[kid cue]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

1. what I mean by I can say what I want and that its not a math problem is that on some level, there's no point in criticizing someone's response to art. On some level. As long as its a genuine response. If someone listens to wagner's tristan and isolde overture and thinks its the most jovial fucking music ever made, as long as the response is unforced, there's not a lot you can say to tell them they are wrong, imho.

On the other hand if I said "Pop goes the world" is a song about consumerism and marx's theories that capitalism alienates man from his natural state you could say I was a twat. Just like if I said animal collective's music is about an earth based religious experience. Luckily that's not what I said. I said that my unforced reaction is that of an earth based religious experience. Which may be as foreign to you as finding wagner jovial, but hey, what can you do? ONe then you absolutely CANNOT do is come at someone and say "I don't like this music, therefore how you feel about it is wrong"

i just don't understand why you are making this a personal issue. i wasn't criticize your response at all. but you asked me what my response was (to Person Pitch, which i hadn't heard, so i decided to respond to the rest of your post). if there is one thing i really can't stand it's this idea that opinions can't be talked about simply because they belong to someone. when i put it into words--which is what anyone does when they talk about music, including yourself--my response to everything is based on operating principles that are completely subject to debate & discussion. when you bring up the presence of religion in all music as a response to my distaste for Animal Collective's pseudo-religious quality, that comment in itself is something that i'm able to respond to. it doesn't have to be about you or the validity of your response at all. but when you articulate the reasons why you like something, i'm allowed to offer my thoughts on those reasons; anyone is.

my responses to music have changed so many times based on what people have said. these dialogues only strengthen my understanding of why i like or don't like things, and sometimes make me change my mind. is that such a bad concept?

but i wasn't trying to change your mind at all. sometimes the problem with talking about such abstract concepts is that every answer implies an all-encompassing framework within which a given opinion is necessarily wrong. of course every opinion is valid, but when we try to act like rational human beings and talk about subjective things, one would hope that that's a given, and that all the talk is happening because people just want to talk.

There's two ways to criticize art at play here. You can pay attention to your response and come to conclusions, or you can make a conclusion and then criticize the resposne. I'm kind of a fan of the former and not so much of the latter.

i already said the latter was not the case. i've made no conclusions, and i was responding to your response. by all means i'd love to LOVE Animal Collective (why not?), but everything i say is based on my response too. put simply, i'm coming with a bottom-up approach to the music and to your comments, which your'e interpreting as some kind of top-down dismissal.

No you can't find ac pretentious by definition as long as you concede that they are "doing their own thing" or in other words definitely NOT trying to engineer the affect of their art on the audience. that's by definition.

yes i still can. any artist has a relationship to his/her own work. you define an aesthetic/style/artistic 'mandate' from subjective impulses. how you think about & shape that aesthetic can be pretentious or it can be not-pretentious. of course you don't have pretension when you excise thoughts of how others will react to your work, but you as an artist are the first audience member. art only exists with a concept of an audience. i refuse to accept this idea that the band exist in a creative hermetic bubble and their choices thus can't debated. as creative people (not just artists, everybody) we should constantly be taking stances on how we feel about these choices, just like talking about art should be encouraged.