sucks again

The discussion of proper ways to critique has a lot of
ramifications...a story from Malcolm X's autobiography means a lot to me
in this regard. Malcolm was walking through Harlem with a very well
educated Phd, when a street hustler approached X, and began talking to
him about his plans for the evening. It was all heavy duty black street
slang, of course, and the Phd didn't understand a word of what the dude
was saying...but, Malcolm did, and was quite amused at how a black
"leader" couldn't even understand how to communicate with a segment of
people from his own race.
Point is, what constitutes good communication? Malcolm knew exactly
what the street guy was saying, and he could also communicate quite well
with world leaders...to him, both forms of speaking were valid, and full
of information. Same with musical styles...I know folks who think that
"classical" music is "superior" to other forms, such as blues...but, I
know they cannot PLAY blues...so, if they can't even do the thing, how
can they say it's inferior? To me, that's a form of elitism, and
henceforth, a dangerous form of thinking, for obvious reasons. Language,
to me, is to communicate what a person is feeling...if you can do that
with simple, powerful words/phrases (sucks), what's the problem? Or, to
paraphrase a sort of goofy saying, what part of sucks don't you
understand? Now, if you want a detailed explanation of WHY something
sucks, I don't think that's unreasonable...in my case, I am always happy
to provide a more thorough analysis of my critiques.
There's a tradition in black culture of "doing the dozens," which is
basically having an insult contest...check out the Bo Diddley tune "Say,
Man," where Bo and Jerome do just that on the record...I think that's
probably where the term "bad" came from, to describe a great
musician...the art of the insult is a real old thing between blues/jazz
musicians, and often, the more you respect a player, the more you make
it sound like he's awful...all in good fun, of course, and when it isn't
in good fun, it ain't happening, and it ain't honorable.
I would be happy to provide a list of some of my more descriptive
phrases, concerning musical (or other) critiques, should anyone be
interested...but, they're real similar to what a feller like Miles Davis
would use...his autobiography, by the way, is real interesting...Hstick

dear neil
i think any music when it becomes a form whetether it be
Blues,classical,punk or otherwise,once categorized as a "form" loses all
significance whatsoever.
Neil Haverstick wrote:

It's interesting that Haverstick used the story
about language (from Malcolm X's book) to
illustrate his point about musical elitism.

My research into medieval Frankish music
theory intersects with a lot of my research
into language, and I just recently came across
a "History of the French Language" which
specifically highlights this kind of elitism -
and involves music, too.

The so-called Carolingian Renaissance began
around 780 AD, because king Charlemagne
was distressed at the state of the Latin,
and at the state of the musical chants,
being used in the church services. The Franks
were Germans who had millions of Latin-speaking
people as their subjects, and it was only natural
that this Germanic influence would "corrupt"
both the musical and linguistic aspects of the
Latin religious environment.

So, in the same way that Charlemagne sent
envoys to Rome to bring the "true" chant back
to the royal court at Aachen, he brought the
great English scholar Alcuin to reform the
language.

The reason why the Latin in England remained
uncorrupted is because the English spoke a
Germanic language, whereas all the other users
of Latin spoke Romance languages, that is,
languages derived from Latin itself. It was easy
for Romance speakers to confuse the "correct"
classical Latin "rules" with those of their own
spoken vernacular, thus the written, literary
Latin itself was changing.

Charlemagne put an abrupt stop to this by
having educated people learn an artificial literary
Latin that was more or less pretty close to the
classical Latin of the Roman Empire, and which
continued to be used for nearly 1000 years more.

This left the spoken Romance languages to
develop on their own among the illiterate masses.
This marks the beginning of modern French and,
by extension to all others users of Latin in
Christendom, of Provencal, Italian, Spanish,
Catalan, Portuguese, and Rumanian, too.

Thus Charlemagne's "elitism" in Latin actually
signalled the birth of several of the world's great
modern languages. No doubt, the "elitism" of the
"Gregorian" chant he imposed had a similar effect
on the development of the secular music of the
time (written records of the music are more
scanty and indecipherable than those of language,
so it's tough to be sure what happened here).

It's been my experience that the main reason
elitists consider certain kinds of music or
language "inferior" is simply that they haven't
studied these "inferior" types sufficiently, and
haven't found a way to analyze them in a way
that brings them an understanding of these
"inferior" methods of communication.

Music is perhaps more slippery than language
in this regard because it's harder to pin down
concretely, but the processes of evolution in
both music and language are remarkably similar.

This is probably because both are a means
of communication that are based in *sound*,
but that are continually embroiled in the process
of being *written down*. Apparently, there
are differences between the aural and visual
aspects of our mental processing that are
difficult to reconcile.
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Joseph L Monzo wrote:

>
> It's been my experience that the main reason
> elitists consider certain kinds of music or
> language "inferior" is simply that they haven't
> studied these "inferior" types sufficiently, and
> haven't found a way to analyze them in a way
> that brings them an understanding of these
> "inferior" methods of communication.
>
> Music is perhaps more slippery than language
> in this regard because it's harder to pin down
> concretely, but the processes of evolution in
> both music and language are remarkably similar.
>
> This is probably because both are a means
> of communication that are based in *sound*,
> but that are continually embroiled in the process
> of being *written down*. Apparently, there
> are differences between the aural and visual
> aspects of our mental processing that are
> difficult to reconcile.

I couldn't agree more! As we delve deeper into the musics on this planet we
discover that where one culture will "develop" more along certain line
other cultures will consider develop in other directions that is sometimes
hard to understand as well as even perceive. Music is anything but a
"universal" language. The whole problem of what is written down is that
what is apparent on the page is sometimes impossible to hear in the same
way!
-- Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
www.anaphoria.com