From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc
Subject: Re: Why do we like one group/artist better than others?
Date: 13 Apr 92 23:01:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: heurikon.1419
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

>So back to the main point of this article. Why do we like one
>group or artist (or some groups or artists) better than other(s)?

The work they do has just the right amount of what makes us feel 
comfortable and something that we haven't heard to feed our insatiable
urge for novelty.

If we like someone who has thousands of nice looking [and, hopefully,
brainless. Brains threaten us.] young girls following them around,
maybe some of these young girls will follow *us* around instead.

Since knowledge is power, knowing a whole lot about someone or group
of someones who are not well known gives us the opportunity to share
our wisdom with dumber folks than us and gather valuable karma points.

We like some groups more than others because we have discriminating 
tastes which allow us to quickly and easily separate the wheat from
the chaff [or, to put it another way, to separate the mere poseurs
from the innately talented].

Music comes directly from the soul, and arrives in our consciousness
unmediated by harmful things like logic or social constructs. We 
can sometimes feel or sense these things, and why would we *not*
respond?

The music made by the group we like shares our values. It takes its
place among the other pieces of music which make up "the soundtrack
of our lives." With luck, we can hear this soundtrack everywhere we
go, surrounding ourselves with familiar aural objects.

Some groups *are* just better than others. It's objectively obvious.
Yes, for example. Kate Bush. Rush. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

This music articulates familiar statements about emotions that we
have neither interrogated carefully nor thought very much or very
deeply about. Since we are living our lives in what is pretty much
a shapeless and ill-defined fog of our own making, latching on to 
these formulations beats the hell out of the anxiety which would
accompany the feeling that we are essentially unreflective sheep
being led about by persons who are smarter than we are.

We just *like* them. Why on earth do you silly people keep trying
to intellectualize the things we've proven to be incapable of explaining
or thinking explicitly about.

This is a nice combination of X and Y [tangos played on the Nagaswaram].

I like to dance, and this band makes kinesthetic sense.

This band has lots of people who follow them all over and tape all 
their shows. If they're capable of doing this to *someone*, then they
must be good [or we'll have to come up with an explanation as to why
it's reasonable to engage in this kind of behaviour].

X is good [cf. Treworgy as cited by Messinger].

This group is on the college charts, which are a haven from the crass
commercialism of the popular charts.

--
I am so lonely for the twentieth century,/for the deeply felt, obscene
graffiti/of armed men and the beautiful bridges/that make them so small and
carry them/into the hearts of cities written like words/across nothing,/the
dense void history became in my beautiful century/gtaylor/608-828-3385
Xref: sparky rec.music.misc:14305 alt.rock-n-roll:9942