Can a music matter if its fans don't like to read?
(Should there be an "about it" after the words "read"? I'm thinking of the stereotypical fan of rock and indie who also goes out dancing to "dance pop" and quite enjoys herself but only reads about the former and doesn't spend time thinking about much less reading about the latter?* Or, say, an intellectual in the Fifties who likes show music and Sinatra and ilk fine, and still takes out his old Benny Goodman discs, but doesn't go out of his way to read about any of it - doing so doesn't cross his mind - his serious reading devoted to more serious subjects: politics, sociology, etc.)
But anyway, to answer your question, yes, of course "Happy Birthday" and "Auld Lang Syne" and "Silent Night" and "Gypsy Davey" and "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues" etc. etc. matter - the stories they tell or the rituals they enrich matter to the people who listen and engage, etc.
Is there a constituency who (if they cared at all) would answer "it really doesn't matter if a music matters, as long as I know what I like" -- and does this constituency generally favour different kinds of music than those favoured by people who care which music matter and why?
Not sure, but I'd bring up a slightly different constituency, or a slightly different use (as in my parenthetical start to my previous response, it's not necessarily a division between readers and nonreaders but between X that people read about and Y that they don't, but the people may be the same): people who value "light" music for the same reason they value "light" reading and "fun" movies etc., value the music because it doesn't matter and they don't have to think about it. And my paradoxical response is that stuff like this can especially matter, precisely because, being "entertainment," it escapes the censorship of the serious mind, it doesn't COUNT, it's not going to be on the exam. So dark stuff can happen in this light area that wouldn't be permitted if anyone took it seriously. Except once we realize it does matter...
But I think ballads (and pop music) generally do matter in the sense that the people care a lot, e.g. the fans of Manilow, of Iglesias pere and fils, of Liberace, etc. Some might be fanatics (from which the word "fan" derives). But they don't make this music and their fandom a matter of sociopolitical rumination, so in this sense it also escapes the censorship of the serious mind, but by "serious mind" here I don't mean their minds but the minds of society at large, whose ruminators don't bother with the ballads. But ballads still get to be part of the cultural unconscious, despite existing in plain sight.
But I'm wondering if this "lightness" is mostly obsolete in the post-Beatles world anyway. I don't know if Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat and Michael Buble escape the cultural commentary of the commenting classes, or how they're taken by their fans, but Pink and Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus sure don't escape cultural commentary, and the latter three are as big on the adult contemporary charts as the former are. And I doubt that Pink and Taylor, especially, are seen as unimportant.
*I use this example because Simon Frith brought up something like it in one of his columns, citing an actual young woman who behaved like this in the '80s and then was hit with the sudden revelation that the music she danced to was "her music" more than any of the others.
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Can a music matter if its fans don't like to read?
(Should there be an "about it" after the words "read"? I'm thinking of the stereotypical fan of rock and indie who also goes out dancing to "dance pop" and quite enjoys herself but only reads about the former and doesn't spend time thinking about much less reading about the latter?* Or, say, an intellectual in the Fifties who likes show music and Sinatra and ilk fine, and still takes out his old Benny Goodman discs, but doesn't go out of his way to read about any of it - doing so doesn't cross his mind - his serious reading devoted to more serious subjects: politics, sociology, etc.)
But anyway, to answer your question, yes, of course "Happy Birthday" and "Auld Lang Syne" and "Silent Night" and "Gypsy Davey" and "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues" etc. etc. matter - the stories they tell or the rituals they enrich matter to the people who listen and engage, etc.
Is there a constituency who (if they cared at all) would answer "it really doesn't matter if a music matters, as long as I know what I like" -- and does this constituency generally favour different kinds of music than those favoured by people who care which music matter and why?
Not sure, but I'd bring up a slightly different constituency, or a slightly different use (as in my parenthetical start to my previous response, it's not necessarily a division between readers and nonreaders but between X that people read about and Y that they don't, but the people may be the same): people who value "light" music for the same reason they value "light" reading and "fun" movies etc., value the music because it doesn't matter and they don't have to think about it. And my paradoxical response is that stuff like this can especially matter, precisely because, being "entertainment," it escapes the censorship of the serious mind, it doesn't COUNT, it's not going to be on the exam. So dark stuff can happen in this light area that wouldn't be permitted if anyone took it seriously. Except once we realize it does matter...
But I think ballads (and pop music) generally do matter in the sense that the people care a lot, e.g. the fans of Manilow, of Iglesias pere and fils, of Liberace, etc. Some might be fanatics (from which the word "fan" derives). But they don't make this music and their fandom a matter of sociopolitical rumination, so in this sense it also escapes the censorship of the serious mind, but by "serious mind" here I don't mean their minds but the minds of society at large, whose ruminators don't bother with the ballads. But ballads still get to be part of the cultural unconscious, despite existing in plain sight.
But I'm wondering if this "lightness" is mostly obsolete in the post-Beatles world anyway. I don't know if Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat and Michael Buble escape the cultural commentary of the commenting classes, or how they're taken by their fans, but Pink and Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus sure don't escape cultural commentary, and the latter three are as big on the adult contemporary charts as the former are. And I doubt that Pink and Taylor, especially, are seen as unimportant.
*I use this example because Simon Frith brought up something like it in one of his columns, citing an actual young woman who behaved like this in the '80s and then was hit with the sudden revelation that the music she danced to was "her music" more than any of the others.