I held a public exchange with The-Great-One earlier this month. The conversation was conducted via personal messages and published on one of his blogs over at Newgrounds. I've reproduced it here (and added a few more hyperlinks than were in the original article).
================================
Movies are a popular art form. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln has grossed over $180 million worldwide since its release last November. It's also been received well by critics. At the time of this writing, it ranks a 90% on Rotton Tomatoes.
After watching a movie like this one, made by a "serious" director, people all around the world engage in a familiar scene: they talk about it. On the ride home, say, or on the phone in the context of recommending the movie to a friend. They talk about what they didn't like and what they did, they talk about the performances of the actors and actresses, the quality of the special effects, the music, the camera shots, etc. From listening to some of these conversations one might think that no aspect of any movie, however insignificant, could ever pass unevaluated before these scrupulous eyes.
People may choose to disagree--sometimes vehemently--about the quality of these films. But it's not always clear to me that these arguments aren't personal or subjective. What is there for someone to be really "right" or "wrong" about in their judgement of these experiences? If someone says for instance that they "didn't care for" Daniel Day-Lewis' portrayal of Lincoln, are they really making an objective statement about dissimilarities between his portrayal of Lincoln and historical records? Or are they simply saying that their experience of the character was an unpleasant or unsatisfying one?
If it's the latter (and I suspect it often is) then their criticisms say more about variables like their individual personalities, the theaters in which they saw the movie, how comfortable the seats were, the moods they were in that day, etc. than they do about Daniel Day-Lewis's abilities as an actor.
This observation applies to critics of all art forms. Consider classical music. Critics often describe Mozart as a "genius"-is that an objective judgement of reality, or an expression of an essentially personal passion for the music?
I'm not denegrating this kind of passion but you can see that its usefulness is limited--"I'm glad you like it," I often want to say, "but what makes you think everyone should or must feel the same way?"
If the critic was describing, say, a plumber hired to fix a toilet, he might judge the plumber's ability by whether or not the toilet malfunctioned the next day. In other words, the plumber has a specific job, and the criteria for evaluating him as a professional is fundamentally connected to whether or not he competently does that job.
But what exactly is the job of a composer? "To write music," one might say. But it's not that simple. Suppose Mozart haphazardly drew pseudo-random notes on a piece of manuscript paper. (Incidentally, there are many people who essentially make their livings doing just that.) Under that simplistic definition, he would be fully doing his job as a composer. Would we still praise him for his abilities? No. There are a whole host of other expectations, some that are extremely subtle and some that even the audience can't quite articulate, pertaining to music composition. When a critic effectively says that Mozart's music is "perfect in every way" (as many music critics have), is he really taking into account this vast and complicated criteria? Or, is he merely describing his own personal taste?
As far as music goes, there is a video called The Science of Music that I think explains music and how people see it and judge it through their criteria. It's a form of drug in a way, best way to describe music is different forms of liquor. Since many alcoholic drinks are two note to three note chords in the way they're constructed, the quality of the drink matters.
BT: Interesting. I've never heard that analogy about drinks--I think you'll have to unpack that a little more for me.
That video explains why people feel good when they do--dopamine--and it points out that "music" generally causes us to release that neuro-transmitter. What's limiting about this explanation can be illustrated by the quotation marks I used in the previous sentence. Not only is it difficult to define what's "good" or "bad" about music, it's challenging just to define music itself. The video begins:
"Whether it's Mozart, Joni Mitchell, Adele, or newcomers like Frank Ocean, music is powerful and has existed in all cultures throughout history."
The fact is that Mozart's music is not very much like Adele's. And (don't get me wrong, I like Adele) I doubt that many serious people would agree to equating the two artists in terms of talent or accomplishment. But is this being unfair? Mozart's music is much more contrapunctal than Adele's, and at the time his music (i.e. his operas and later works) was much more innovative. Then there is the fact of Mozart's natural ability to apparently conceive entire works of this massive complexity in his head--clearly Mozart had much more to "offer" in terms of both ability and influence than Adele does now.
And yet...if we were to judge music purely by its complexity, or by the talent of the composer, we're liable to praise music which is neither pleasant to listen to and admire people for parlor tricks. Here is, for example, some music for a game called Adventures of Rad Gravity. The music is deeply complex. The composer obviously put a lot of time into it. But I think most people will agree it sounds terrible.
TGO: As I have been doing The Interviewer, I have interviewed different musicians here on Newgrounds and have asked them what the definition of music is. All of them have different ways of answering the question. I feel that is the question here. What is music and how should we judge it? How should we compare them? A video entitled Brutal/Deathcore/Grindcore is NOT Music! talks about how Metal is better constructed than these forms of music.
I think the dopamine does have something to do with it. How we label what music is good or bad. For some people one drink can be put together in an amazing way, like a martini. There are those though, who do not care for martinis. Then some drinks which are put together in a complex way, which taste great to some, but awful to others - like a Bloody Mary. The time and effort put into anything doesn't account for the finished product, if the finished product doesn't hold up well. Simplicity at times is much better.
BT: That was a funny video. I share PMRants' annoyance with Grindcore/Deathcore/etc.-core. It may be that certain genres of music, because of its outrageous content and messages, may actually be detrimental to the mental health of its fan base. But if we take PMRants' statement at face value (instead of regarding it as the polemical "rant" he probably intended) then we can see that he's clearly being illogical. Grindcore does, in fact, conform perfectly to the definition of music to which he alludes in the video. Here is that definition again.
music, noun.
1. an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.
2. the tones or sounds employed, occuring in a single line (melody) or multiple lines (harmony), and sounded or to be sounded by one or more voices or instruments, or both.
The construction of a Grindcore song may not take much talent (or perhaps it does; I don't know, as I have never tried) but it is certainly an "art" of some kind rather than a "science" in the traditional sense. Each song expresses a vision which is fundamentally based on an individual's conception of the world. It may be that most people (myself included) find many such conceptions unattractive. This does not change the fact that, conventions aside, there is no perfectly exact formula for a Grindcore song--at least not to the same degree of detail as, say, a scientific experiment or a culinary recipe.
A Grindcore song is necessarily comprised of temporally organized sound, and these sounds do express ideas and emotions. The fact that these ideas are largely violent in nature does not change this fact. Similarly, PMRants may find the rhythms of, say, the obnoxiously fast kick drum figures in Grindcore monotonous...but they are still rhythmic figures under any recognizable definition of a rhythmic phenomenon. He may find the lyrics indecipherable, but the singer is still expressing some kind of a melody. The accompaniment to the singers still expresses some kind of harmony. And so on.
I think what I'd like to argue for is a change in the language we use when criticizing music. We may defend our feelings about a genre by describing properties of that genre ("I find Grindcore monotonous because there isn't much timbral variety found in the entire spectrum of Grindcore songs."). But we're inaccurate when we say that our feelings objectively describe genres on their own merit ("Grindcore is monotonous.") I don't see the point of labeling music as simply "good or bad" in this way.
TGO: I agree with you that we do need a change in the language we use to describe music. We've been on the subject of music for quite sometime now, perhaps we could change the subject. I believe you and I are both fans of The Legend of Zelda series. What is your favorite game in the series and why?
BT: Well, I don't know very much about the series as a whole. I haven't played any of the games after Ocarina of Time--this includes most of the Zelda canon. But when I was a kid, A Link to the Past was probably my favorite game. LTTP offered a huge degree of variety and exploration. Its aesthetics, visual and aural, really "did it" for me. I recently replayed it in order to study the soundtrack for a paper, and found that I still knew the game inside out even after having shelved it for ten years. That hyper-intimacy might be partly why I still have a continual attachment to the game. How about you?
TGO: I also played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as a kid. My favorite is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I love the story, characters, music, and the use of all the unique items, dungeons, and fun boss battles. I would say the best in the series though is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. You did a paper on the soundtrack? Why a video game as a choice?
BT: Yes, I wrote a paper called "Hypermeter in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past". It examined a specific musical element of the soundtrack. Now that I've passed it in as a final project for a class (and gotten a B- for writing issues and a couple illogical statements) I'd like to rewrite it and maybe publish it at some point.
I chose to write that paper because I liked the music in LTTP. In a larger sense, I suspect games are worth writing about. Roger Ebert once pointed out in an informal survey that there exists a demographic of people who would rather play a [generic] video game than read Huckleberry Finn. Alongside this apparently important phenomenon is the existing video game literature, often by authors who seem to lack first-hand experience of games. Ebert's companion blog post Video Games Can Never Be Art demonstrates this strange juxtaposition.
Ebert, it should be noted, later wrote that he was foolish to publicly bring up the subject of video games. This demonstrates again the usefulness of that "cardinal rule" regarding time management: "Not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself" (Harris). I know you do some work in this area; I'd love to know what drew you to video games, what authors you'd recommend, etc...?
I didn't start reading about video games until much later. Little Wars by H.G. Wells I believe to be the origin of all video games. It's a rule book in miniature warfare with small tin soldiers. Another book called Floor Games by H.G. Wells I believe describes why we are gamers, why we are drawn to video games, and why we enjoy playing them. Even though he talks about simple children's games such as Jacks, it can be related to us throughout the different eras of video games. I could also recommend Dungeons & Desktops by Matt Barton. What drew you to video games and what authors would you recommend?
BT: That's so cool--I didn't know H.G. Wells took games on as a topic. Super Mario World was my first game too. In retrospect, I was probably drawn by the bright colors in that game as much as anything. My second cartridge was the impossibly difficult Taz-Mania for SNES, which again immersed the player in a hyper-saturated cartoon universe.
About ten years ago I was initially drawn into trying the "Game Maker" software by a thoughtful piece written by its programmer, Mark Overmars. In an essay entitled "Designing Good Games", probably a distillation of a course he teaches at Utrecht University, he outlined some of the characteristics of games as opposed to toys or tools. There are some other developer/writers. Cly5m has a sort of exquisite website which offers some intimate scribbles about video games and other things; and blogs by people like Notch and Auntie Pixelante can be illuminative.
TGO: Oh I remember Taz-Mania on the SNES. That game was brutal in difficulty. I never really got far into it. I will admit it was still fun to play, even if it was hard.
My first take into making games was making my own board games. I made so many, even though most of them were just go from START to FINISH. I developed my own maze game on paper, it used a lot of different items in it to get you from here to there including keys, bombs, and skateboards just to name a few. I have done some ROM Hacking with Super Mario World, but that was about as far as I got. I never really dived into a program to make games. When it comes to making video games and information about it, I love watching Extra Credits. It is very insightful while at the same time being humorous as well.
BT: You're probably in good company in liking "Extra Credits". I remember a tweet from Daniel Remar (a talented Swedish game developer, one of my favorite people) saying he was inspired by that show. The artist for "Extra Credits", by the way, is much more brilliant than the visuals on that show might suggest.
================================
Since this conversation, I've discovered that Allison Theus, long-time artist for Extra Credits, has stepped down from the show. Sad as this is, I would still recommend this thought-provoking web series to almost anyone. I also recommend The Game Overthinker and the brand new video-games-meets-feminism show by Feminist Frequency.
