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

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

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

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.

[anonymous]

This is making me think of the couple hundred weddings I DJ'd over the years, where background music (through cocktail hours and dinners) took up more than half of my playlist, and was (therefore) something I gave plenty of thought to (i.e., constantly adding songs to my "dinner playlist," trying to sustain a very particular type of energy during those moments, etc.). The key for me during cocktail hour and dinner (though there are variations even between those two segments) was to play a set of tunes which simultaneously were unobtrusive enough so that people could chat over them (light jazz, a la Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker), but just interesting, or unusual enough that every so often someone's ears would perk up and they might even come over and inquire about what I was playing (it's a good time to pull out familiar-but-not-overplayed oldies, Walter Egan's "Magnet and Steel" was a favourite, We Five's "You Were on My Mind"). While playing these sets, I would sometimes scan the room to see if the music was causing at least a minor

Confession

[koganbot]

Okay, it wasn't literally, actually, a real live elephant under the cut, or even a picture of one. But it was the real figurative elephant (as it were), the one that's been marauding through my mind, as opposed to the well-mannered, nonrogue elephant that was grazing peacefully atop my post.

(Mark once pulled such an elephant switch on one of his ilX threads, though the second ("real") elephant took a while to reveal itself, and I don't think the revelation was necessarily in Mark's plan when he began the thread. Fwiw, I hadn't gone into my post with the idea of introducing the real elephant down the line, though such a possibility was at least in the back of my mind; and of course the giant elephant itself was there right smack in the middle of my mind's living room, pawing restlessly at the floor.)