Common opinions--what's at work?

Obsessive music fans are often accused of being contrarians, but I think that they/we are just passionate and highly-opinionated. People who aren't as "into it" find the attitude annoying, which I perfectly understand.

I grew up listening to popular bands who I hoped to see on The Ed Sullivan Show and other network programs. As I got older, I was happy when a group like R.E.M. got popular. I was also a bit rueful because I don't enjoy listening to music in sports arenas, but I didn't begrudge them their well-deserved success.

Peer pressure is a distant memory and I didn't always succumb... I never smoked a cigarette. But I did go to a few concerts in high school just to be part of the gang; Jethro Tull on two occasions (which convinced me that I really didn't like them). Peer pressure can also be a good thing, I discovered the Grateful Dead that way [cue: That's a good thing?!? jibe].

 

Is there something lke 'cold art'? I can't get in which sense something like that could exist as a kind of artistic activity.

Other thing that puzzles me is that today's easy and free access to any kind of information isn't helping people to develop a more critical sense and lessen the social influence impact on their lives. Today I see a much bigger variety of 'works' (I'd even dare to say almost anything) selled and universally accepted as 'work of art' than, say, 20 years ago.

 

I was thinking of music along the lines of Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, Milton Babbitt, or Gyorgy Ligeti, for instance. Or maybe to other people, some more avant-garde kinds of free jazz perhaps. Of course, some people might say that they always had strong emotional reactions from the very first time they heard any of their works. But I would think that to many people, including myself, their music is at first largely just puzzling or baffling, more like something that you have to try to figure out. Later on, if and when you start to "get it" a little bit, then it might start to open up and make some sense, and then there's more of a natural, reflexive emotional reaction. And of course there are people who say that kind of music isn't really music at all.

 

I don't know if I would say that kind of music isn't really music at all but from what you are describing I can say it isn't music for me.
I like melody & structure.

 

Yes I would include to that bunch almost all atonal music released since the last century as music that explores themes or concepts in ways completely different from everything already done up to the end of the 19th century or roundly so.

That said, it's just music to me, and as such it's way far from limiting one's experience as strictly cerebral, or conveying a purely intellectual engagement. For a strictly cerebral or purely intellectual engagement I'd much rather play a game of chess or any other intellectual puzzle (for example doing a Maths equation solving).