Dancing about architecture here

December 4, 2005 10:38 AM

What do you like about your favorite music? Or, really, how do you describe music you like to someone else who has no clue who you're talking about?

Usually the best I can come up with is "well it sounds kind of like..." when I'm really excited about a band, this isn't usually enough to get across just how awesome they are. What are descriptions you've used to describe music that is just too cool to fit in a genre?

posted by martinX's bellbottoms to Media & Arts (38 answers total)

I think the power of music stems from the fact that it's indescribable with words. Music takes over once words fail.

Having said that, you can always rely on how the music makes you feel. I like this music because it makes me want to jump to my feet and dance; it makes me cry; it makes me feel sexy...

Or you can use metaphor. It's like a dip in the ocean; it's like fire; it's like hunting prey...
posted by grumblebee at 10:45 AM on December 4, 2005

The allmusic.com 'mood' list provides a nice selection of adjectives to choose from, though what they actually mean to any given person can be rather subjective.
posted by RGD at 10:45 AM on December 4, 2005

Having a good musical vocabulary helps, if the people you're talking to are also somewhat fluent. Being able to say that a band plays mostly minor-key songs (lots of indie rock), or plays mostly pentatonic variations (blues rock, but really most rock and roll music), or really likes C-F-G chord progressions and major scales (hippy bands), or use lots of tremolo-picked minor scales on distorted electic guitars with double-bass drumming (black metal), will help people get an idea of what kinds of sound a band likes to play with.
posted by baphomet at 10:50 AM on December 4, 2005

I like music where people play instruments and show virtousity. I like a "led zepplin groove" (led zep, ac/dc, pantera, zz top...) and I particularly like it when the groove continues during vocals. I love any sound that has the Fourier transform of a pulse, whether it be an over driven tube amp (fuzz guitar), a harley with open pipes or a top fuel dragster. Anytime a waveform has sharp edges, the sound has a very full quality from all the harmonics.
posted by 445supermag at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2005

I've noticed that the more I study music theory, the more I like "academic" music. By that I mean music that doesn't necessarily have an emotional pull, but is impressive or interesting from a technical perspective -- changing meters, unconventional chord progressions, virtuosic playing, that kind of thing. Thinking about music that way makes it easier to describe to other people, as baphomet said.
posted by danb at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2005

"The lyrics are intelligent and they have good melodies and a good singer" covers 98% of everything I listen to.
posted by fire&wings at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2005

Never say "it has a good beat."
posted by electric_counterpoint at 11:16 AM on December 4, 2005

It's a rare skill to think of analogies or metaphors for what you're hearing that don't absolutely suck. Two examples I've always liked were someone describing Pandit Pran Nath as "infinity's pathfinder", or Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Can's "Halleluwah" as a "Möbius strip".

I write music reviews all the time, and it's rarity for me to come up with a description, void of all technical content, that conveys any emotional impact at all.

So, to actually answer the question, my descriptions are usually a mix of the "sounds like a cross between..."-game plus a bit of technical information. I generally have to rely on my appearance being sufficiently googly-eyed for others to pick up on how I feel about it.
posted by hototogisu at 11:19 AM on December 4, 2005

Response by poster: fire&wings: Me too, but Wilco's 'good melodies, lyrics and singer' are a long way off from Franz Ferdinand's 'good melodies, lyrics and singer'
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 11:20 AM on December 4, 2005

The way I compare music depends largely on the other person's musical background.

Most of the time, I give a brief description of the general format and sound. Something like "a four man rock band that plays energetic party music" or "acoustic guitar playing singer/songwriter who mostly plays ballads"

If the other person has some formal musical education, I'll sometimes discuss album and song structure/style more formally, but only if I don't know how to express my thoughts using more general terms.
posted by I Love Tacos at 11:39 AM on December 4, 2005

It's a rare skill to think of analogies or metaphors for what you're hearing that don't absolutely suck. Two examples I've always liked were someone describing Pandit Pran Nath as "infinity's pathfinder", or Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Can's "Halleluwah" as a "Möbius strip".

I dislike these metaphors. I know what a Möbius strip is, but I don't get how it's meaningful to compare one to a song. The song is like a looped object upon which one can travel in a straight line and traverse both sides???

And I'm totally clueless as to the meaning of "infinity's pathfinder." To find the path to infinity, doesn't one just keep walking and walking and walking forever?
posted by grumblebee at 11:44 AM on December 4, 2005

Never say "it has a good beat."

Unless followed by "and you can dance to it."
posted by luftmensch at 11:51 AM on December 4, 2005

My music enjoyment is proportional to the track's crunkness, so I go by that when I discuss it as well.
posted by moift at 11:54 AM on December 4, 2005

If you were in a conversation with me, moift, I would have no idea of what you were talking about (I guess because I'm old). Well, now I would, because I just googled "crunk."
posted by grumblebee at 11:57 AM on December 4, 2005

Many good points, but thinking back on recommendations people have made for me, I definitely trust some of my friends more than others. I like them all, but this is just to say that your battle may have already been won or lost depending on previous things you've said about art, food, people, politics, etc.
posted by bardic at 12:08 PM on December 4, 2005

grumblebee: actually, to me, that perfectly invokes what the drum track sounds like. These aren't things I'd toss out there on their own, or even really to someone who had no idea what I was talking about to begin with. Though if someone hasn't heard of Can by this point, there's quite a bit more difficulty than that presented by confusing metaphors...
posted by hototogisu at 12:24 PM on December 4, 2005

I think the power of music stems from the fact that it's indescribable with words. Music takes over once words fail.

How is it indescribeable with words? It's completly describeable with words.
posted by delmoi at 12:32 PM on December 4, 2005

I like records that sound like they're stuck.
posted by punilux at 12:50 PM on December 4, 2005

I like textures and atmosphere. Crunchy or skittery beats, beeps and boops, maybe cut up or otherwise unintelligible vocals.
posted by aubilenon at 12:57 PM on December 4, 2005

Music made by people who take drugs to make music to take drugs to? that usually covers a lot of it.

No ok seriously if I have to describe it rather than making someone listen to something, which is better, I'd try and be as straightforward as possible. Genres can be a very fuzzy concept but you can't deny they're useful to start with. Then it's mostly about the rhythm and the kind of instruments and style of playing or singing, that kind of stuff. Mood is too relative. The "sounds like" comparisons can be handy but often pointless because there's always something in any music that sounds like something else...

Fancy metaphors in reviews can be ridiculously annoying. "Sounds like a cross between so and so on acid waking up on a beach in Ibiza and so and so writing the soundtrack for a Tarantino movie if they'd been raised in a Manchester council estate... but they're actually from Los Angeles!". Ok, hmm, very interesting... The NME are masters of that kind of silliness.
posted by funambulist at 12:58 PM on December 4, 2005

It's completly describeable with words.

Example?
posted by grumblebee at 1:02 PM on December 4, 2005

What are descriptions you've used to describe music that is just too cool to fit in a genre?

Sometimes I think that by itself is a good way to describe it. Trying to fit stuff into a genre gets difficult, especially when someone else's definition of said genre may be different than yours. When I describe music I like, I usually include a whole range of descriptions from mood to tempo to what kind of instruments they use. Using technical musical vocabulary only helps if the person knows the vocabulary, and there are usually other ways to describe it without getting all fancy-pants. It helps to read reviews of stuff you like to see how others describe the sound... I've gotten very good at figuring out if I'm going to like certain bands by simply reading reviews. If you really want practice, you could try writing your own reviews - when I did this I really had to zone in on what the music sounded like instead of just saying, "it's good!"
posted by jetskiaccidents at 1:04 PM on December 4, 2005

More specifically, martinX asked "What do you like about your favorite music?" I guess one could put this into words if what one likes is "the pitch of the vocalist's voice" or "the bass player's skill" or "the cleverness of the lyrics," but I would want to know WHY you liked the pitch, what impressed you about the bass player (and why that thing impressed you), and how the lyrics make you feel."

At some point, you'd need to simply say, "I just like it cause I like it." THAT'S the point where words fail, and THAT'S the point that most interests me. Why does such and such a song fill me with longing or lust or paranoia? How can I possibly explain it (maybe one day we will, via advanced neuroscience)? And even if that IS explained it still doesn't communicate the feeling.

Much of life is like this. I once posted a thread (Matt deleted it) about how people FEEL God. I'm an atheist and I've never felt God, and I can't imagine how it feels to feel God. How can a believer give me a sense of this feeling using words, other than via metaphor?
posted by grumblebee at 1:13 PM on December 4, 2005

If it sounds like I overdid it, here's a quick google sample from actual nme reviews:

"sounds like Wu-Tang Clan dressed as Vikings and pillaging the black-metal community"

"sounds like new wave oddballs Devo covering the Motown back catalogue"

"sounds like Brian Wilson trying to conduct an orchestra of Andrex puppies on E"

"sounds like The Polyphonic Spree ascending to the mothership at the very moment a tear gas-wielding army beats down the gates to their compound"

"sounds like Usher with a hangover without sounding like poshos after their first spliff"

"sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of pissed-up Liverpool fans the night they won the Champions League"

"sounds like Chas'n'Dave doing The Velvet Underground; I mean actually sounds like it was made right in the thick of the '60s with wasted Parisian hustler girls banging on the window for smack money"

Then again I'd take this kind of silliness over being bored by reviews who try to describe stuff too technically and seriously. There has to be a balance somewhere in between.
posted by funambulist at 1:19 PM on December 4, 2005 [1 favorite]

I think people get too wrapped up in how fantastic their music is. Describe it very literally, it's the best you can do. Don't try to convey how the song makes you feel, as that is, suprise suprise, open to individual taste. For instance, the other day I was trying to describe "The Books" to someone:

"Well, most of their tracks have some sort of string instruments on them, most frequently an acoustic guitar, but often violins and such. They also like to include a lot of samples that seem to be random, or what they call "aleatoric" music. The samples often take a rhymthic role. They use a lot of folksy and bluesy guitar riffs and they don't have a consistent song structure. A few tracks are just samples arranged cleverly."

I avoided saying anything silly like how "brooding" or "warm" certain tracks are.
posted by phrontist at 1:23 PM on December 4, 2005

memorizing random long sentences from pitchfork reviews and using them works very often : )
posted by suni at 1:37 PM on December 4, 2005

One of hte hardest things about being a music writer is that music is infinitely describable to someone who's already heard it; the "mobius strip" makes sense once you've heard the song.
That's why it's easier to go for the shorthand "Carly Simon meets The Beatles" when describing, say, some New Pornographer's track than it is to say that the music is like microwaved Skittles, sweet and warm. It communicates well. And that's leaving aside the fact that probably 60% of analogies are used to cement the cred of the reviewer— that's why you see things like "Beefhart meets Gainsbourg" to describe things like Arcade Fire.
And certainly with my audience, the majority of readers aren't musicians (and neither am I), so mentioning that the song is the the key of G but switches to C for the chorus is less helpful than saying most of the song has "bright" verses and the choruses are more "cool." As for Delmoi's contention that music can be perfectly described by words, I'd say that it's much more able to be described by numbers, but telling someone that the solo went 1001010100010001000100011100100010010011 isn't as clear as it might be.
Add that to the current fad in music writing of the Maxim simile ("beats as firm as J.Lo's ass") and you've come to another problem: it's so much easier to be glib than it is to express what you like. There's a connection to a beautiful song that expressing leaves you vulnerable to mocking, even if you might deserve it (sometimes Nickleback speaks to everyone). But the "ironic" denial of that feeling, especially in new music, has led to a weird space in the music that's being made where there's very little that isn't grounded in the emotional authenticity of the past. But maybe that's another topic.
Onto the music that I like: I like a lot of different things. I like bands like Can, The Kinks, Gang of Four, The Seeds, Throbbing Gristle and Girls Aloud, and musicians like Albert Ayler, Aaliyah and Afrika Baambata. I like things that I haven't heard before, and I'm a sucker for a good hook. I love distorted basslines and dirty recordings of blues songs. I tend not to like cleanliness in recording, and usually get annoyed if there's a virtuouso musician or vocalist too far up in the mix. I like panning and vocoders, and The Who's arena rock. I like samples, cut ups and mashups. I generally like dynamicism, don't like mid-tempo and pitch correcting, and I like bands to have a sense of humor. I like the multi-tracking of Massive Attack and love the 4-tracking of Guided By Voices. I love bubblegum and amorphous noise.
One of the things I like to do when I review an album is to try to listen to the album and decide if the musicians had a goal in mind, and if they achieved it, and I think that the music I like (if you can excuse the tautology) tends to succeed on the terms that it set out and that music I don't like tends to fail on its own terms.

Oh, and it should have a good beat so I can dance to it.
posted by klangklangston at 1:40 PM on December 4, 2005

Simile and metaphor. Analogizing it to something completely unrelated to the music, but in doing so conveying the parts of it that I like. It requires skill, reflection, and luck, and it works best if you're talking to someone you know very well.
posted by Hildago at 3:49 PM on December 4, 2005

Response by poster: Sweet! I like a lot of these answers, especially, well, I can't think of an especially, they were all great. Thanks!
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 4:10 PM on December 4, 2005

I agree with the person who effectively said that music is its own language; a language which communicates things words cannot communicate so well.

However, words can go some way towards describing the feelings music causes.

And it varies as widely as music and language varies. I like punk rock because it is sheer cathartic sonic aggression, it is the sound of the endless anger and frustration of life beaten out in basic 4/4 in clangs and bangs and distorted clatter. It is the sound of gritted teeth, broken nails, swollen temple veins and white knuckles. I like symphonic classical music because it is the sound of grief and joy and weeping and passion and the keening ache in the chest when the heart quails under the blows of life. I like choral church music because it is the sound of heaven hoped for in vain yet embraced in resignation. I like industrial noise because it is the blissful surrender to the brutal cacophony of the world and other people. I like Albert Ayler because it is music beyond language, it is squark and bleet and sibillimal. I like Sandy Denny because it is pure tone; hollow soul-deep resonance.

And so on.
posted by Decani at 5:16 PM on December 4, 2005

I think people get too wrapped up in how fantastic their music is. Describe it very literally, it's the best you can do. Don't try to convey how the song makes you feel, as that is, suprise suprise, open to individual taste.

Agreed. I tend to roll my eyes at the "music is indescribable" and "it's like dancing about architecture" crowd. You may as well tell a physicist that "falling objects are indescribable" or a botanist that "writing about plants is like dancing about architecture."

So yes, if you want to describe music, describe the music, not yourself. Most music utilizes the same materials; rhythm, harmony, melody, timbre, and often words. Describe how these elements are utilized, and you're off to a great start. Talk about the instrumentation, the subject matter, the lyrical style, the performance style, the melodic approach, the song structures, and the apparent focus or artistic goals of the music.

For example, my musical taste tends towards strong composition/songcraft and mostly traditional pop structures. I like music that gives its listeners credit for intelligence. I like lyrics that are subtle, witty, and full of wordplay (e.g. Lucksmiths) or that are vivid, affecting, and poetic (e.g. Neutral Milk Hotel). Mostly I care about creative and interesting use of language. I don't much care for emotive outpourings that lack craft and form. I appreciate good musicianship, but don't tend to enjoy flashy displays of virtuosity. I admire good vocalists (that is, people who sing in tune, don't scream, etc.), but am turned off by vocal styles that strike me as contrived/artificial/overly-polished. Most of what I listen to is rooted in standard pop/rock arrangements (vocals, guitars, bass, drums), but often incorporates more sophisticated or or off-beat arrangements as well. Mostly I like clear, crisp production, but I love some lo-fi stuff as well, so overall I'd say I enjoy a production aesthetic that serves the music and doesn't seem to be dictated by mass-market demands (e.g., the huge, overcompressed, wall-of-guitars, pitch-corrected vocals, etc. sound that's popular on rock radio).

And I could go on. As a musician and music fan, this is shit that I think about all the time, and being able to describe it well is a point of pride for me. I would urge people who feel that they can't describe music as well as they'd like to study it a bit and see if they can't clear things up a bit.
posted by ludwig_van at 6:53 PM on December 4, 2005

If you skip the first paragraph, which is annoying misdirection that buries the lead, Not Enough Protection from the Song at The Believer is a great piece of writing about music that had a lot to do with my formulating an emotional response to the Arcade Fire and Funeral. Yes, it's an over-the-top gush, but he actually manages to communicate much about what a live show is like (which I've since sampled on video). In this case, I think he described the music well, although at times he had to approach it by describing the band playing the music.
posted by dhartung at 8:18 PM on December 4, 2005

Not Enough Protection from the Song at The Believer is a great piece of writing about music that had a lot to do with my formulating an emotional response to the Arcade Fire and Funeral.

Heh. I liked that.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:50 PM on December 4, 2005

Things I like about the music that I like:

I like a clever lyric that isn't just clever. When a lyric manages both to impress me technically (great rhyme, great phrasing, great allusion or double meaning) and emotionally (hitting the nail on the head in some narrative/emotive fashion), that usually gets me. Some of the stuff on Sufjan Stevens' Illinoise does this well -- Casmir Pulaski Day and the Palisades songs are both great like that. Make me wanna cry where any number of Whitney Houston ballads leave me rolling my eyes.

I like a song that builds up pieces to a beautiful layered climax. Where the artist has the sense and inclination to pace it just right so that you have each piece in your head when the next one comes along, and you can just keep up with each new thing until finally, a few minutes in, they hit some modified chorus that has that final extra variation and push on top of the things established before. A couple of Weezer songs pulls this off really well, and there's a track of Sleeper's The It Girl that is a perfect example, when Louise Wener goes into the final extended chorus with this line about "was it when I said I / wanted to have children"...
posted by cortex at 10:57 PM on December 4, 2005

I also like what cortex said.
posted by ludwig_van at 11:22 PM on December 4, 2005

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
posted by hellbient at 11:44 PM on December 4, 2005

pandora.com is one of those online music recommendation/listening services - but the nifty thing is that it describes each track's "characteristic" elements. Apparently the descriptions came from the Music Genome Project where a group of people listened to most songs and carefully categorised them using a variety of elements.

So apparently I'm a huge fan of music with "extensive vamping".
posted by badlydubbedboy at 5:51 AM on December 5, 2005

I never have much luck explaining the music I like to people. I usually just point out that I almost always hate the sound of a person singing unless it's treated as a sample instead of as vocals, that I hate the guitar in pretty much the same way, and that I can never tell who on earth a song is by when I am listening to music on my screen-less ipod shuffle because most of the songs I listen to could have been made by anyone with a laptop and awful taste.
I think Aubilenon is better at this than me.
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:04 AM on December 5, 2005