ok, i basically agree with you, and my last post was about why i think it's inherently hard to pursue any discussion without seeming to "conclude the limits of experience based on the premise of distaste for the music" (well put). i did get that the part about religion is your "own unsolicited response" and not their stated intent. i said that (not very clearly) here:
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i know you brought this up because you were just responding to the sounds (so was i), but let's take Religion in Animal Collective as an axis of discussion...
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but, i don't think there's any point in considering what is or is not the band's intent (and to attempt to separate that idea from one's own response, which must always relate to one's personal, underlying concept of what the artist is "about"), and using that to determine what to say and not to say about it. to me, the music comes across as being pseudo-religious--and it's not the implied philosophy, but simply the
sound of it, that strikes me as a little cloying and obvious. i'm just making an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one, about the effect of that sound.
pretension: i use the word as a subjective qualifier of the music: a description of how i personally hear it, not a label for the artist which would invalidate their every move. i don't know what "the truth" about them ultimately is, but that's a moot concept, because that word is more about how i'm responding to the music than about my understanding of whatever their intent is (obv. the latter follows from the former, but i'm only talking about one specific record and why i don't like it too much.....).
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are you just taking exception to the idea that their audacity is sufficent enought to exclude the possibility of their being pretentious?
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yes that's it! for all the praise they get, i feel they should sound much more audacious & radical than they actually seem to me. i'm not at all saying pretension is inherently bad (most great artists in history must have been at
least quite pretentious) but if the music doesn't justify that sense of pretension, then it annoys. lately i've been listening to the Ghost record Hypnotic Underworld, a meandering, totally religious-mystical trip by a bunch of hippies who rehearse in abandoned temples and etc. i may or may not decide that this is "pretentious," but it doesn't matter to me, because i'm moved by the music before i start caring about that. meanwhile, whenever i hear Animal Collective i mostly think of some dorky guys trying really hard to be different (even if they are being 100% true to their impulses). the fact that they have such a hipster following does not help me to believe in them either, obviously. anyway, yeah.