Like I'm not asking whether you can enjoy it, call it your jam, favorite song ever whatever. But to actually know the song do you have to have some of the context as to it's creation. Like the saying, you don't know the book unless you know the author. Does the same apply to music?

Poll result (12 votes) Yes (5 votes) Vote Know (2 votes) Vote Nah (5 votes) Vote

if Stevie Wonder composed it i wanna know what was going on for him to have made that song and what it means.

take for instance "billie Jean" i didn't know then that you could dance on the floor in the round and get a woman pregnant??

i need a road map to understand some things

mistermaxxx R.Kelly, Michael Jackson,Stevie wonder,Rick James,Marvin Gaye,El Debarge, Barry WHite Lionel RIchie,Isleys EWF,Lady T.,Kid creole and coconuts,the crusaders,kc sunshine band,bee gees,jW,sd,NE,JB

Miami Heat, New York Yankees,buffalo bills

No two people "know" or take something the exact same way.

------------------------
"The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures."

Go in peace.
------------------------

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so I'm in a band now:
album ---> http://greenwoodburns.bandcamp.com/releases
Soundcloud ---> http://soundcloud.com/greenwood-burns

my own stuff -->http://soundcloud.com/lonesomedstringband

avy by buckshot_defunct

i like what Marvin Gaye had to say about a similar issue. he didn't like explaining the meaning behind his lyrics b/c he didn't want his interpretation of his work to color or ruin the listener's experience.

i think we're all perfectly capable of hearing a song and coming to our own understanding of what it means for us w/o knowing anything about the creator's experience. our interpretation doesn't necessarily need to line up w/anyone else's. we can have our own, personal experience w/the song.

fuck you.

of lyrics per se. like i was thinking about this specifically with regard to Raymond Scott's orchestral work. It's famous for being used in countless Looney Tunes cartoons, one might think that they were created for that purpose explicitly. But they were actually made before that not as cartoon songs but 'serious' compositions (serious in quotes not to say it's serious serious but not kiddie tunes). Knowing this you can ten listen to them in a completely different way. Did you actually now the songs before knowing this?
________
Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

.

fuck you.

it's easy with vocal songs to think of knowing as knowing the meaning of... but with instrumental stuff what does it mean to know the song? and how do you apply that definition so that its universal between both.
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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

fuck you.

(and this may be what the original poster was getting at)
that knowing what the artist had in mind when he or she created the song...
or knowing what the artist was going through in their life when they created the song...

can add more layers of meaning to it.
it can help you view things in a new context.
and that's a cool thing sometimes.


like, as a kid, i always dug "star wars."
cool light sabers. awesome yoda quotes. space battles....
it's great stuff.


but as i got older, and i started reading mythology...
and i realized that George Lucas' stated objective was to create a mythology
for a generation of kids that didn't have one...

my respect for the art increased a hundred fold.


it made me think of "star wars" in a way that i hadn't before.
i think that's awesome.



i think that's what you're getting at.


so to bring it back to music...
i love Marvin Gaye.
"what's going on" was (and is) one of my favorite albums.

as a kid, i liked it for reasons that were completely my own.
but as I got older, and I started putting it in the context of what Marvin was trying to do...

to break out of the Motown machine. to make a statement about the war.
to maybe find some kind of peace within the tormented life that I didn't realize he led when I was a kid...


it gave the album dimensions that I never considered before.




but no, I don't think I DIDN'T know the album as a kid.
I think I know the album differently now.
I have been fortunate enough to experience this brilliant album in more than one context.


hell... when i deployed, the album took on yet ANOTHER layer of meaning for me.
and all of those meanings were equally valid.





to suggest otherwise would be to think
that a million hip hop fans who's first exposure to
james brown was a funky drummer sample somehow
have an experience that is less valid than my own.

i think the cool thing about art is that
we project what we want into it. it's abstract.


I see your point. but nah...
I can know a song before I know the artist.

>i like what Marvin Gaye had to say about a similar issue. he
>didn't like explaining the meaning behind his lyrics b/c he
>didn't want his interpretation of his work to color or ruin
>the listener's experience.

and he also added that that's why he doesn't include lyrics in his liner notes. He said that if somebody "mis-heard" a lyric* and made it fit something that had a special meaning to them, he was in no place to take that away from the listener. ( kinda weird that you wouldn't want your listeners to get the words of your shit right, but I totally respect him for feeling that way).


*-There's no way out of Baltimore...

______________



http://www.windimoto.com


http://ten2one.wordpress.com/ <-FEB

http://wallpapershi.net/wallpapers/2012/01/boba-fett-star-wars-star-wars-boba-fett-movie-anime-1080x1920.jpg

You can never fully and truly know the context from whence it came, or every last thought and feeling the artist had while creating it. It's a fool's errand to even try. Our relationship to art doesn't work like that. So I prefer to move to the other extreme - know it the way you know it, and if you want, feel free to enrich the relationship by reading about its background and the person who made it. But don't try to put yourself in the artist's mind or think that your relationship to the art is less meaningful until your understanding is full and verifiable by its creator.

Most artists will even say they don't want to define how you interpret their art, and I think that's a wise approach. Most truly great art is suffused with ambiguity anyway, and deliberately lends itself to a lot of different interpretations and works in many different contexts.

--

for the artist to say something about a song that you never even thought of that completely changes your perspective that you can't even hold on to your previous notion of meaning.
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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

your own personal context, sure. And it doesn't even have to be a statement by the artist - it could be somebody else speaking on their interpretation in a way that feels like scales just fell from your eyes. Still I would argue that the altered context you end up with is still a personal one that will rarely align perfectly with the context the art was born in, and that it's too much pointless effort to ever try to get them to match. Plus it just makes the art less interesting in a way, to require that every valid interpretation of it be identical. One of the great things about art is its subjectivity.

Personally I like to learn about the original context of art to inform and enrich my own take on it. But I would never refuse to even HAVE a take, absent that knowledge. There must be thousands of songs and books and whatnot that I've listened to/read/viewed without any meaningful knowledge of the circumstances of their creation, or the history of the artist behind them. That doesn't mean (or maybe I don't WANT it to mean) that I didn't get anything out of it, or don't have something to say about it.

--

but then again like others have said it can also color how u interpret the song

as an artist I may or may not want that..it depends

--------------------
"Good hair"-Uzi

1619 the 1st slaves are brought to American shores
thus begins the phrase “mine is better than yours?” (huh?)
forced to serve-too broke to by freedom
the systematic rape of African culture has begun
little time

I’d rather sojourn into self till I reached the epitome of spiritual splendor
Haters fender bender beat down and ostracize the dreamer
But its more than dreams when the inner light is revealed through the cracks of façade-strum the emotions on guitars~me

Was this post inspired by me not really knowing what the Matana Roberts album was about, but just enjoying the music, outside the context of what she is saying?

signature pose.

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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

But there's plenty of music I dig without really knowing much of its history.

~Austin

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."
— John Lennon
http://austintayeshus.blogspot.com
http://www.last.fm/user/Austintayeshus
http://twitter.com/Austintayeshus

With me, I listen to music for the emotional aspect of it. The way the sounds and melodies come together does it for me, and I could really care less on what the content is saying. For example, the new Death Grips album, The Money Store, I have no idea what MC Ride is rapping about. For the most part, I feel like hes mumbling gibberish, but the aggressive energy and power of the music grabs me.

Of course if I do know what the content of the song is, Im sure that it will help the listening experience more because they you can relate to the whole presentation, as well as concept albums, such as Dark Side Of The Moon, Coin Coin Chapter One, and many more.

signature pose.

WTF. are you stuck in 1945. you don't have to know shit about the author to understand, interpret, interpolate and be interpolated by a text. learning about the author may give you some idea as to why certain authors write certain types of material, but other than that, just no. meaning is a shared experience by creator and consumer.

as for music it's even less necessary to understand context, in particular with rap, since so much is performative and exaggerated. and those aren't bad things, just part of understanding process and dynamics of art.

in my 70 years on this earth.

But you young people are not just weird but wrong if you think understanding the context of the artwork is irrelevant. Not just wrong, arrogant and self absorbed victims of the individualistic ego. Which isn't to deny any of your obviously true claims. Art is a shared experience between the creator and the consumer. Art is subjective. But also art has meaning. That meaning can change but it changes from someplace the starting point of which is the artist.

I find it incredibly strange that one might take in a work of art (any medium) feel moved by it personally and not then be inclined to find more context about the artist in relation to the work. Back in 1945 that was a natural reaction to art you actually liked. And making that gesture was in part the way you paid respet to the work.

Imagine you meet up with the artist later and go on some hour long rambling about how their work changed you because it meaned xyz and the artist then looked at you and said, very good for you but that's the opposite of what I was trying to convey. If what they were trying to say is public knowledge and you're in a group of people you just embarassed yourself. Or you can just call them and the artist haters and move on to the next one.

I guess...
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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

knowing you have kids, if they are in school, and you and I lived in the same area, i'd more than likely have a possibility of being their grade school teacher. that's my response to your misguided age assumption

to address the ego thing, i'll approach with caution and with varying answers, 'cause you're one of the more interesting posters on here...

one, it's not about ego. lets keep it on books/literature for a minute. the 1945 reference was alluding to the end of world war II, and in many ways to the shift in ideas around what art is and what are does. the on set of the high point of modernist thought as it related to existentialism, 1950s jazz, abstract expression, etc. but by the time modernism starts to die, the late 60s, and post-modernism begins to take form, one of the most important ideas that develops literarily from the minds of Barthes, Deluze & Guattari, and Foucault is that the author is just another agent in the "fictions" we create about out time on earth: the act of historicizing and narrating. the author just sets forth the motion of the dialogue. we simultaneously shape it AFTER print.

an example: Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things is one of the most important, elegant and powerful works of fiction I've ever come across. because i had spent time with many of the struggles she addresses in the book in some shape or form, i "knew" what she was writing about, or better yet what truthS she was attempting to state. yet, that does not stop me, from accurately or in-accurately, extrapolating further meaning and sharing it with "my community".

personally for me, i love diggin into artist bios and knowing where they came from and what they were attempting to do. and in a way i agree with you that it helps the reader/listener/consumer, get to a closer understanding of the work. but it is NOT necessary. the true context is not the author, but the time period: the social attitude, the technologies, the systems of dissemination. if we are talking about context that's what truly matters, not the author. no shit miss Roy wrote the God of Small Things how she did. the way she speaks truth to power and the social movements she aligns herself with make her work "make sense", but i didn't need her personal words to get there.

lastly, this is rather strange considering your Ab-Soul post. he and others simultaneously give you personal context and the art product, but you wanted no part of it. you wanted mystery, ambiguity. yet here, you think that personal context is fundamental?

And folk so far have only dabbled around why I would say yes.
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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

Much of the appeal of music is that it's able to convey emotional spaces more directly, which can be apprehended even where programmatic or conceptual concerns may be involved. The emotional message is direct/primary and the context is latent/secondary; the latter may enrich or aid in accessing the emotional material but it's really not the point of music.

The context that would be important for understanding is more broad, like having a sense of the devices or cliches that come to represent certain ideas/feelings - some of that may be unique to the individual artist but generally there would be some kind of cultural basis for it. In the cases where one isn't familiar with the appropriate context, even descriptions of those devices are secondary to listening and internalizing them directly. If the information could be conveyed indirectly, the music is non-essential.

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http://soundcloud.com/ajiav
http://www.last.fm/user/ajiav

Games without front ears / born without ears

the whole immediate connection stuff is feeling right?

but art in many ways is meant to create that feeling where there is a lack of words to express right. so if you don't know how to express it, you can still recognize it and feel it when conveyed in an artistic medium, and that may help you think about how to express it, but where there's a scientific thing around knowledge and the expression of it can you say you know it?
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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

>but where there's a scientific
>thing around knowledge and the expression of it can you say
>you know it?

could you expand on or clarify this further?

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http://soundcloud.com/ajiav
http://www.last.fm/user/ajiav

Games without front ears / born without ears

I guess the point I'm getting at is that if we lower the threshold of knowing to be merely subjective based on feelings, there's clear evidence that our feelings can be wrong. Human beings make mistakes. Most often when they don't explore the facts. MIles Davis could listen to Sun Ra blindly and think the trumpet player's the only black person in a band of amateurs. He'd be wrong on both accounts. It wouldn't make him wrong for thinking that it sounded white, but the reasoning behind that could be in the history of Sun Ra and what he was trying to accomplish musically. Given that context it may not change Miles' perception of the song (meaning he doesn't have to like it) but he would be better informed in knowing the song and could comment from that place.

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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

>I guess the point I'm getting at is that if we lower the
>threshold of knowing to be merely subjective based on
>feelings, there's clear evidence that our feelings can be
>wrong. Human beings make mistakes. Most often when they
>don't explore the facts. MIles Davis could listen to Sun Ra
>blindly and think the trumpet player's the only black person
>in a band of amateurs. He'd be wrong on both accounts. It
>wouldn't make him wrong for thinking that it sounded white,
>but the reasoning behind that could be in the history of Sun
>Ra and what he was trying to accomplish musically. Given that
>context it may not change Miles' perception of the song
>(meaning he doesn't have to like it) but he would be better
>informed in knowing the song and could comment from that
>place.

I think it's interesting that you consider it "lowering the threshold"! The analogy that pops to mind is gematria, spending all your time computing the relationships between numbers, letters, ideas, and things in order to try to get at the thing underneath (some kind of transcendental mystic experience). The goal is the "mystic union" but the device/methodology can become such a distraction as to prevent one from reaching the goal, to confuse the pointing finger with the moon itself.

From the Miles Davis blindfold tests, I actually don't interpret them as his feelings getting in the way, rather I see it as his preconceived notions (context) preventing him from feeling it. Or a music fan who hears something he could easily play and allowing that to distract him from identifying whether or not it is a successful or personal expression.

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http://soundcloud.com/ajiav
http://www.last.fm/user/ajiav

Games without front ears / born without ears

>I think it's interesting that you consider it "lowering the
>threshold"!

Well I said lower the threshold of *knowing*, which is where the scientific bullshit in my prev replay was coming from. Knowledge has been pretty well defined in scientific terms, and it isn't considered a subjective thing. So If we are calling the subjectiveness of feeling knowing then yes that would be lowering. But I completely agree with this.

>The analogy that pops to mind is gematria,
>spending all your time computing the relationships between
>numbers, letters, ideas, and things in order to try to get at
>the thing underneath (some kind of transcendental mystic
>experience). The goal is the "mystic union" but the
>device/methodology can become such a distraction as to prevent
>one from reaching the goal, to confuse the pointing finger
>with the moon itself.

That which is called the tao is not the tao. It's a different philosophical take on knowing in which knowledge is the experience of the thing. Alternately the thing in and of itself as opposed to the description of it. Again I'd call that a parallel to feeling though. But it's a heavy philosophical question. Is feeling the only true knowing. Science would heavy handedly disagree.

>From the Miles Davis blindfold tests, I actually don't
>interpret them as his feelings getting in the way, rather I
>see it as his preconceived notions (context) preventing him
>from feeling it. Or a music fan who hears something he could
>easily play and allowing that to distract him from identifying
>whether or not it is a successful or personal expression.

But see that's kind of my point. Its his sense of knowing music that separates him from the context of the music being performed. That context doesn't have to be knowing all the players, their side projects, etc. It could be something as simple as knowing you need to be hear now while listening.

Music for Airports when played in actual airports was a failure of context. Eno making a background music for the air commuter that ended up being to distracting for the commuter themselves. Or was that the context he was actually trying to create? Can I recreate that context in the comfort of my home whether literally or through my imagination or will I have to remember to load it on the iPod before my next trip out of town to really understand it in context.

Locative art is very detailed on context. One could experience a piece of locative art anywhere but to actually experience it is to take in what the environ affords it. Similarly can we come to know the sistene chapel merely by a google search? Even various trips to the library reading everything that's ever been written about it, could we ever say we knew the sistene chaple until we experienced it?

Now how does all of that apply to music. I've probably listened to more Hendrix than any other artist in my lifetime, but he died before I was born and sow I've only ever seen footage. Wait wait song. Oooooohhhh. I've had heard at least ten different versions of "Room Full of Mirrors" and then they put this alternate on that big box set that I had never heard before and it was a completely different song musically. I thought I knew the song, but this one version of it opened up how much more there was to it than I had previously understood.

Then what happens when you start to play it.

Perhaps one can never really know a song or perhaps.... I don't want to get ahead of myself, tehehehehehehehe

________
Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

>That which is called the tao is not the tao. It's a different
>philosophical take on knowing in which knowledge is the
>experience of the thing. Alternately the thing in and of
>itself as opposed to the description of it. Again I'd call
>that a parallel to feeling though. But it's a heavy
>philosophical question. Is feeling the only true knowing.
>Science would heavy handedly disagree.

You would have to clarify why it is important to apprehend art (and music in particular) in terms of scientific knowledge, where art and science are separate fields with separate functions and require separate means of apprehension ('heart' versus 'mind'). In an earlier post you suggest being less clear about what you mean by 'knowing,' so if here 'knowing' is somehow related to the scientific method of testing hypothesis via experiments in order to better define reality, where is the musical application? If this application undermines the primacy of the emotional value, then I would say it fails to apprehend art on its own terms --- which one MAY frame in terms of various contexts, but I will maintain that the key for apprehending music is better served by stripping away intellectual notions of what music is rather than accruing a series of 'contexts.' An overly-defined sense of context may lead one to hear the effect presets but not the expression. Again this is not to say that one cannot enrich their experience via context, but it would be secondary.

>>From the Miles Davis blindfold tests, I actually don't
>>interpret them as his feelings getting in the way, rather I
>>see it as his preconceived notions (context) preventing him
>>from feeling it. Or a music fan who hears something he
>could
>>easily play and allowing that to distract him from
>identifying
>>whether or not it is a successful or personal expression.
>
>But see that's kind of my point. Its his sense of knowing
>music that separates him from the context of the music being
>performed. That context doesn't have to be knowing all the
>players, their side projects, etc. It could be something as
>simple as knowing you need to be hear now while listening.

His ego, wrapped in his "knowing," is preventing him from taking in Sun Ra, Dolphy, etc. This doesn't to me mean that he needs to learn a new context so much as that he needs to let go of his own. Perhaps we are saying the same thing in different ways, this difference in attitude may lead to very different conclusions/approaches.

>Music for Airports when played in actual airports was a
>failure of context. Eno making a background music for the air
>commuter that ended up being to distracting for the commuter
>themselves. Or was that the context he was actually trying to
>create? Can I recreate that context in the comfort of my home
>whether literally or through my imagination or will I have to
>remember to load it on the iPod before my next trip out of
>town to really understand it in context.

That Eno's ambient recordings may fail in the environments they are intended for confirms for me that the value is separate from their professed context and is something inherent to the emotional experience of apprehending the music directly.

>Locative art is very detailed on context. One could
>experience a piece of locative art anywhere but to actually
>experience it is to take in what the environ affords it.
>Similarly can we come to know the sistene chapel merely by a
>google search? Even various trips to the library reading
>everything that's ever been written about it, could we ever
>say we knew the sistene chaple until we experienced it?

The sistine chapel is a place and so must be experienced as a place. Music is sound, and must be heard to be understood.

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http://soundcloud.com/ajiav
http://www.last.fm/user/ajiav

Games without front ears / born without ears

>
>The emotional message is direct/primary and the context is
>latent/secondary; the latter may enrich or aid in accessing
>the emotional material but it's really not the point of music.
>
>

~Austin

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."
— John Lennon
http://austintayeshus.blogspot.com
http://www.last.fm/user/Austintayeshus
http://twitter.com/Austintayeshus

>Like the saying, you don't know the book unless you
>know the author. Does the same apply to music?

Go Smack yourself and then apologize to your hand for looking stupid - Case_One

http://i54.tinypic.com/nxros2.jpg

“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing … the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.”

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Big PEMFin H & z's
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"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician." © Miles Davis

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

i think someone can 'know' a song or get a great deal of meaning from a song, but i think the experience kind of deepens or shifts once you are able to contextualize the song either through knowledge of the artist's mindspace or the historical context of the song.

sometimes knowing more details about the history of the song actually can ruin the experience, kind of like how Marvin and Seal mean.

when i was really into Radiohead, i would come up with these fantastical and esoteric interpretations of the songs. but when i would read the statements about the songs in interviews, i would always be underwhelmed hearing Thom's comments or history of the song.

like there is an acoustic song that Thom releases earlier in the year. just him on piano and his voice. and the song is gorgeous. but then i read on the net that he wrote the lyrics about his wife dropping a carton of eggs after shopping at the grocery store and i was let down and disappointed. i felt like something had popped my thought balloon of the song.

i think history behind the song can help you understand the technical aspect of songwriting expressed in a song. things like the innovation or the significance of a song. but sometimes, like in my case, alot of times the 'knowledge' interferes with the 'experience' of that knowing the song or being with the song.

__________________________________________

http://www.twitter.com/chriscjamison/

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

Peter Drucker