Good music is Good music

Music is so subjective that to define good and bad music in itself might be enough to drive MIT students to go insane.  Good is good, it just depends on who you ask.  if you ask a Metal head what good and bad music is you’ll get a different answer than if you ask you’re grandpa.  It’s not so simple to get to the heart of what makes music good or bad, it’s always clouded with opinion and agenda. It comes down to a preferred genre or group of genres.

I can appreciate all kinds of music. Ok, I guess i should say many Genre’s of music.  Within those Genre’s however are good and bad examples of those particular styles.  Wow, now it’s getting really complicated.  So now we have opinions on good and bad genres based on peoples tastes but we also have good and bad music within the genres.

Hmm… so what do we think about Pop music? Good? Bad?  Is the Genre bad, or are there  good and bad artists in the genre.  Let’s break it down a little.  Pop music is mass marketed and force fed to the masses.  So are the masses just a brainless group of people who buy into marketing hype?  Maybe some are but the music still has to touch them for it to stick.

I was listening to a radio station this morning that plays pretty much any and everything.  I heard a Pat Benatar song, followed by T rex, followed by Stone Temple Pilots.  All three of these artists could be classified as rock but they are still very different.  Each one of these songs gave me a different sensation.  I memory, a lyric that hit home, the chord progression that just felt right.

I realized this morning that good music is good music.  It’s up to the listener to decide what they think is good music.  No amount of marketing or hype will make people feel something they don’t feel.  So even if the music seems like crap to me, to some other person it may be the greatest song on earth, not because of it’s structure or complex phrasing and progression, but simply because it touched that person.