Oh, Anna. I am not sure whether you are making a profound statement or just being nitpicky. Assuming nitpicky: Color me unconvinced. I believe that fat is important, but the idea that salad + fat is important strikes me as someone's rationalization for ranch dressing.

Thanks, Rebecca.

Ha, thank you for reminding me that we are not necessarily doomed. Food *does* go well with sticks.

It *is* pretty easy. The only real confidence you need to have is that there will be enough suckers who continue to care about money.

Good points. All art is communication. Yes. I am just saying that (1) some works of art communicate better than others, and (2) some mediums communicate in different ways, e.g., music communicates on a much more emotional level than other forms.

That's interesting about Cyrano de Bergerac. That's probably another work of art that school ruined for me. I watched it in high school French class and got nothing from it. I should give it another try.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It seems like a few things. Maybe your main point is that the purpose of art is to compel people to act--"emotions" are just a means to that end.

I would disagree. Astral Weeks does not change my behavior, nor does it need to to have value.

I don't think challenging music is challenging in the same way that challenging books or films are. Challenging music just means you need to passively listen for a longer amount of time to reap the rewards, whereas challenging books and films mean that you need to pay closer, active attention. I still say that music is almost completely independent of intellect, even the challenging kind, which separates it from other forms of art.

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I am satisfied with the reasons you give for Pandora being an untrusted steward, and I think that reasonably explains why we can't find local Van Morrisons.

I also think it's a cultural issue. The people I grew up with were raised on video games and soccer practices. Always keeping "busy," never really stopping to think or wonder. Never being moved by anything other than Lion King. Most of the people I grew up with don't seem to be aware that Van-level art exists, or that it matters. Which means there probably aren't many people even attempting to be Van-like. Those few who do probably don't have enough like-minded people around them to help them get better.

All this is to say that local Vans aren't just hard to find, they are hard to create.

I still wouldn't say that Bach's fugues excite our intellect, because I wouldn't say that Escher's geometry-bending drawings excite our intellect. Escher's drawings give us the feeling of confusion, but don't make us think in any deep or important way.

Jack, you force me to think yet again, even more than before. How dare you, and thanks.

Your main point is that music is un-algorithmizable, so I’m going to stick to that.

I’m with you on music being largely subjective—certain musicians and certain songs by certain musicians are going to strike certain chords in a person more than others, to the point that which musician or which song will strike someone is largely unpredictable.

Rebuttal 1: Is this unique to music? Isn’t this the case with all art forms? I’d argue that this subjectivity/unpredictability is even less true of music than any other art form. How people will react to painting or sculpture is probably much more unpredictable because those forms don’t have as direct of a channel to our emotions and so require more interpretation and thinking.

2: More broadly, variance in responses does not imply that responses are unpredictable. They’re just not perfectly predictable.

3: Pandora does a good job of giving me music that I consider good. I plug in Ray LaMontagne and they give me all of the cats we’ve been mentioning: Van, Bob Dylan, David Gray, John Mayer. I suspect Pandora does this successfully not because of the reasons they say – stuff like “acoustic rhythmic piano” and a “twelve-eight time signature” – but rather because they know through thumbs up and such feedback that people who like Ray LaMontagne also tend to like Van et al.

4: Astral Weeks is widely recognized as Van’s best album and one of the best albums, period. On the one hand that offends my contrarian senses because it makes me feel that I’m not as much of a unique little flower as I like to think. On the other hand, it gives me hope that art isn’t just a matter of “taste,” that it’s more than a weakly held opinion and more than cheap stimulation. There’s something *true* about it.

The question for me remains: why can’t we find “the guy in your town who nobody knows”? I strongly believe that music isn’t just a matter of “taste,” which means that it is to a large extent predictable, and I believe (although less strongly) that there are unknown Van Morrisons in my town, but the two beliefs are basically incompatible. Ugh.

Jack, you are not allowed to apologize for verbosity. That was amazing and convincing.

I appreciate the distinction between pop music and “the guy in your town who nobody knows.” I think that’s right, but it disturbs me that we can’t find him. Music is the most accessible art form, as you said, so why can’t we just plug Astral Weeks into Pandora and have a world of amazing music revealed to us?

P.S. – You might have a moral responsibility to be reviewing music on Amazon and/or elsewhere. I currently have the top-rated review of Maroon 5’s new CD, which means it’s possible that my review is the world’s most viewed review of one of the world’s most deplorable works of “art,” which is kind of absurd because you know orders of magnitude more than I do.