I didn't know where else to post this, but this thread in r/classical cracked me up way more than it probably should have:

Why I hate the Goldberg Variations by Jeremy Denk

Usually r classical is pretty good with their knowledge of performers, but I guess Jeremy Denk is a completely unknown quantity to them even though he is one of the most affable pianists of the last 10 years. Add on top of not knowing who he is, they also don't know that 1) he recorded the Goldberg Variations in September 2013 and clearly is in complete awe of them as any pianist should be and that 2) he had a whole series of blog posts, interviews, and more with NPR throughout all of 2012 as he prepared for his recording project and his tour.

I think I just can't fathom their lack of imagination that maybe just maybe Denk was being tongue-in-cheek...

Hi r/badmusicology,

I just submitted a request to take over moderation of this subreddit after seeing all the spam posted last month. I love this subreddit and want to wipe it clean of spam. I've done this in the past for r/jazzpiano as well so I'm hoping we can return to having some hilarious quality posts soon.

Some choice comments from r classicalmusic's recent unpopular opinion thread overstating Debussy's influence on jazz:

you remove Debussy and you get rid of... jazz (in my uneducated opinion)

Debussy and Ravel were a huge influence on a whole generation of jazz musicians

If you remove Debussy you still get jazz, you just get an alternate reality version of it - Louis Armstrong was influenced by Debussy and took that "expressionistic" floating quality out of his music and on top of jazz - that led to a "jazz grows up" type of moment that influenced jazz/dance/pop/etc music to this very day. But jazz was existing just fine without that, it would have just been entirely different - perhaps it just wouldn't have grown the way it did

Found a great YouTube comment on atonal music (specifically Arnold Schoenberg - Piano Concerto, Op. 42)

Text:

"Atonal music is similar to food "delicacies" in certain cultures, those that taste horrible but people still eat them because they're said to be interesting or out of the ordinary, and call them "acquired taste" just to make themselves look sophisticated and open to new things. The fact that something is edible or listenable (i.e. eating it or listening to it won't kill you) does not automatically make it enjoyable. I bet only very few people are able to memorize or recite any 5-second fragment of any atonal music, or even differentiate between two such fragments, without any melodic anchor to hang on to. For me, anyone who says he/she "likes" atonal music is just posturing, to make them seem to have a refined taste, the same way as in the food analogy."

The article in question: Cut the C-Rap, an essay in City Journal (I've never heard of it either) with a title incorporating some wordplay so appallingly bad I am forced to point it out, if only because an essay this unhinged demands a reality-check before investigating seriously.

The premise here is that rappers should not criticize the president on issues of tone (in this instance, that means with regards to his "shithole" comment) because they speak crassly too. The rapper who leveled the criticism is none other than Jay-Z, whose criticism would not vex the conservative writer so if it were not for his considerable influence and fame. Discussing the moral logic of this reasoning sounds like a tedious exercise (it's a fucking ad hominem if anybody who can remember those latin phrases gives a shit), so I'm gonna just skip to the musicology problems

The essay moves freely between criticizing Jay-Z specifically and criticizing rap in general. But at no point is it clear that the author has any concept of rap outside of Gangsta Rap style popular through much of the 90s. With a gun to his head, I doubt the author, who pretends to be an authority on rap music, could name a single trend of the past decade, or evidence in the slightest way his knowledge of the rise of social recluses with a xanax perscription and a pirated copy of FL Studio who lead the genre in new directions with the sometimes brilliant experiments they post to Soundcloud. This line of criticism which conflates Gangsta Rap with rap in general is typical of people neurotically opposed to learning about people different from themselves, and also incidentally the same argument your dad makes when pontificating on the subject.

But this is to concede Gangsta Rap as inherently evil or spiritually destructive in order to win a particular argument. And at /r/badmusicology, we take this shit like Saving Private Ryan: we don't leave musical styles behind. The rise of gangsta rap should first be understood in the context of the explosion of urban black youth writing and performing poetry which speaks about their experience. Any cultural reactionary who laments the decline of poetry, which they probably blame on the liberalizing of sexual morals or some equally unlikely horseshit, should celebrate the rise of hip hop, which placed lyrical content front and center in popular music in a way it probably hasn't been since the era of epic poetry which illiterate peoples once passed through generations. Yet, of course this never happened. Before the rise of gangsta rap, the poetry revolution in front them they simply ignored. But when groups like N.W.A. sprung into the culture with tails of irreverence and braggadocio, now they could justify their snub. The poetry lacked morals, so any discussion on a rapper's merits could preemptively be avoided. (You see why they cling to this understanding that all rap is gangsta rap?)

The claim is never seriously argued, but to support his position, he quotes some random black jazz musician who said, "Now you have to say that you’re from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail." Sometimes, a rapper is able to make such claims seriously, but for the most part, it is understood that Tupac attended a peforming art's high school for gifted children, most of NWA grew up middle class, and Biggie was never "considered a fool because I dropped out of high school" because he did in fact graduate from such an institution. Anyone with a brain that hasn't been pickled in subconscious racist fears of hatchet-weilding buck negroes can recognize that their gangsterism is part of the kayfabe. If someone is worried about the celebration of violence inherent in the lyrics of Ice Cuba, I wonder if they once railed against the corrosive anti-Americanism beamed into households across America every time the Iron Sheik got some ring time. The only group of people who are consistently fooled by gangsta rap performances are, after all, the same group which write essays like the piece linked here. I take great pleasure in knowing that every detail of the comically exaggerated tales of blood-soaked criminality blasted out across the airwaves is nowhere less challenged than in the minds and hearts of the most insular, xenophobic folks in the nation.

The ridiculouslness reaches a peak in the claim that rap is "devoid of harmony, beauty, structure, transcendence, or thought." Some of these we're forced to agree to disagree on the grounds that we're discussing abstract concepts, and that while Ghostface Killah's Fishscale is an astonishing return to form which unequivocally bears examples of beauty, transcendence, and thought (is thought inherently good, by the way?), we must admit such qualities are subjective, and under pressure can admit the heart of the author is so blackened by fear that they likely are being honest in claiming that they cannot perceive the enormous beauty throughout the genre. But harmony and structure? These are clearly identifiable musical concepts, which composing a piece without them would present a serious theoretical challenge. Harmony, in a simple sense, is the relationship between notes played simultaneously. Harmony is present whenever more than voice can be heard. Does the author seriously believe that no piece of rap music in the history of the genre has more than a single voice audible in a given moment? Similarly, I'm forced to assume he doesn't know what the word "structure" means in a musical context. How does he understand a hook or verse if not in terms of structure?

Not that the musical value of rap is even relevant to his argument, that people who've recorded music with lyrics as offensive as Jay-Z have no right to criticize Trump on issues of tone. The author's additional wandering through his wildly confused understanding of rap music is rehearsed only as the result of what appears to be a reaction triggered somewhere deep in his reptile brain. The task of copy-pasting lyrics from Rap Genius (a name into which he reads a lost battle in the greater Culture War) so exhausts him that he's never forced to seriously explore the relationship between the president's contempt for foreigners and the use of violent imagery in Jay-Z's lyrics. After all, Jay-Z isn't objecting to the word "shithole", which by itself isn't offensive, but the belief that there is nothing of value which isn't of European heritage.

Agh! Of course, this was exactly the mind-numbing inspection of ethical logic I wished to stay away from, these discussions being completely independent from the unrelated moans about the victory of rap music as it becomes the dominant American musical art form.