However, I do feel trance is more "fun" and when I say "fun" I mean it's better suited as a leisure activity. It's comfy, it's instant, it's powerful and it's consistent when it comes to needs it targets, whereas fusion is selfish and requires quite a lot of investment and if you're lucky and that is, if you can relate to artist and like what you see, you discover something really interesting, else, you get a bummer.
I think the issue here is that I've been using the word "fun" in a different sense than you have then. When I talk about fun, I don't mean in the sense of something frivolous, comforting, or (in the specific case of music) catchy; if I'm enjoying something and I want to keep doing it, then it's fun for me, and that can apply to complex things that I take seriously or require effort too. I can't really say that frivolous and comforting things make better leisure activities, either; I mean, I'm sure they do for
some people, but then you have people whose favorite leisure activities are things like rock climbing.
Also, what's the difference between a leisure activity and a hobby? A hobby is "a regular activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure, typically done during one's leisure time." If you mean that you have to take jazz more
seriously than trance to enjoy it to the fullest extent possible then sure, but many of the most enjoyable things out there are appreciated best when taken seriously; that doesn't mean they're not fun anymore (in fact, they become
more fun.)
Most interesting thing about it is that when the initial "magic" disappears (which is inevitable, I hope you'll agree), you're left with comfy music that you.. expect to be fun, but given it's not crafted to be fun in the first place, you have to skip through the song to find sections that are fun. Weird that I found myself doing this at times.
Sure. I think the "magic" disappearing as we become more accustomed to something new is a part of every artform, but at the same time, not liking everything means that what you
do like you usually appreciate and enjoy a lot more.
You're missing the point. Music IS objective. It's physical, you know, it has properties that everyone can agree about. We can agree on chords, harmony, percussion, texture, structure, rhythm, etc etc. There is something called "music theory" which deals with this. This is the objective side of music. Now when you listen to it, it comes in contact with subjective side of things, which is made out of one's needs, values, expectations, biases, the way one is listening to music and so on. (in other news, I've been working on music simulation game which simulates fanbases, so I thought about this quite a lot
)
Music is "objective" in that it has structure, rhythm, etc. yeah, but that wasn't really what I meant. What I was focusing on is
judging music (which I should have probably clarified more), which, well, is inherently subjective. The same thing applies for other artforms, e.g. painting has color, form, etc., movies have cinematography, plot, etc., which are all "objective" qualities that still affect each individual differently. I don't think we're really disagreeing on this, it's just that I find certain types of reasons for liking something more useful or intelligent than others.
It shouldn't be funny at all dude. You listened to two songs for like less than a minute, didn't like them, and then you chose one simply because you spent a couple of seconds more on it. Lame.
It was more like a minute vs. 5 minutes. Even if I only had a 30 second sample of each I think I'd still be able to say the part of one song that I heard sounds more interesting to me than the other, though.
Also, I'm going to answer this post from a little bit back from the whole "maturity" part of the discussion, because I think I can fully communicate why I feel the way I do about the issue now:
But it's kind of strange to say that something can be less mature because it has simpler gameplay.
It might sound a bit strange, but basically, what it comes down is the age-old issue of
form vs.
content. The coat of paint the creator puts over something, vs. the meat of the creation. In movies, the form is the cinematography, and the actual content is the plot. In novels, the form is the word choice, diction, etc., and the content is...plot again. In games, the form is the aesthetics (audiovisuals, story, etc.), and the content is the mechanics, level design, etc. (basically the rules which actually affect the possibility space of the game.) When people praise something for being "mature," they're always talking about its
content being mature, not its form. If I say a movie or novel is mature, I'm talking about the maturity of the plot, the psychology of the characters, etc., not the visuals or the wordplay. But for some reason, when it comes to videogames people are willing to call a game mature based solely on the form, even if its content absolutely blows. It's a result of the same "thinking of games like movies" mentality I've been mentioning throughout this thread. Usually, you'll see people's lists of most "mature" games consisting of JRPGs, "artgames," and maybe an
Ico or SoTC thrown in somewhere (though those two games don't blow, but you get the point; their
main appeal to most people is in their form/aesthetics.) The equivalent in the movie industry would be a critic praising
The Spirit as the most mature movie ever because its art direction was so dark and gritty.
Your throw-away argument of 'there's no such thing as a truly "new" idea' is patently false. New ideas - new Forms - are made all the time. If you require absolute historical proof, I refer you to the reaction of North American Indians upon seeing European sailing ships - if sails were not a truly new idea, then why did the North Americans not grasp their function and form upon seeing them?
Every idea is derived from and related to a previous one. From a viewer's perspective, any idea we haven't been exposed to before is "new," but we come to understand these new ideas we don't understand by relating them to previous things that we
can understand. In the Native Americans' case, the sails would have to be explained to them and related to the watercraft they already knew ("this is like one of your kayaks, but the sails help it move in the wind.") The same also applies with the perspective of a creator (an artist.) Even if I'm a three-year-old making a simplistic crayon drawing of a monster, my ideas are still derived from somewhere; for example, if I give the monster four arms and four legs, I took the concept of "arms" and "legs" from somewhere (namely, my generalizations about other people around me as well as observations about my own body), and that number came from somewhere too (namely, my recognition that having two arms and two legs is a normal characteristic of a human whereas having four of each is an abnormal characteristic fitting of a monster.) Every idea is derivative to some extent, and so is every creation; trying to say that art is about "rejecting conformity" not only seems false to me but also kind of insulting to some of mankind's most revered artists, especially given the connotation that the "art" label evokes (as well as the issue I mentioned before, that if you use "rejecting conventions" as a criteria for how artistic something is then the first artworks ever created are also always the most artistic ones because conventions barely existed at that time.) If you want to truly make something great then you don't simply reject conventions, you build on them and push them further through experimentation ("refinement.")
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