C-RAP

Kvasir wrote:

The 80’s and 90’s rock era was a science in using repetition in their music.

South Korea has decided to maintain its current system of giving no exemptions to K-pop artists in mandatory military service. https://t.co/chxwKcOII1

— ABC News (@ABC) November 22, 2019

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

...our ears have become increasingly intellectual. Thus we can now endure much greater volume, much greater ‘noise’, because we are much better trained than our forefathers were to listen for the reason in it. All our senses have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the
reason, what ‘it means’, and no longer for what ‘it is’ … our ear has become coarsened. Furthermore, the ugly side of the world, originally inimical to the senses, has been won over for music …
Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual, and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form and colour. Here, too, that side of the world originally considered ugly has been conquered by artistic understanding. What is the consequence of this? The more the eye and ear are capable of thought, the more they reach that boundary line where they become asensual.
Joy is transferred to the brain; the sense organs themselves become dull and weak. More and more, the symbolic replaces that which exists.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The problem of modernism, as Sass points out, is one of excessive self-consciousness. The question of what style to espouse, and with it the need to make a conscious decision to be something never before seen or heard, began to be more and more oppressive from the period of the later Romantics onwards – composers not just being intuitively drawn to imitate something they had heard elsewhere, as in the past, but deliberately inventing themselves and their art, rather than discovering it. This resulted, perhaps inevitably, in the decision to abandon our intuitive sense of harmony, melody and tonality.

It may seem unjustifiable to speak of an intuitive sense of harmony, melody or tonality, since these are now widely believed to be purely culturally determined, with the implication that they could be refashioned at will. But that is not the case at all. Music, of course, evolves, and what constitutes harmony, for example, has changed slowly over the course of time. The dominant seventh was considered a discord until the nineteenth century, and even the major third was once – in organum, therefore until the fourteenth century – considered a discord. (This is in itself fascinating, because it shows that the ‘melancholy’ minor third was accepted before the more ‘optimistic’ major third.) But generally there is intercultural understandability. Mongolian music, for example, does not sound harmonically incomprehensible, and certainly not unpleasant, to the Western ear. The acceptability and emotional meaning of music is not purely culture-bound. In fact it is almost universal. For example, Norwegians acculturated to a Western musical tradition make precisely the same associations between particular emotions and particular musical intervals as are made in Ancient Indian music – a radically different musical tradition.98 This would accord with most Westerners’ experience of Indian music, acknowledged as it is to be complex and based on different musical principles from our own.
Studies of adults from different cultures, and from different generations, studies in preverbal infants and even studies in animals and birds, show remarkable agreement in what is perceived as consonant and pleasurable, and what is seen as dissonant and disagreeable. Specifically there are universal natural preferences at the physiological level for harmony over dissonance. Harmony causes changes in the autonomic nervous system, with a slowing of the heart.101 Dissonance activates areas of the brain associated with noxious stimuli, and harmony areas associated with pleasurable experience. Babies as young as four months old prefer consonance to dissonance, and infants already associate the minor key with sadness. In terms of the hemispheres, the right hemisphere is more sensitive to harmony, more involved in the processing of it, and more sensitive to the distinctions between consonance and dissonance. And there is a specific right hemisphere link with processing consonance, and a left hemisphere link with processing dissonance.
The appreciation of harmony is inherently complex. It is the last aspect of musicality to develop, beginning around the age of six, and reaching maturity only by puberty. Harmony in music is an analogue of perspective in painting. Each produces what is experienced as ‘depth’: each is righthemisphere-dependent. They developed together at the same time in the Renaissance; and, similarly, they declined together with modernism, harmony becoming more precarious as painters such as Picasso started deliberately disorientating the viewer through manipulation of perspective.
Bach's music is full of discords, and one would have to be musically deaf not to appreciate them – in both senses of the word ‘appreciate’, because such moments are especially to be relished, as are the wonderful passing dissonances and ‘false relations’ in the music of, for example, Byrd and his contemporaries. But they are introduced to be resolved. The same element that adds relish to the dish makes it inedible if it comes to predominate. The passing discords so frequent in Bach are aufgehoben into the wider consonance as they move on and resolve. Context is once again absolutely critical – in fact nowhere can context be more important than in music, since music is pure context, even if the context is silence. Thus, in harmony as elsewhere, a relationship between expectation and delay in fulfilment is at the core of great art; the art is in getting the balance right, something which
Bach consummately exemplifies. There is an enormously subtle range of emotional expression over the entire range of the harmonic, with the tiniest changes making enormous differences in meaning. But we cannot make the same subtle discriminations of emotional timbre between discords, because the human nervous system, and the mammalian nervous system from which it derives, appreciates discord as distress, so that all threatens quickly to become merely angst-ridden, and the emotional range is inevitably reduced. The sound of modernist music tends to be intrinsically alien, minatory, which is why it is used in films to convey a sense of some frightening ‘other world’ (for example, at points where such an effect was required in the film 2001, Ligeti replaced Strauss).
The left hemisphere plays an important part in rhythm perception, though more complex rhythms are right-hemisphere-dependent106 and rhythmic skills are preserved in total left-hemisphere ablation.
Despite Plato's assertion that rhythm comes mainly from the mind, which possibly reflects more on Plato than it does on rhythm, there are again limits to what the human frame can experience and what the human brain can appreciate. Honegger is supposed to have said:

Honegger wrote:

I myself remain very sceptical about these rhythmic refinements. They have no significance except on paper. They are not felt by the listener … After a performance of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements the players in the orchestra all remarked: ‘One has no time to listen or appraise. One is too busy counting eighth notes.’

Many composers, as might be imagined, have found themselves ambivalent about the process. Tippett lamented the loss of melody, described by Haydn as ‘that which is most difficult to produce – the invention of a fine melody is a work of genius’, and by Mozart as ‘the essence of music: I should liken one who invents melodies to a noble racehorse, and a mere contrapuntist to a hired posthack’.
Hindemith was sceptical of serial music, likening it to one of ‘those sickeningly wonderful merry-go-rounds on fairgrounds and in amusement parks … the idea is, of course, to disturb the customer's feeling of gravitational attraction by combining at any given moment so many different forms of attraction that his sense of location cannot adjust itself fast enough.’ The lack of tonal centres destroys the listener's anchor point for hierarchies of intervals. Although the composer may understand where he is going, the listener simply cannot, because we do not have sufficient short-term memory to cope with this degree of apparent formlessness.

Satyr wrote:

Is this boy-band phenomenon comparable to the Beatles or even the Rolling Stones phenomenon of my time?
Do the Backstreet Boys or Nsync compare?  

Anfang wrote:

You need to be sufficiently intelligent to be a "rebel". Doesn't mean you have to be an independent thinker or have a sensible cause for your rebellion. But intelligent enough to retain this conceptual idea of your rebelliousness. Kind of like you have to be sufficiently intelligent to be a Marxist, intelligent enough to retain all the narratives and concepts and way of thinking. Doesn't matter if they are perceptive or true.

Have you seen those lengthy leftwing memes? They fill the whole frame with speech bubbles and text because it's always complicated BS arguments. Noting is obvious, it all has to be explained because if someone were to just look around in the world nobody would come to their conclusions.

Wikipedia wrote:

Frederick Jay Rubin was born in Long Beach, New York and grew up in nearby Lido Beach. His father, Michael (Mickey), was a shoe wholesaler and his mother Linda a housewife. He is of Jewish descent. While a student at Long Beach High School he befriended the school's audiovisual department director Steve Freeman who gave him a few lessons in guitar playing and song writing.

For some reason, it's not "toxic masculinity" when it's promoted by left-leaning media companies. Without the big media money behind it, rap would have been a little blip in the early 90s. I suspect that the target audience all along has been young White males. https://t.co/Ctufma2XHn

— Kevin MacDonald (@TOOEdit) February 18, 2022