Put that gun back in that holster, bub

So we have disagreement on yeaterday's encounter with the Michael Jackson fan. Some of us feel that it is a mistake to equate the two listening experiences. The first counter-argument runs as follows:

1. We do not know for sure that the listener of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was experiencing it as nostalgia, nor specifically as nostalgia for life in the 1980s.
2. Feelings of nostalgia for the feelings of a particular time and placed evoked by a piece of music, is not the same as an appreciation of a particular piece of music's ability to evoke those images and feelings. Granted, there is an undertone here that engaging in criticism is more valid than engaging in nostalgia.

This might seem a bit like a hair-splitting endeavour to save face, as if listening to the Descendents and Michael Jackson are of different aesthetic value, but (enter the second argument):

1. The casual listener's appreciation of music rests on either an enjoyment of well-crafted pop elements, such as melody (Michael Jackson's not called the King of Pop for nothing you know), or else because the initial listening of a song is linked in memory to specific episodes of personal or shared cultural experiences. A "hit" occurs when many, many people find resonance in the same song at the same time. Some theorists explain the rise and fall of hits as being related to the songs larger cultural resonance, while a few see it more in terms of the capitalist underpinnings of radio and other media.

2. Songs that never become hits are trickier, because a listener's first encounter with them may be well after their initial release. While they undergo the same sort of experiences as noted above, the emphasis is often on the personal as opposed to group experiences (unless the song is re-released, think "Unchained Melody" from the Ghost soundtrack). Furthermore, these experiences may be linked to more contemporary events, and not those surrounding it's initial release (thus, "Unchained Melody" evokes Jr. High, the age most of us were when Ghost came out, and not so much 1955 when it was first performed, nor 1965 when the Rightous Brothers recorded its' most famous version, and certainly not 1977 when Elvis sang it weeks before his death).

If one is to suggest an aesthetic superiority to a piece of music, then the "superior" listening experience is to be had by the song with the ability to engage in novel pop constructions, evoke personal as well as group nostalgia, and reveal insights into the larger cultural moment in which it was constructed.

Given how much of this is dependent on the listener's ability to develop a context for listening to a piece of music, one cannot truly state a universal merit to a particular musical piece, only a personal one.