for any genre

what do you think the general characteristics, positive qualities & flaws of the "purist" are?

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whenever you did these things to the least of my brothers you did them to me

Someone who soaked in as much information as they could possibly have in that genre... knowing it's general-to-in depth history, releases, sales, artists, subgenres, etc. Someone who "breathes" that genre. Someone that is constantly learning something new about the genre everyday, and openly admits that they desire to learn more about it. Someone that acknowledges that they can never know exactly everything, but wants to and works hard at it.

Flaws? Hmmm... coming off as a "know it all" but all you're trying to do is explain the correct yadda yadda of that genre. Seeming like you don't care about anything else

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https://twitter.com/MeeshUniVerSoul


welp

Conservative approach to the genre coupled with a belief that their particular understanding is essential. This over here is REAL jazz, that over there isn't.

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

Games without front ears / born without ears

Someone who believes a given genre should adhere to a strict "code", style or sound that they believe is that given artform's highest level of artistry and the "truest" essence of how it was intended.

>for any genre
>
>what do you think the general characteristics, positive
>qualities & flaws of the "purist" are?

I think the positive qualities of a music purist is generally speaking they have a good foundation of the genre and that could be helpful to people who maybe just getting into a certain genre and are looking for some of the basic foundations of what are some of the best artists, songs and albums to check out.

The flaws are the same flaws that exist with any "purist" attitude or perspective with any aspect of life. They can have a limited or biased scope of a given genre based on their own prejudices and not be open minded to anything that goes outside of their own narrow definition. They usually have some year or decade in their head of when the music "died" and despite what the actual non-purist origins of the genre might be they tend to see music as being pure at some point which is almost never the case and having some strict guidelines which usually never existed with the originators of the style or genre. Most of their arguments have little to do with logic and fact and are more based on emotion and in a lot of cases is just the purist pining for the feeling they got when they were younger and life was a lot more simple.

Being purist simply means that you want a genre to fit into a specific set of aesthetics; it does NOT by default mean that you'll dismiss ideas that fall outside of those parameters. Basically, being a purist more than anything means that you want an easy, simple, *effective* way of classifying a genre which of course is why new subgenres gets invented every month in some genres; people who are looking for easy ways to classifying what they are looking for need to invent new shit in order to classify what they are looking for.

A genre at its core is simply a way of classifyong music; something you drop in a conversation to make people know what you are talking about; the sounds, aesthetics, attitudes etc. It *shouldn't* be deeper than that but people seems to have an issue with it and the irony is of course that the people who claim that they don't care about genres are actually the ones who cares the most; they are the ones who make it OH so important to point to point out that artist X should belong to genre Y but also be viewed as a contender in genre Z and also the ones that make it the biggest deal to make it clear that their artists of choice are too great to be contained within one genre.

Can you dismiss the genre-purists when they want to dismiss those artists as being part of the genre when both the fans *and* artists go out of their way to distance themselves from the genre in question by saying that they are "more" than the genre or are simply above classification.

This is NOT a chicken vs. egg scenario but rather a byproduct of pretentious artists *and* fans thinking that they are "above" and "beyond" a genre; had it not been for those guys, I suspect there had never been a need for any of this purist shit to manifest itself...