If you’re a huge fan of music and enjoy being a part of internet communities, chances are you may have heard of 4chan’s sprawling music board, /mu/. Now, despite the title of my article, I don’t entirely dislike /mu/. They’re a fairly open board that do allow the discussion of a lot of music that would otherwise go ignored. But they’ve got a lot of problems. In addition to the general problems of 4chan (anti-feminism comes to mind), /mu/’s tastes tend to be far too canonical and poorly reasoned, often based more on historical mythology rather than actual listenability (check out their essentials list: https://goput.it/zix.jpg). Case in point: Neutral Milk Hotel’s good-but-not-great “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” is frequently voted as the community’s favourite album. And I wouldn’t find this objectionable if the community wasn’t so adamant in their defense of the validity of their taste, which is, unfortunately, the case. In addition to this, last time I checked /mu/, there was a popular theory in circulation which categorized music listeners into “plebeians” (term for lower-working class used to describe listeners who judge the music they listen to based mostly on subjective qualities) and “patricians” (term for aristocracy used to describe listeners who judge music primarily based on objective qualities). It’s this kind of thing that drives me away from visiting /mu/ regularly, despite being the music fanatic that I am.
To be fair, I’ve been told that this plebeian/patrician thing started mostly as a joke, but it’s evolved into something fairly serious, and that troubles me. To start, it’s extremely dismissive of people who judge music by any subjective qualities. Casting these listeners as the lower class is unfair and ridiculous. It also seems to imply some sort of standard of quality that can only be achieved by objective greatness. The trouble is, objective qualities about music rarely have anything to do with whether the music is actually enjoyable to listen to. You could make an album of frantic noise and unique styles of playing that still sounds awful, but objectively, there’s never been anything like it before. Does that make it great? Maybe by /mu/’s twisted patrician standards, but not mine. What’s more, an album of objectively interesting musical material may be held back by secondary qualities that can generally only be judged with something of a subjective edge, for example, production, singing styles or lyrics.
What I really don’t get about the patrician view being supposed as superior is the disregard it shows for any possibility of being able to combine objective and subjective qualities of music. Why can’t I comment on an album by saying that it has dark and depressing lyrics (objective), but poorly written ones (subjective/objective)? In addition to this, /mu/ tends to use this patrician/pleb dichotomy to dismiss most music critics who focus on things other than objective qualities as opinion-slinging plebeians. Why not treat them with a degree of respect? I like to think that music critics’ opinions are based on a level of experience and therefore even their subjective criticisms should be valid up to a point. If you disagree with their subjective opinions, there are always other music critics who value different qualities. You decide what critics you trust.
Now /mu/ has brought us some great things, and their essentials list still has some great stuff (plus they’re supporters of a great youtube music critic, Anthony Fantano of Theneedledrop). But I hope this patrician vs. plebeian thing dies out. It really just epitomizes the worst of the faux-intellectual music criticism that dominates the board.
Golden Age 
Objective qualities?
What’s objective about music?
I guess there’s the amount of money it makes. Maybe I should start judging music by its profitability, so that I too can be an elite upper-class music person in the eyes of /mu/.
If /mu/ supposedly prized music by its objective qualities, compositionally complex material such as Dream Theater would be seen as patrician. That’s not the case, it’s viewed as pleb as fuck there.
P.S. ‘Patrician’ and ‘Pleb’ began as rather tongue in cheek terms and still are.
And I’m sorry that you do not stand against the delusional, divisive rhetoric of feminism.
Hey man, glad to hear your input on this, don’t want to get into debates on feminism here, as this is a music blog, but you raise a good point about the Dream Theater thing. It’s true, they don’t judge music specifically on compositional complexity, and I’m actually very glad of that. And as I said, I do believe that the community often has some interesting input on pop music. At the same time, I still find /mu/ to be overly pretentious about the whole idea of music criticism. Often, pop music is dismissed quickly if it enters any kind of “mainstream” setting, which I find ridiculous (yeah, there’s exceptions to this, but I’d also like to see the community discuss something like Nicki Minaj or The Black-Eyed Peas more seriously, even if you find them commercial or don’t like them, it’s obnoxious to hear people dismiss this stuff as “pleb”). And I realize it’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but I find that in this age of internet irony, that kind of thing can still have a major impact on how people think and approach pop music (I actually wrote a whole essay on that subject as well, not sure if I ever posted it here). I just think a lot of the people are really limiting themselves in what they think they’re “allowed” to like. You may disagree. I don’t actually spend enough time there to know for sure.
You are taking my meme way, way too seriously.
Also, you seem unclear on the respective definitions of “objective” and “subjective”. For instance, “complexity” is a subjective quality, rather than an objective one, because there is more than one matrix by which a piece’s complexity may be evaluated. In fact, there are as many such matrices as there are musical traditions (i.e., countless).
I hate to say it, but in the tone and content of your little article here you come off as something of a plebeian. I’ll understand if you refuse to post this comment.
Posting your comment anyway. A couple things I don’t quite understand.
1. I would think there are certain ways to judge “complexity” objectively if you narrow it down. I’ll admit, I was pretty non-specific. True, there could be an infinite number of ways to judge what is objectively complex about something, but our common standard in music involves basic elements such as keys, rhythms, etc. At the same time, yes, this actually involves combining objective and subjective judgments to understand music, which is part of why I’m arguing the two are inseparable.
2. Your first comment confuses me a bit. “Your” meme? Were you the originator or something or am I reading that wrong? Also, I’ve already acknowledged at least twice on this page that I understand it’s supposed to be a joke, but that jokes take on an impossible-to-differentiate nature on the internet where many people can’t tell whether it’s serious or not. Now, I think that’s a fascinating idea, but it makes for some serious communication issues, and I think this meme is a good example. If neither of us are taking it seriously, though, we don’t actually have anything to argue about. So why refer to it as a joke and then end your last comment by saying my tone was “plebeian”? I don’t really get it. I feel like I’m missing something here. Keep in mind that I don’t actually frequent /mu/.
>actually caring what other people think about your music tastes
>taking the opinions on /mu/ seriously
>not accepting Neutral Milk Hotel as your lord and saviour
>getting upset at people calling you a pleb, when 80% of the time it’s a joke
Confirmed for pleb. You probably think Radiohead are obscure and you’re unique for liking them.
I’m finding it a little sad that the article I got the most comments on is a quick rant about a barely-relevant online hub that happens to be very defensive of the validity of their opinions. It’s worth noting that I don’t just use this blog to rant about /mu/, I’m actually an amateur critic, and I wouldn’t really be one if I didn’t care what other people thought of my music taste, would I? If this keeps happening, I might just delete the post. I’m getting tired of finding these comments here and all of you say pretty much the same thing.
you seem upset by /mu/’s inside joke. you should keep in mind nobody, i repeat, nobody takes it seriously IRL(even /mu/tants). if you frequented 4chan you’d truly understand its twisted,troll-like nature.
also if you ever bothered to stick around and see one of the meta-discussions on the patrician-pleb dichotomy, you’d find out that the general agreement is that music IS subjective. most people find it offensive to the core when somebody disses their music taste. /mu/ is only doing you a favor by calling you a faggot and bringing you down from a false high horse. that being said, /mu/ is great for people that want to branch out and discover new music in a non-serious way. there’s plenty of shitty discussions and you have to wade to find something legitimate. the sharethreads do make it worthwhile, as do the bandcamp and soundcloud threads.
if you don’t enjoy 4chan’s atmosphere, don’t hate on them just because you can’t fit in. nobody takes it seriously anyways. go on reddit or RYM if you want serious, no-fun-allowed music discussion.
hope you keep on discovering great music!
It’s not a question of “no-fun-allowed”, I’d say, rather the way in which I think that meme directs conversations there (I’m not a fan, though I guess I made that clear). But I suppose you’re right that I’m hardly experienced enough there to make such sweeping generalizations. That being said, I take exception to both the idea of “bring me down from a high horse” and the use of the word “faggot” in that context. Unless I’m misremembering something, I don’t think I described my role as a critic as somehow “all-knowing” or of vastly superior taste. I was simply arguing that as a critic, I often make subjective judgments on things and that it ought to be up to the reader to decide whether or not they trust that set of judgments. But I guess it wasn’t really fair to completely dismiss /mu/ while not bothering to look deeper into the community. And I have to admit that I’ve heard of some cool stuff there that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Anyway, thanks, hopefully you keep discovering great music too!
I am new to mu aswell but i find it as a great place to find music and have some fun