Why do most music fans not care about jazz Sup Forums?
For a genre that has been around for 100 years, has many distinct styles and eras, a lot of history and culture, and is generally accepted to be "good music", I've found surprisingly few people really care about jazz beyond maybe a couple of things.
I'm not saying this to be elitist, I really feel sad that nobody cares about such a large piece of music history. Even if you didn't like Miles Davis a lot, you'd probably be surprised how much is out there, and I would say with near certainty that there is a type of music in jazz that every kind of music fan could enjoy. I really mean that.
Don't count me on that, Op. Since I've started listening to jazz, I couldn't stop and it has been my favorite genre since then. It's incredible how different subgenres can bring so many different impressions and emotions to you. From bop, fusion, free, spiritual, etc.
There's plenty of jazz performed all ethnicities. Racism is not an excuse.
Joseph Howard
Jazz serves a cultural function in the music scene. It is a signifier for musical "adulthood." To embrace jazz is to don a kind of graduation cap, signifying a broadening of tastes outside "mere" rock music. This ostentatious display of "sophistication" is an insult, and I find the graduation cappers transparent and tedious. Certainly there must be interesting music one could call "jazz." There must be. I've never heard it, but I grant that it is out there somewhere. Jazz has a non-musical parallel: Christiania, the "free" zone in Copenhagen. In Christiania, like in jazz, there is no law. People are left to their own inventions to create and act as they see fit. In Jazz, the musicians are allowed to improvise over and beside structural elements that may themselves be extemporaneous. Sounds good, doesn't it? Freedom -- sounds good. The reality is much bleaker. Christiania is a squalid, trashy string of alleys with rag-and-bone men selling drugs, tie-dye and wretched food. Granted Total Freedom, and this is what they've chosen to do with it, sell hash and lentil soup? Jazz is similar. The results are so far beneath the conception that there is no English word for the dissappointment one feels when forced to confront it. Granted Total Freedom, you've chosen to play II V I and blow a goddamn trill on the saxophone? Only by willfully ignoring its failings can one pretend to appreciate it as an idiom and don the cap.
Nathaniel Perez
It's a negro style, it is imbued with the spirit of the negro.
Nathan Butler
I think a lot of people have trouble deriving emotion from music without lyrics that tell them how to feel. They don't have the attention span and even if they do they aren't willing to give the music enough of their attention to actually appreciate the small details that make it great music.
I think you're generally more likely to be able to derive emotion from instrumental music if you have experience expressing emotion through instrumental music yourself.
I think this is the main reason why most of the people who DO care about jazz are musicians themselves.
Obviously there's a lot more to it than this but I think this is a big part of it. Jazz has had a small but dedicated following for several decades now. If you're looking for good jazz discussion on Sup Forums you should seek out the /blindfold/ threads that go on here every Friday and Saturday.
Jackson Sanders
It's music that people respect and see as "intellectual" but it isn't a instantly gratifying as pop music or stuff focused on quality production and hard-hitting beats. So most people don't care to actually explore it, but rather respect it from a distance.
Eli Morales
I find it quite funny that anyone in the music industry would say this. Jazz/swing was considered pop music before bebop emerged (in 40's/50's). It's not particularly hard to listen to. In fact it was a huge movement in the first half the 1900's. I know he isn't THAT old, but he must have some idea. I'm not very old and I get it.
Charles Williams
Most of the best pop music is jazz. I guess it really comes down to being too old for most people.
Isaac Williams
>Jazz serves a cultural function in the music scene. It is a signifier for musical "adulthood." To embrace jazz is to don a kind of graduation cap, signifying a broadening of tastes outside "mere" rock music. This ostentatious display of "sophistication" is an insult, and I find the graduation cappers transparent and tedious.
This is true to a degree; there are definitely people out there who pretend to like jazz and treat it as some sort of special club for "enlightened" people. Read: poseurs.
To write off the entire genre is incredibly stupid though; most people legitimately enjoy jazz and it's a diverse and interesting genre. Steve Albini has a habit of pigeonholing music genres, I'm not sure why this quote from him surprised me.
Aaron Hernandez
When I ask people about Jazz, the usual response, which I have heard many times, is some variation of "I like the sound of it, but I have never gotten into it."
The general culprit here is a lack of pressure to listen, I think. They will hear it in video games, movies, TV, and from these snippets have come to like the sound of Jazz but are never actually explored their interest or taste at all. Exploring the interest would require them to take initiative, and people on a large scale are generally bad at taking infinitive. It's like jumping into an ocean blind for them, especially with the VAST amount of shit there is, good and bad, that they would have to sift through on their own time.
Brayden Nguyen
please just fuck off and die
Parker Richardson
honestly, i didn't think much of jazz when i first started listening to it. ever since i started to take jazz guitar lessons however, i realized how amazing harmonies and improve can be, and it's one of my favorite genres
Grayson Allen
That's because black people have shit taste tbqhwy
Lincoln Sanders
I realized earlier today that jazz was a movement about black people creating an intricate and distinct culture of their own in a civilization where they had been forced to adopt the culture of another race, but sometime in the '80s they abandoned that for hip hop, which is a genre that, instead of creating their own culture, celebrates their lack of culture.
Parker Baker
Most music fans do care. You must be hanging out with plebs who don't listen to anything made before 1990.
Nathaniel Adams
This. I mean thats what puts off people to getting into lots of other genres too. And that also happens not just with music, but other artforms as well
