… but I am still mad.
Anyway, the part I would like to call attention to what occurs on page 82 where Woodford complains about feeling oppressed when he is at summer rock music festivals. He goes further to state that it is anti-democratic for anyone to impose his or her musical values.
To begin with, if you volunteer to attend something how can you seriously be oppressed? I hate to oversimplify things but when you are outdoors, without any reflective acoustic material, having to compete with crowd noise… you are going to have to be loud! Secondly, what is wrong with loud? How one defines loud can be drastically different from another definition.
Secondly, how is playing music loud imposing? Isn’t playing music a way of stating musical values? Yes at 3 am when my neighbors break into a drunken rendition of “Louie Louie” it is annoying but they are stating their love and association to that song. How are we going to engage in a dialogue with people and their musical values when they are not able to play them for fear of hurting the delicate ears of the teacher?
Thirdly, I take real offense to his, admittedly assumed, statement that “rock and roll” or “popular music” fans are the only ones who can cause disruptions when playing music loudly. I can aggravate just as many people by blasting Mozart as I can blasting Slayer. Moreover, please, PLEASE someone explain to me why we still make such a sharp, good versus evil, differentiation between “pop” and “classical.” Perhaps I am again oversimplifying things but wasn’t “classical” music at one time popular anyway? If we keep making these delimitations all we are doing is further separating the educated or correct teacher, and the foolish unintelligent student, when in reality popular music can teach just as much as classical music. Whew, I am glad I finally got that off my chest.
1 comment:
Holy Cow Shaun- I send a big ditto your way for a good deal of that but I can understand the idea of feeling oppressed at something you volunteer to go to. If you go to a music festival expected your voice to somehow be represented and it isn't, you could feel oppressed. I have felt oppressed at Italian restaurants when they have been playing that same fucking "Mob Hits" album. I mean I love Sinatra, Dean Martin, Louis Prima etc. but to make an italian-American collection of songs and call it Mob Hits is oppressive! This is just an example. I would go to see a show with this music and enjoy the music but I may still feel oppressed by the way it is presented and the way it is received.
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