Does toan imply feelz? An explorative discussion with Cisco Hayward Does the emotional conviction of a song forgive its technical flaws? In many minds, this question is an obvious “duh” and deserves no further discussion. Many people will be quick to defend an attack on their musical tastes with a call to emotional capacity. “No man, I listen to REAL music with FEELING! My music doesn’t need to have super-fast guitar solos or good production because it SPEAKS to MY HEART.” It’s a pretty well established perspective that emotional content can forgive technical inability. Whether or not this is “valid” is a fruitless debate in many ways because nobody actually cares about whether or not you listen to better music than they do. People think that their musical taste is the best and that everyone else is stupid. Very few people try to actively “expand” their taste, and very few people are
“...when someone displays no emotion whatsoever, that scares us.”
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willing to accept the fact that they enjoy objectively bad music (and that there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT). Thus, the conversation of whether or not feeling should forgive technical flaws is a Sysiphusian task that is not the point of this essay. That said, the issue (whatever it is) is easier to attack from the other side. Does a lack of emotional energy make a song bad? This is a much more interesting debate because people don’t really think about it. Why is that? Even though we all have emotional vulnerabilities (and we all fucking know it), when someone reveals too much of their emotions, we interpret it as a sign of weakness. However, when someone displays no emotion whatsoever, that scares us. The notion that music should be “free” from emotional constructs is not a new idea, but it’s also not a wellknown idea outside of academic circles. In its simplest explanation, the term “absolute music” refers to music that is not about anything. It is music that is free from all “extra-musical” connotations (according to the Wikipedia page). A musical absolutist would argue that music should be thought of purely as sound, and that if you have to justify the goodness of a song by the quality of its non-musical elements, then it is not a good song. Basically, musical absolutists are big fans of instrumental music and like it a lot.
