Strike One: "influential" vs. "relevant"

newer, more relevant answers

the question mark after "assumptions" was meant to be an exclamation point! yes!

you have to explain why historicism in music has to be a destructive force.. dismissed it bogs yu down in talking about shit music.

Okay, "relevant" is a tricky one, because it's a relative term: in proper usage it should just mean "pertinent to the matter we're considering," which is context-sensitive and could mean anything. It seems like people tend to use it to mean one of two things.

The first is some spectrum between "pertinent to life" (which is an awfully bold claim) and "pertinent to my life" (which is an interesting one). In this usage I think "relevant" can do decent work of describing things that seem to be trying to say or define or comment on something that feels important.

The other way of using it would be to claim something is "relevant" to a particular version of music history, e.g. if you're talking about punk the Sex Pistols are certainly pertinent to the topic. This mostly gets used to mean "canonical" but theoretically it should mean somethine ever-so-slightly different -- for instance, it should include outright crap that nonetheless plays a major role in any particular topic. (So also "relevant" should have no connection with "good," just with "notable.") You can raise the "who decides what's relevant / pertinent" issue here, except it sort of fails because it's a social decision: the Pistols are relevant because the people who came after them thought they were. (Similarly Ulysses S. Grant was not a good president but he's "relevant" to our history because, well, people voted for him and put him in a position to do important things.)

I can never tell which of these ways people are using "relevant." It always seems like some muddled combination of the two intended to come out as meaning "important" -- either canonically important or socially important, both of which are just the same thing on different levels. Both of those usages can communicate something worthwhile, but they don't mean quite what I think people use "relevant" to mean.

I think the issues with both "relevant" and "influential" have to do with how much the canon changes us vs. how much we change it.

your second point is an utterly gorgeous piece of hermeticism (in the sense of Celan/Trakl), my hat is off to you sir

I only said it cause it totally sounded deep.

neither. unless you enjoy linguistic nihilism.

Who doesn't love and actively embrace "linguistic nihilism"? They are the best grindcore band evah

"linguistic nihilism" could hardly be a grindcore band -- more like an Industrial Goth band.

well...I can't agree with you there, "agorophobic nosebleed" and a thousand other gc bands use the same sort of construction as my posited grindcore posterboys, "linguistic nihilism" whose new single on Gravity is ace

Relevant is the evil one. People hung up on 'relevance' are too obsessed with the present tense and their own political agendas. Whenever people emphasize 'relevance' in their music writing, I become very skeptical about why they are interested in music.

ah, but dont you see? while both agorophobic nosebleed and linguistic nihilism are pretensious, agorophobic nosebleed is somewhat amusing and tied to the body while linguistic nihilism is all head and detachment. as for being on Gravity, I don't think so. Never has been a band with a name like that on that label (and I'm not saying there havent been bands with stupid names either).

I don't know man, "linguistic"="having to do with the tongue"! u iz just hatin' on linguistic nihilism becuz of the new direction in which they are takin' Gravity ;)

ha ha ha -- i don't know the Young Bubonic Hegelians are pretty alright. ;)

relevant = short term historical influence?

are the two inextricable in some sense?

think i prefer influence. has more staying power and could also be used to describe lesser-knowns. relevant seems to accessory to be the more useful of the two. who knows though...

I think what I want to argue is that relevance = influence

mark s where are u

In this thread could we also clarify why the head is so often not considered a part of the body?

Because it snaps off fairly easily, having not been childproofed.

This is tough, because "influential" tends to be used to excuse bad old crap and "relevant" tends to be used to excuse bad new crap.

so the question might be "new" vs. "old"

(or it might not, I might just be feeling totally simpleminded right now)

I don't like this "influential" vs. "relevant" thing, mostly because there's a lot of worthwhile music in this world which isn't easily classified as either. It seems short-sighted to focus only on what is "important". I don't think importance is necessarily a measure of artistic value.

andy warhol to thread!

Relevant == Has proven Influence DOES Exist.
(runs away screaming in terror as the torch-waving villagers close in for the kill)

(villagers politely ask to see said proof)

w/o these tools, history wd cease to be written by the victors

i like relevant & think it can be used with a good meaning v. easily both in the narrow sense of pertaining to the thing at hand and in the broad sense -- pertaining to the world as it now is.

influential can hide things, but claims of relevance are claims about how the world actually is -- claims which necc. compete but which can be discussed and argued precisely.

influential is a necessary word when discussing the History of Rock, but almost worthless in a review (have a similar sound is more important than having a direct influence there).

I'd rather get rid of relevant. It's only needed by people who would rather have a socio-political reason (or excuse) to discuss a band than a personal one.

I'm pretty okay with socio-political reasons for liking bands! The crux of "relevant," though, is pretty exactly what Sterling says: I think the problem with its usage is that people just let it hang there, and don't do the finishing work of following up on why they deem it relevant to the greater experience of life. It just gets used to point to what's canonically "important," which is a 100% different thing from "relevant" -- in old-school indie discourse it gets used to mean "this talks about stuff that actually matters to people," which is a far more complete claim in and of itself, but even when people use it in that sense now they tend to mean "this has been deemed by history to talk about stuff which should matter to us."

personal reason = it makes me happy.

sociopolitical reason = it makes me happy (and i am...)

mark s: w/o these tools, history wd cease to be written by the victors
remove the "...to be written by the winner" clause of that sentence and It would become true.

nabisco: (villagers politely ask to see said proof)
See below

Sterling:
personal reason = it makes me happy.
sociopolitical reason = it makes me happy (and i am...)
it makes me happy == Relevant.

see, there's yer answer.

so mark are you with me here? I think I am onto something & have located influence's partner in crime!!!

No you haven't. Influence is the evil opposite of relevance.

This is bizarre, Custos, I keep looking at your last two posts and I sort of wind up baffled and drooling. I honestly don't have any idea what you mean by either of them, to the point where I almost want to ask for elaboration but I'm scared.

I'm working it out in my own mind.
Unfortunately, Its 1:00am here. So, I'm going to go to sleep now and give you a coherent and hopefully profound answer in the morning.
WATCH THIS SPACE FOR MAGIC.

my evil opposite is always already my partner in crime, ain't it so ain't it so

Okay. I'm Baaaaack!

Lets get one thing out of the way. The moment someone claims that something is historically relevant, then, yes...is just an evasive way of opening the whole *nfl**nc* can of worms. BUT, if I were to say that a certain song is Relevant to me, then it is a compliment without any heavy duty chin-stroking melodrama that historically relevant.
Example: right now in my headphones is George Michael's "Freedom '90"; I absolutely love this song for a long laundry list of reasons. Its a pop song/a rock song/a dance choon and a funk party all in one. Is it Relevant? To me it is. Is it historically relevant? Not in the slightest. If you were to ask for the sagelike opinion of hoary Sanhedron of rock critic cognicenti, they'll probably say that the video was keen/key/cool/crucial but the song itself was rubbish. This does not change that I heart heart heart "Freedom '90"
So anyhow. Thats my op-ed. I'm using my royal authority to declare Relevant (when divorced from the modifier "historically" and reverently capitalized) as a unconditional compliment.
So to recap

Relevant == I love it unconditionally / Your mileage may vary
Historically relevant == (insert boilerplate highbrow circumlocutions about *nfl**nc* and canonical importance.)

There you go, nabisco.
Relevant == "Its Good"
Influence == "It has values and issues of import besides raw 'goodness' and I propose we dissappear into our gnomic little fundaments and bicker about them like a bunch of bored theologans."

does this make any sense to anybody?

Okay, it makes sense now: you're just asking if we can please still use the words so long as we agree that they have absolutely no meaning and we're just saying them for fun.

Yes. Its painful (but understandable) to contort your language to avoid saying "*nfl**nc*", but losing Relevant would be even more painful.

I can't believe you agreed to that statement.

I was saying 'yes' to the 'we can please still use the words' clause. I wasn't sure what the rest meant until I re-read it. I'm still not 100% sure. What does it mean to just 'use words for fun'?

Let’s come at it this way.

When someone says a piece of music is “good” or “really fantastic,” it’s understood that they’re expressing an opinion. Obviously, right? That’s step one. But then we notice that we disagree about different things—maybe I think a song is good and you think it’s bad. How do we move on? Well, we have a whole vocabulary of other words available to talk about why. On the simplest level, there are words that describe pretty objective things about the music itself: this song is “fast,” this song is “slow.” We can almost always agree on that sort of thing. And then we start working up the scale from objectivity toward abstraction: this song is light, or heavy. It’s hip-hop, or country.

What we are starting to do here is to invent a language that allows us to talk about music—a language where we try to find words that describe some of the things that music does. At first it goes fine: even if we occasionally disagree about whether something’s “happy” or “sad,” we at least know that we have some overlapping idea of what those words mean. But as we go up the scale, it gets more and more subjective and provisional. I say something’s “furious” and you say “no, I think it’s more resigned.” One day we realize that we have completely different estimations of what constitutes “funky”—we’re getting back into the realm of the subjective.

Disagree as we might, it’s still useful to have the words. They help us get beyond “I like it” and try to point at actual parts of music, actual qualities we think music has, starting from obvious things like fast/slow and working up to difficult, abstract ones. We want to create conventional uses around these words: we find it helpful to be able to say “this is very funky” and know that the person you’re talking to has some vague idea what that describes.

Okay, so: “relevant” is one of those high-level abstracted words, one where people don’t agree on its application and conceive of it in different ways. That alone isn’t a reason to throw it out: like I said, those more abstract descriptions are always going to be hashed out and in constant question. What this thread did, though, was to level a bunch of criticisms about how “relevant” works as a term—how maybe it can’t always mean what it pretends to mean, how maybe it’s become a crutch or a misnomer. That isn’t a reason to get rid of it, either: just a reason to be careful about it, to be skeptical of what it seems to think it means, to try and “fix” it.

The reason I was confused is that in your attempt to save it, you just destroyed it. You said: "relevant == I love it unconditionally / Your mileage may vary . . . relevant == 'Its Good.'" You turned it meaningless, sort of: you pulled it out of the realm of “words we’re hoping can maybe function as halfway-objective” and you knocked it back to total subjectivity.

“Relevant” was meant to at least try and point to some semi-definable quality that we could all try and recognize in something, even if we didn't agree on whether we found it or not—the same way we know what a "polite" person is even if we have very different ideas about who or what constitutes one. “Relevant” was supposed to say something about how a given piece of music either seemed particularly pertinent to what happened in people’s lives or to the rest of the music around it. People here were grousing about how that gets decided, and what we like to pretend it means, and you seemed to be trying to defend “relevant.” But instead, you just picked it up and slaughtered it!

Okay, so: “relevant” is one of those high-level abstracted words, one where people don’t agree on its application and conceive of it in different ways.
Okay. Howsabout we use the word "Crucial" (intentionally capitalized and surrounded by quotes) instead to denote musical objects that one
1) Loves passionately
2) Finds to be "important" (to themselves, not to "History") and
3) For which all argument against is pointless. (in other words, you've made up your mind on the subject and are no longer collecting formative opinions on it.)

My major concern is that ILM seems to have a bulging potato sack full of ways, both crass and highbrow, of dismissing something somebody loves...but not enough ways of saying that something is "good."
All the "good" words ("good", "nice", "like", "love") all sound vague and bloodless. I'm searching for a compliment word that sounds both authoritative and dynamic; and for 24 hours "Relevant" struck me as being an intensely potent word that I could bend to my will.
Well, maybe not.