Is ABBA shit?

[tsung@aerospace.ARPA]

(I sent this two days ago but apparantly it was lost; sorry if repeated)

(This is not meant to be a flame)

Remember when you were small?  When you first began listening to music?
Didn't you listen to what appealed to you immediately?  Did you know
what harmony/texture/rhythm were? Did you care?

Then, perhaps you listened to music a lot.  Why?  Maybe because you found
that music made you happy, sad; music made you FEEL.  Hell, they were
melodic, commercial songs, but you didn't know nor care; they still moved
you.  They were there when you met your first girlfriend/boyfriend; they
were there when you were learning to dance; when you flunked a test;
when you moved and had to leave all your friends.  They were there when
your parents didn't understand you and you locked yourselves into your
own little fantasy worlds.

You were growing up, into quite a sophisticated individual.  Your
musical taste grew sophisticated, too.  You realized that, hey, the
top 10 stuff sound so ... boring.  Perhaps if you studied music you 
would find that structurally these songs pretty much stayed the same as 
what you listened to five years ago.  Why couldn't the world wise up
as you were wising up?  You now listen to the "alternative" stuff.
That's the real art, no doubt; the sound of the future.

Now you feel these lousy, top 40 "artists" were making our "real"
artists starve here.  Come now! Pioneering work in any field is never easy!
But that's what the pioneers choose, isn't it?  Do you really think
that if a certain no-talent megastar disappeared, his/her audience would
turn around to support our talented heros?

So those top 40 artists don't make "new" and "challenging" music ... surely,
if top 40 were full of "new" and "challenging" music, if so many "artists" 
can make this music, and every listener can appreciate it, would it still
be new and challenging?  Wouldn't that be a fundamental contradiction?
What about those poor 8, 10, 15 year-olds?  If they were bombarded with 
Kate Bush's dreamings and Peter Gabriel's insecurities and Laurie Anderson's
science projects, gosh, wouldn't they be terribly confused?  Where is
that simple love song for the first kiss?

Is, like, arithematics and 3x + y = 20 useless crap now that you're 
learning the third proof of Sylow's theorem?  Should third grade math
teachers all quit now because they're not contributing to the development
of new mathematics?  Could we all appreciate "alternative" music from
the first day we listened to music?  Is ABBA shit?

Perhaps, the "general public" don't listen to music as much as you do,
and their musical "sophistication" is about as deep as yours when you were 15.
But they don't care!  They're satisfied.  Simply melodies, commercial
songs please them.  They don't want to, or need to, get more adventurous
than Lionel Ritchie in the same way that they can be happy with the
solutions to 3x + y = 20.  Who needs them, you say?  Well, they are probably
contributing to some other fields of art that you're not familiar with and
consequently they're bitching about YOUR immaturity (as the general public) 
in the appreciation of THEIR art!  Music is just one of the arts, right?

Fu-Sheng

(1. "art" used in a very general sense.
 2. "you" is definitely nobody in particular.
 3. any names resembling "real" personalities are probably coincidental.)