# What is the appeal of 'difficult' music? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 26, 2010, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398 "2010-10-26T13:16:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/21 "2010-10-26T17:07:18Z")
> [@jordanr2](#): > > Your next challenge is to pull a _Zaireeka_ with those three, and perhaps throw Boris’s _Absolutego_ into the mix to round it all out. I don’t care much for Boris, but I do like Earth and Om and Sunn-O)) quite a bit. I loves me some drone with my feedback. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/22 "2010-10-26T17:08:34Z")
> [@jordanr2](#): > > I think he’s great, but then I’ve heard most of his albums - it takes a long-term familiarity with his work to realize the diversity of what he does. There are a lot of albums where he’s working in prototypical Jandek mode (i.e. the sound of _Ready for the House_), but then there’s stuff that’s even more melancholy and desperate (_Blue Corpse_, _Six and Six_), some very minimal and cryptic stuff (_Ruins of Adventure_, _Put My Dream on This Planet_, the latter of which is a totally gripping _a cappella_ album) and the recent live albums, like _Glasgow Sunday_, where he just rocks out. > > As for the question in the OP, I find this music appealing initially because of the challenges it poses: forcing you to find interest in repetition, veiled beauty in superficial ugliness, etc. A lot of this music does very compelling things with sound, too - listen to Lambkin/Lescalleet’s _The Breadwinner_ through headphones, for instance, it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. When it steps outside the bounds of what’s conventionally appealing and comforting, music can open up whole new emotional spaces. Ready for the House, Blue Corpse, Glasgow Sunday are prolly his best, IMO. Especially Glasgow Sunday; I really like that album. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/23 "2010-10-26T17:26:58Z")
> [@Pitchmeister](#): > > There is a point of ‘optimal complexity’ in music where we recognize the patterns and build an expectation what the next chord is going to be, but are also surprised when we hear something entirely different. Do you have a source for this particular insight? I’m working on a book of aesthetics and this ties into my argument in interesting ways. I have Leonard Meyer’s _Emotion and Meaning in Music_ but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/24 "2010-10-26T18:34:20Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#): > > Do you have a source for this particular insight? I’m working on a book of aesthetics and this ties into my argument in interesting ways. I have Leonard Meyer’s _Emotion and Meaning in Music_ but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I would highly recommend reading Frank Zappa’s _The Real Frank Zappa Book_, Chapter 8 - All About Music. Frank talks a lot about the role of tension and release and compositional complexity in that chapter. > [@Frank Zappa](#): > > Anything **can** be music, but it doesn’t **become music** until someone **wills** it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to **perceive it as music**. > > Most people can’t deal with that abstraction - or don’t want to. It’s prolly my favorite chapter of the book, as my initial reading of it caused me to sit up and exclaim “OMFG someone else perceives music the same way I do!” Plus, he put it into words better than I was able to at the time, so that helped me coalesce my own ideas more fully than I was previously able to. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/25 "2010-10-26T19:14:20Z")
Does anyone listen to Merzbow for fun? Some of the Japanese noise is decent, Boredoms, and even Melt-Banana. I don’t know about him though. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/26 "2010-10-26T19:20:54Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Does anyone listen to Merzbow for fun? Some of the Japanese noise is decent, Boredoms, and even Melt-Banana. I don’t know about him though. I don’t have any of his solo stuff, but I do have collaborations such as Merz-Banana and Merzbow Null. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/27 "2010-10-26T20:26:53Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > I don’t care much for Boris, but I do like Earth and Om and Sunn-O)) quite a bit. I loves me some drone with my feedback. 😃 There were the bands I thought of when I read the thread title, along with Khanate - add some pure noise to the drone. Also, all Funeral Doom metal fits. For those not familiar with the genre, very slow, heavy and repetitive extreme metal, with deep, incomprehensible growled vocals. Done well, it’s extremely hypnotic and cathartic. Examples would be Thergothon, Pantheist, Ahab, and Esoteric. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/28 "2010-10-26T20:38:28Z")
> [@Steophan](#): > > There were the bands I thought of when I read the thread title, along with Khanate - add some pure noise to the drone. > Also, all Funeral Doom metal fits. For those not familiar with the genre, very slow, heavy and repetitive extreme metal, with deep, incomprehensible growled vocals. Done well, it’s extremely hypnotic and cathartic. Examples would be Thergothon, Pantheist, Ahab, and Esoteric. Thanks for those names. I know Pantheist, but the others are new to me. I’ll have to check them out. I agree that when it’s done well, it’s very cool. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/29 "2010-10-26T21:23:31Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > Back in the 1980s, I couldn’t listen to Black Metal or Death Metal because of the CMVs. Which was weird, because I was totally into hardcore and punk, and if you’d have asked, I’d have said that my favorite type of singing was really yelling. But I couldn’t do more than laugh or twist my face in disgust at the low, guttural, almost barking Cookie Monster Vocals or black/death metal. The growly vocals are the reason I have purged a couple of freebie death metal compilations from my music library. The music often isn’t bad and I could get to like it; the vocals are a non-negotiable turnoff. Besides, given that abusing one’s voice tends to cause the development of vocal cord polyps, I don’t want to think about [what’s growing in the larynxes of those lead singers](http://www.ghorayeb.com/vocalcordpolyp.html). ---
**Author:** ![jordanr2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jordanr2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jordanr2)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2010, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398/30 "2010-10-26T22:08:38Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Does anyone listen to Merzbow for fun? Some of the Japanese noise is decent, Boredoms, and even Melt-Banana. I don’t know about him though. He’s not my favorite noise artist (his “signal-to-noise” ratio is kinda low, so to speak) but I listen to him here and there. He’s definitely not doing anywhere near the same things as Boredoms and Melt-Banana - he’s more pure noise, while I think of those guys more as noise-rock. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-appeal-of-difficult-music/558398.md?page=1)