a few days ago i caught someone talking about guilty pleasures on twitter and this sent me on a rant that i developed since i came to the conclusion that guilty pleasures as a concept is wrong. i believe that you should stand accountable for all sorts of art or opinion and don't use this waiver or a copout and say that it's a guilty pleasure. there is just two sides to this artwork called music, there is good and bad. i have different shades of good where the lowest is "i don't mind it" and even then i still like it. on the bad there is just that category, bad because otherwise you are just splitting ends.
i like a lot of music that isn't credible at all but i've probably mentioned most of it here on this blog. it's everything between eurodance and epic trance, random chart fodder, the sort of classic & opera pieces that are regarded as for beginners and has crossed over to the mainstream. same goes for jazz music of that kind and also all sorts of mundane or inane music that will send simon reynolds into a rant or lecture.
with regards to the easily picked on of the ones mentioned here i can explain that eurodance by default doesn't take itself seriously. it's dance music about dancing, there was a whole lot of it that had "conscious" topics but it had already been said many times before. this fact shatters all sorts of questions about credibility and disposability and it's also why it's credible in it's own right.
the music might be mundane but it has bite and this is the issue and when you strip of all the bite from music you basically have musac, anti-music disguised as music. a lot of chart fodder pop that can send you to irritation about how "awful" it is at least provokes you because it plays according to formula. i really don't like alexandra stan's "mr. saxobeat" or carly rae jepsen's "call me maybe", to use two examples on songs that i've taken a shit on for this blog, but they have some sort of bite and i can tolerate them but i still don't like them.
so to the song at hand then and this song is from jamie myerson's "the listen project" album, much like "crucial" as i talked about a few weeks ago. it's a very emotional piece at glance and i think myerson and carol tripp wants you and i to think so. all i hear is this serious piece of music trying to be soulful, comforting and uplifting and i think it fails within all of that. somehow i get the impression that myerson wanted to make something that sounds like if 4hero and grover washington jr. had done a collaboration.
fusing together contemporary jazz with modern drum and bass but it comes off less as that and more like the really soft side of omni trio and kenny g or david benoit. it plays right into all the clichés and it's devoid of all sorts of bite in every element. whether it's the rhythmic backdrop or the keys or donald ward's saxophone or carol tripp's vocal. a part of me doesn't want pick on the saxophone as it's a problematic instrument thanks to it's constant use in schmaltzy smooth jazz but i have to as it does fit the bill in this case.
basically if you boil down all of that random malarky, it comes down to that all of my instincts are saying that this song is musac. it's disguised as drum and bass but it's musac. i have issues calling it music that i stand for but i can also honestly say that i love this song. there isn't any way to really defend it with with my logic on what constintutes as good music but i do actually really love it. this sort of problematic was delved into in my entry on madrid de los austria's "mas amor".
what differentiates them is only by a smidge and has to be that "mas amor" has better instrumentation and has some bite. even though they have the same kind of modus operandi and i might be actually bullshitting myself over that also.
buy here (itunes)
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