What is
good music? Generally a song follows a scale, or a sequence inside the music
theory, d-r-m-f-s-l-t-d, and a batch of noise in combination of silence, fast
and slow, loud and low, every popular song follows this, just the difference in
degree. If so, what is good music?
Good
music, should be not badly produced, played and listened. To put this concept a
little bit further, it is to ask what is "not good" music, in the meantime, it is to ask what is bad music. Should we define something
as bad of we like? It is not so necessary, however, somehow we have to do it
for the sake of “music itself”. A song, if no one says it is good, actually we
should not have to define it as bad; on the other hand, if everyone says it is
bad but you think it is good, I believe we have the obligation to defend as
well as to protect something you believe in. It is to like something, not
disliking the music you like.
Therefore, I lay on the
belief that good music is a completely personal preference first. It could be
whatever reason you like a song or an artist. For instance, the singer looks
cool, the music connected with your soul, remind of you something sweet, bitter or bittersweet, make you love your parents and friends and life after
you listen to the song or look at the artists. To say a piece of music is not good music, again, it is a completely personal preference like what good music is. The thing which is more
important should be, what is bad music, again, I lie on the belief that we have
something to protect in life. When everyone says the song is bad and I think it
is good, it is the perspective that how bad should we says a song is “bad”.
From the previous, good music is not badly produced, played and listened, thus,
bad music is badly produced, played and listened. The responsibility of making
a music bad is crossing different aspects, production and reception side, as
well as the processing in between these two. Bad music, is produced by someone
who can’t produced, played by someone who can’t played, as well as listened by
people who are not probably listened. In between these three aspects,
authenticity is an important concept transcend them. Authentic music should be
authentically produced, it is by appropriation but not by “copy” (it is
difficult to distinguish between copying and appropriating, but I think it
should be accorded by your own listening experience, like the concept of
copy-right, it is regarded as copying if you listen to the song you seem to
copy before you produce your own song. Therefore, the case here is, if you
listen to Eric Clapton at your ages of 80, in which you never listen to Jimi
Hendrix before, Eric Clapton’s guitar is not copying in your own term, and he
should not be seen as “a thief” from any black music, fair enough); Authentic
music should be authentically played, it is by a real communicative process as
a player as well as a listener of “the player” in his/her own history; finally,
Authentic music should be probably listened/played(as a reception side), it is
not determined by the technical equipment, like how much the hi-fi system you
have, or how much the earphones you have; or it is vinyl, cassette-player,
MD-player, CD-player, MP3 player or whatever, they are just about media
channels. It should be, listened and played at the right place in sociological
term, we listen to the music but not “ripping off” the music, should we play Metallica’s
Sad but true at a wedding? Or we play “Tell Laura I love her” when you propose to
Mary? They are dry wit, and they are interesting to put some thoughts on.
