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I completely agree. Music
IS art, my favorite form of it, I might add.
I love how you said it! (bolded text). But I still think there are ways to analytically discuss music. Maybe a better way to think about it would be to ask yourself how you'd feel if any single aspect of the music was removed. I noticed earlier you mentioned that you don't care precisely what the lyrics are. But how would you feel if a female vocalist was replaced by a male singer, or if the lyrics consisted entirely of "na na ba ba" repeated sixty times? What if one of the instruments in a song was removed? What if cowbell was added? Or what if the song was played an octave higher than the original recording? It may be difficult to imagine each of these scenarios given that you already know the songs you love.
Have you ever listened to a remix of a song that you already knew? What was different about the remixed version and how did that impact you differently? I'm interested in specific emotions (simple or complex), mental associations or cultural references, reminders of or ties to personal experiences, etc.
It would be important to note that I am somewhat a passive listener, so I don't actually break down or analyze any of the music I listen to, I'm rarely thinking about the music I listen to, which unfortunately, is due to the somewhat busy lifestyle of this day and age =(. That's probably one of the reasons why I seem to be very tolerable on say very poor recordings or the mainstream music without much 'substance' so to speak.
Since I grew up watching a lot of Anime(English subbed) as a kid, about 75% of my collection is in Japanese and I don't actually understand a shred of it eheh. I just hope the 'love-song' sounding songs aren't actually about murdering kittens, that would slightly ruin things wouldn't it.
I think the inability to understand Japanese vocals means that I'm programmed to view the vocals as 'notes' and not 'words', and I suppose this habit carries over to when I listen to an English song, which would explain why I'm not bothered by naughty lyrics and such eh?
Despite that though, I still have my personal tastes and biases!, I love listening to amateur/hobbyist female vocalists livestreaming, it's the 'rawness' that gets to me =P.
I actually like listening to remixes of various pieces of music,
Touhou is a series of video games by a composer(he made the games to 'showcase' his music!), and the sheer scale of 'fan' re-arranges and remixes is pretty much a whole industry in itself in Japan.
I feel that despite the roots of the remixes originating from the same song, you can get quite dramatic differences in terms of emotion, so I view remixes as completely different songs itself (hell, I sometimes can't even recognise that 2 different remixes were from the same song).
So I guess you can say that I'm not really an "original-only" fanboy or anything like that, as I take the remixes for what they are (completely different songs, and not just another spin on the original).
Perhaps this is another reason why I'm not bothered by the top40 stuff, do many of the songs have somewhat similar 'melodies' to older/other songs? I think somebody might have mentioned that they did. (I don't listen closely enough to notice it myself ahah).
