Sean Meslar- Student Choice #2

My second arbitrary post is about my taste in music, about which I am quite proud and admittedly verging on arrogance. I'll begin by saying that I haven't listened to the radio since elementary school nor do I have any exposure to popular music. When people reference rap or pop artists, I have no idea who they are no what their music sounds like specifically. I know that generally, all popular music is bland, repetitive, obnoxious and of generally low quality. Furthermore, I'm not an indie music fan, I think that indie artists are simple those who weren't good enough looking or controversial enough(because the importance of actual vocal talent has been mitigated in the era of auto-tune and the like)to be pop-stars. I am a fan of electronic music, IDM, synthpop, drum n' bass, dubstep and the like. Not too many people know anything about these genres of music, nor do they have any experience listening to them, this I think is part of the appeal. My other musical preference is classical; the most talent musicians in the history of humanity are contemporarily called classical composers. The symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart and Bach are unrivaled in their genius. I find the connection between these two genres to be in the mathematical purity of the music. Whereas pop finds a beat that people tend to like and re-hashes it for fifteen years or so, baroque and intelligent electronic music (I'll be the first to concede that there is a lot of awful electronic music) are based on mathematical relationships and developments in rhythm and harmony. In fact, much of what constitutes current top-40 music was originally developed in the American electronic movement of the early to mid 1990's, fans of electronic music are often able to tell what will be the "next big thing" by judging what they liked five to ten years earlier.