The Elephant In The Room

[koganbot]

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and

Comments

I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[arbitrary_greay]

I find that BGM is a state of mind. At one moment, any one genre in my library can be conducive to good studying/working, at another, the same genre ruins my productivity because I find myself analyzing the music instead of my chosen task.

There's also something to be said for how people value soundtracks to various media.
Functionally, the "best" soundtrack is the one that brings the most value to the media it accompanies, but there are so many different mechanisms to do so. One is to seamlessly augment portrayed emotions, but more often, the portrayed atmosphere is ambivalent in its original form, and the "background" music is the defining factor.
Arguably, the functionally best soundtrack is the one you don't notice because it's inextricably tied to the source media, but all entries on "greatest" lists will be soundtracks that stand on their own, bringing value to the media it accompanies through its own intrinsic, independent value. As in, the soundtracks that merit buying.

This is complicated immensely in the video game industry, where background tracks are played on loop, and often seamlessly looping. Players may listen to the same track for hours on end, so a fully aggressive defining piece of music will quickly become grating, or worse, begin breaking the intended atmosphere, even serving as a trigger of the opposite emotion, due to irritation at oh my fuck it's that fucking song AGAIN.. So "greatest" video game soundtracks are both defining with intrinsic value, but also have the ability to comfortably fade into subtle enhancement. (My current obsession as the epitome of both sides is the No More Heroes OST, although if you don't want to hear ALL OF THE VARIATIONS on that main theme, you can get the greatest hits digest through just the boss themes.)

There's also something to be said about how soundtracks, (which may or may not be technically BGM, depending on how forward they are in the source media) due to the associations with the accompanying media, are arguably the most common avenue by which people are exposed to music they like in genres they do not frequent. A person with the most singular taste in music may have one or two tracks in their library in a completely unpredictable genre because they heard it on TV or in a movie once.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[arbitrary_greay]

I would argue that anime and video game geeks will have more wildly varied music libraries, with listening trends more even spread across more genres, than most music geeks, (Wherein the former and the latter do not intersect) even when the former never takes any time to learn about the contexts and details of each genre the way the latter does. If my library was solely the works of Yoko Kanno, I might have a wider variety of styles than your average music critic. I have a music aficionado co-worker who I impressed by giving him a CD of the Bioshock Infinite covers, and I really want to share with him the joy that is the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, especially what with Scott Matthew sounding to me like a Bowie impression.
The soundtrack for RWBY, (not technically an anime but aesthetically is one) which spans a good number of genres, was at one point more popular than the Hunger Games soundtrack on Itunes. (#1 in soundtracks on Itunes, is #4 for soundtracks on Billboard this week, was #25 for overall Itunes albums in the US and #1 in Canada)

And setting aside anime, arguably video games inspire the most baggage-less music development in genres "who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and therefore Popular." What awareness is there of Overclocked Remix outside of geekdom? Only in video games music orchestral concerts can you find concert halls sold out packed by younger people for classical music composed within the last few decades. (The only other time that happens is for hugely recognizable movie themes, a la John Williams' career)

I guess what I'm trying to say with those last paragraphs is, geek-fandom-music (rooted in soundtrack) is another oft-ignored field when it comes to consideration by the non-geek-music music world? And its music develops in ways more in line with what is desired in said critic/news/entertainment circles than, say the development of Broadway music. (tl;dr of link is: "Sondheiiiiimmmmm!")

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[koganbot]

Of course this is all quite relevant. And, despite my relation to video games and anime consisting of a vast, impressive ignorance, I've nonetheless occasionally written about bits of music relating to bits of video-n-anime-games (the "Lam Suet" remix of "Crayon," something-or-other that Faye Wong did for Final Fantasy, something else by Scooter or someone, and some Russian cod-peasant tune as the theme of yet another video game). This leads me to believe that geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on. But I really don't know. I assume there is some overlap between the Rockwrite and Fanfic and video-geek worlds that'll facilitate this overlap. I should find out if and how much skyecaptain and freakytigger and petronia have crossed into this overlap. I'll post a call for comment to these people and others.

I've long assumed that crunk takes its basic tonal sense from the romanticism of nineteenth and twentieth century "serious" music (rather than say from rhythm & blues, though of course there's no law stopping it from taking from both), but that this was owing to wanting to create the feel of suspense and horror movies - the composers of which were steeped in European romanticism. (Which isn't to say that I've done any research into what Jon, Banner, and Collipark were drawing from or getting at.)

Since critics are people, and people generally are exposed to TV sets and radios and the like, I think the critic is familiar with a huge variety of music, whether or not that variety gets into his or her library.

Another thought: "soundtrack" probably doesn't connote in people's mind quite what is going on - or even remotely what is going on - in TV commercials, almost all of which use music but the music very rarely coalesces into anything like a song or even a jingle. It's almost like: a rhythm, jumpy or not-so-jumpy depending; a daub of rock, or a daub of disco, or a daub of mood; perhaps followed by a wash of something. Back when I lived in San Francisco one of my roommates, a very good jazz musician, was once invited to play on a TV commercial. He said if you'd filmed the session it'd have made This Is Spinal Tap seem like Schindler's List in comparison.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[petronia]

To be honest, I think that geek fandom music (especially the folk-filk, pop-classical, post-Enya side of it, which is the AC side, as opposed to the electronica/Jpop sides which are respectively closer to their genre mainstreams) is critically ignored because there's little audience overlap. It's not that the critical types don't hear this stuff necessarily (everyone plays video games) but that the people who make this stuff the core of their listening care not about Kanye or Kylie or Arcade Fire. I mean, personally I have had an immense education from Yoko Kanno -- from mind-melting 90s techno epics to jazz-funk to Beatles pastiches that would make Noel Gallagher weep -- but that last sentence would mean hell-all to my D&D buddies, and to my music critic buddies she'd be, well, a talented pastichist and soundtrack composer.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[petronia]

The other day I bought a remastered CD of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the liner notes claim it introduced a generation to jazz.