Originality?

mvuent

Void Dweller
I'm trying to work out whether something can be unique, but unoriginal. It sounds like an oxymoron, but you can make an authentic expression of something whilst making an unoriginal tune.
maybe something that had an unprecedented amount of work poured into it, but to an end that's boring?

like there might be someone who's created a uniquely detailed model of the enterprise in minecraft. no one else has reached that level of craft in a minecraft build. but--who cares? it's unoriginal.
 

version

Well-known member
Anyone seen a PS1 game called Vib Ribbon? You stuck a CD in the console and it would generate a level for you to play through based on what was on it.

 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Everything worth saying has been said. Now more than ever.

Have been down this trail before and not really found anyone interested enough to talk about it. Always end up asking myself if maybe originality is something we could shift the main focus away from. Maybe it's not the be all end all. Maybe it's just the byproduct of capitalism and mass production. People used to be fine listening to the same old shit for centuries before this era. In many parts of the world they still do. We've been over this before, right? Songs older than anyone can remember. Replayed over and over. Still bringing the same joy. Can easily transpose this into the hippy side of my point, which is moving away from a materialist mentality and some form (not sure what exactly) of a return to some prior state of mind. I think my shroom trip confirmed all of this to me. There I was listening to old music and getting as fresh a buzz as I would having heard it for the first time. In fact plenty of the tracks I heard on that trip were new to me, but very much within the confines of the framework. So maybe the problem is us and our externally imposed need for the new. Could this be bypassed? I mean, let's face it, you hear an old classic you haven't heard for years and it catches you. Smile plastered across your face. It's part nostalgia, part just sheer awe at the work. Timeless is timeless.

Loads of good stuff on originality in that thread..

There are new old tracks that copy a classic style and make you feel good. There are old old tracks you haven't heard before which do the same. Craft is important as mvuent says. So many variables though. Like a lot of new stuff to me sounds insanely well crafted, but is totally forgettable. And then some old grime thing made one music 2000 who's melody gets etched in your brain. Hard to pin it down really.

As far as music making goes for me, I definitely don't feel the drive to make something new. My main battle is against making boring music. I don't want it to be totally generic. The craft for me is taking the well established pallette and doing something that creates a compelling mood for about 6 minutes. The thing is, even with a genre as codified as house, there's still so many ways to twist it.
 
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version

Well-known member
 

catalog

Well-known member
So why is nobody able to come up with anything new?
you did! with the tags. no one had done anything with them for years, you came along, totally transformed the place. Proof = you got biters real quick and the tags are now gentrified.
 

version

Well-known member
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sufi

lala
i checked my android device and that cheeky button showed up ok, & i looked in the dissensus controls and apparently the drafts stay 24 hrs
and they re-save every sixty seconds, so you could overwrite your draft with something less incriminating i guess?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Everything worth saying has been said. Now more than ever.



Loads of good stuff on originality in that thread..

There are new old tracks that copy a classic style and make you feel good. There are old old tracks you haven't heard before which do the same. Craft is important as mvuent says. So many variables though. Like a lot of new stuff to me sounds insanely well crafted, but is totally forgettable. And then some old grime thing made one music 2000 who's melody gets etched in your brain. Hard to pin it down really.

As far as music making goes for me, I definitely don't feel the drive to make something new. My main battle is against making boring music. I don't want it to be totally generic. The craft for me is taking the well established pallette and doing something that creates a compelling mood for about 6 minutes. The thing is, even with a genre as codified as house, there's still so many ways to twist it.

Craft is an apt description. You could associate it with musicianship, but mood is just as appropriate either as single tracks and/or a long-form mix of tracks.

The few drips of free time available have been spent hunting new but equally as much ‘old’ (if not more so) music that’s compelling. My House list will never be completed. Most of it isn’t even on a list, it just hasn’t been personally discovered yet. Same with masses of ambient and drone, same with Grateful Dead shows and versions of their tunes. Sets reminder to delete browser in case other half reads and thinks it time to get me fitting a fucking kitchen.
 

muser

Well-known member
Anyone seen a PS1 game called Vib Ribbon? You stuck a CD in the console and it would generate a level for you to play through based on what was on it.


Loved that game, completely forgot about is existence, I want to play it now
 

muser

Well-known member
Maybe people care less about originality these days, the general youth, in the same way genrefication seems less important and even shunned.
 

version

Well-known member
Here’s the thing, right, Finnegans Wake—Joyce thought it was the last novel. He thought this was the novel in which the destiny of literature would realize itself. It was the event that we have been waiting for all of these years. And he literally thought it would be the last novel. It would be (a) unnecessary and (b) impossible to write a novel, I mean a proper novel, a serious novel, after Finnegans Wake. Now, in a way, if you have this linear-progressive view of literary or cultural history, then it is quite hard to see that he wasn’t right. But I have tried to argue, in the past, that he was exactly, I mean exactly, wrong—that Finnegans Wake is actually the first book. It is the source code of the novel. It contains everything from the picaresque Spanish, to the Anglo-Saxon novel, through Shakespeare and everything else. It eviscerates them and lays them open, but doesn’t resolve anything.

[...]

So, I don’t buy into the idea of progress, that we need to go beyond Joyce in terms of form. I think there are other things to do. Once we’ve observed the big bang in physics we don’t all just dissolve into space. We do other stuff that’s enabled by that. This goes back to what you were asking about Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs, who are writers I have a huge, huge admiration for. And you know, in my early twenties I used to copy passages of Burroughs out and make diagrams of sequences of Robbe-Grillet. But I don’t just want to imitate them or take what is most superficial about them and add one to that. I would rather do something that makes sense at a more intuitive level.

[...]

For example, one of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward.

[...]

... I think you have to be a bit careful about this cult of newness, the idea that somehow, post-about-1962, we’re suddenly postmodern—It just ain’t so. There’s always a precedent.
 
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