I sometimes feel like nobody understands music less than certain musicologists or music theory people. They often can’t talk about any music without ranking it on a supposed fixed index of merit. There is often no sense that music is supposed to bypass being a rote intellectual exercise you can assign a grade to. They are sure they can call you an idiot for enjoying any music originally conceived or composed after 1900.

As if it is a certainty that music made after 1900 is objectively the product of degraded beings, and the quality or lack thereof can be scientifically proven. These same types will listen to like anime soundtracks and go “yeah, it’s just a joke, I listen to anime music 10 hours a day as a lark.” No, you are undermining your whole air of superiority because you can’t admit that your own standards for evaluating music are insufficient.

There is no objective route to giving experimental music a D- and officially designating it a failure at what it attempts in total. You don’t know motivations of artists, you don’t know the audiences, you don’t know the webs of signifiers and experiences audience members bring to music, you don’t know the myriad points of aesthetic connection that are being mapped out in any given performance, you don’t understand the range of interpretation the experiences open to. You degrade music by treating it will this kind of fetishistic, hierarchizing approach.

Which is not the same as saying art for art’s sake. You can also judge works from numerous vantage points. You can judge aesthetic and political content on separate terms, even if you then turn around and consider how they interact. The political evaluation is not aided by the fetishistic instrumentalization of music as grist for rigid cultural hierarchies. We do not need to have all genres ranked on a list and told our experiences with the lower genres are the result of our degraded consciousness.

“People who listen to experimental music are degraded beings, they think they’re smart, but they don’t realize music stopped being necessary after 1900, and all that’s left is for people like me to pick over its corpse.” Definitely a wise way to experience life, where everything you could interact with ceased being worthwhile a century before your birth, and all that’s left is to consume in service of grading it.

You may as well be a ghost. You have turn music into an elaborate ritual that works like an anti-summoning. You’re forcing yourself to die and haunt your own existence. You have turned everything into a fetish that protects you from exposing yourself to your social world. You keep music and society at arm’s length to have an illusion of mastery.

PS: apologies to any musicologists who are good people. This does not apply to all musicologists. But if you are a musicologist, I imagine you must have at last met a pretension one who fits this description.