A Quick New Year's Resolution: More Value-Judgements

I'm currently cooking new year's dinner for my in-laws (which will include two types of venison) so I don't really have time to blog. But since resolutions are meant to be delivered today I thought I'd sneak mine in. And since I've preoccupied my mind lately with my personal relationship to music, it'll have to have something to do with that.

Once, in what seems to have been a time when my taste in music was an entirely different one, I was posed a challenge by some friends. I had written a lot of forum posts and articles describing seemingly every aspect of music, but they all relied on facts to work - I effectively told the story of the music and relied on its greatness being conveyed through that. But my friends challenged me to write an entire article without mentioning a single identifiable extra-musical fact, merely how the music felt and worked.

It was hard. I chose to write about a track with an extreme energy level, namely this one:



Unfortunately the result is lost in the annals of cyberspace, and I'm not sure if the result had not been a lot better if I'd been allowed to mentioned (say) the secularisation of gospel tradition and so on. But nevertheless. I described the music with adjectives, feelings, effects, and to be excessively musicological, with value-judgements. I'm still not entirely comfortable with actually evaluating specific pieces and details of music, but I've been experimenting a bit with a slightly more verbose style like this here and here.

I think I need to have this side to my writing as well so as to not lose touch. So for next year, I'm going to do something which for most people is normal but that I've completely lost touch with.

I'm going to spend the year listening to whole albums and singles, and rate them internally, and post a best-of list at the end of the year. Feel free to ignore it. It's mostly for me.