October 2007 Archives

I'm kinda bummed that I failed to post any Halloween content this year. I had ideas floating around in my head but just never took the time to hash them out. I can't believe October has already reached its end... in any case, hope you have a great Halloween!

I love music, and it's one of those things I get pretty opinionated about. Given that, I'm glad my brain isn't burdened with the task of classifying every band or music artist that I hear so that I can decide whether or not it's cool and therefore worth listening to.

I read a post on another blog the other day comparing emo and hipsters, the writer putting them-self more in the hipster camp. For example, in outlining the 2 genres, they listed "Yellowcard" as "emo". I disagree with that label (at least with their most recent music, I'd just slap it in the "pop" genre), but I digress. Author talks about how the hipsters are music snobs who have to like stuff that's not popular or mainstream at all, etc etc. In the comments, a dialogue like this appeared:

Visitor 1: "no I don't think these couple bands are emo, they're more alternative" (referring to Yellowcard as one of them).

Author: "You're wrong. Yellowcard is totally emo for reasons x, y, and z."

Visitor 1: "I don't really know what these bands *look* like. I'm going off the sound, etc."

Visitor 2: "No, Yellowcard is emo, It's more about the lyrics than the look or sound. Just read their lyrics, totally emo."

This annoys me. First, most of the "emo" they mentioned is mostly pop, even if some of it has some emo roots. Second, I would define that genre differently than either the author or visitor 2 does, so their classifications would be worthless even if I did care.

After thinking about it for a while, I came to this conclusion: I'm glad I'm not a music snob who has to classify music to know if it's cool or not, and who places value on music according to its popularity. (Look at me-- I'm my own kind of self-righteous music snob, turning my nose up at the other snobs, hehehe). These people could argue all day long about what is emo, what is not, what's this and what's that, etc, because they have a need to be cool and make fun of everything that is not "cool", and heaven forbid they like or get caught listening to some music that might fall into or be related to an uncool genre.

Aside from that post, I still find music increasingly hard to categorize these days, just another reason not to worry about how specific you get in categorizing it.

I also hope to continue to become less judgemental of other's tastes-- everyone has different preferences. (If I slam a type of music it'll be something like rap, and not because of the sound of the music so much, but rather because in general the content is so base and depraved-- it's not even worth it to listen to try to find stuff that is clean).

Edit: I just remembered another reason I was disgusted with the "hipster" attitude-- for shunning artists that are "in it for the money". I'll save that for another day, since it touches on more than just music.

Let's take a little trip down nostalgia lane. Today I was again contemplating the Goofy collection of DVDs, as they have all the Goofy Sports cartoons that I grew up on. That was one of my favorite VHS tapes.

Then it occurred to me that they might be on Youtube. YES. The nearly all-knowing youtube... Here's one for football season: