Music modes

There’s vibe-scouring, trying to place music in some kind of historical or generic context to draw relationships for fun.

And then there’s “I really like this, it’s interesting and meaningful to me, and I think it’s high quality.” (And that’s where the score comes in)

I think you could even have in-genre scores and global “excluding genre considerations” scores, which is kind of what Xgau does with the asterisks anyways, and I like that framing. It’s plenty of hyper genre-aware music is only really meaningful if you’re immersed in its genre. Hip-hop requires knowing some genre conventions to really grasp.

But also, all art is like this—most “serious” art is in conversation with its forebears and with itself or the things currently around it.

Music to me feels extra contextual because it’s never a static thing—it’s a temporal media. A melody happens in sequence. That’s also why I have a hard time listening to anything that’s not an album, or a curated playlist—decontextualized radio plays is exhausting to me for some reason, I don’t like having my context/state of mind broken up every two minutes. I want to sit in something intentionally.

In fact, those are the only two ways I make playlists. Either “this is a series of songs in a particular order to create an intended context and experience”, or “this is a grab bag of songs that have a particular vibe, so the individual order doesn’t matter, what you’re getting out of it is just being immersed in a particular aesthetic”.

I think one of the signals people look for to identify “good art” is whether they can tell (or whether it itself signals) that it’s in conversation with prior work. That the artist did their reading, that they’ve paid their dues to immerse and understand the existing culture and community (the…context). But this also makes a lot of sense, at a human level. Seeing and being seen is a big deal, and I think a pretty big motivator of art happening in the first place.

There are times or genres where people try to break from the existing genre, context, culture, ideologies, and people. If those work, and they resonate with other people, they spiral out and calcify into their own canon. But even then, to be successful they can’t just be “I think I invented something new by not paying any attention to the context around me”—those seem to rarely turn out great.