Does context matter when you're listening to music?

Music
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Does knowing the history of an artist affect your appreciation of their output?

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Sounds like you are pitching a podcast idea.

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Sometimes

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Sometimes, not always

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If I like some music and the person who made it turns out to be a dick then I will probably still be able to enjoy it

If I know the person is a dick before I hear the music it will probably colour my first impression of the music a bit more

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And if I don’t like their music and find out the artist is a wonderful person it’s not likely to make me enjoy it.

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Feel like this comes up every other week and the answers always the same

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Didn’t mean this to quite be art v artist again. Aside from artists being dicks, do you think knowing what an artist has been through or where they’re coming from makes a difference to how you feel about their work?

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100% When I’m listening to music I’m a person doing a thing and so I take this into account

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suppose so yeah

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100%, probably get this best with my favourite Irish artists as I’ll be much more likely to have seen them early and maybe chatted to them at some point

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I feel like Taylor Swift is a big ‘context’ artist at the moment (maybe just lyrically?), I’m assuming she wouldn’t be so successful if the songs didn’t reference people/situations that people know about?

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Does that mean you’re mostly listening to music passively/as a secondary activity?

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Slightly off topic but I think the skill of Taylor Swift’s lyrics is that they’re simultaneously specific and generic so everyone can relate them really easily to their own lives. ‘It’s like she’s speaking to me directly! She just gets me!’ say all of her fans individually.

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Would say the context made The Art of Forgetting my favourite album last year but normally I don’t pay too much attention to it. Probably because I listen to music in the background a lot so I’m probably missing out on what I could get from active listens.

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Who’s the biggest non-lyrical ‘context’ artist?

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Where the context feeds directly into a particular piece of work it can deepen my appreciation for it. Best example I can think of off the top of my head is Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album. I loved it from the moment I first heard it, but finding out more about the band’s history and Syd took that further.

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23

There’s layers aren’t there, and some of them are unavoidable. There’s the context of where music belongs in terms of it’s influences, where it lies in the genre, the overall impact it’s had / having on culture as a whole. Find it very confusing if I hear an artist for the first time and willfully avoid when and where they were recording, where it’s placed in the canon etc.
Then there’s the artist/s as people, if the music is better understood as part of them as people, if it’s more abstracted. For records I really like, knowing the ‘lore’ on how it was recorded, more unspoken ideas in the composition, instrumentation and production just increase the enjoyment tbh.

I’m also sympathetic to only wanting to support the music of people you feel comfortable to support, but it’s quite hard isn’t it (there are levels though, happy to forget about anyone completely evil because it does tarnish songs they make).

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Think there’s roughly three overlapping things going on in this question:

  1. the context of the artist in terms of morality. Does it matter that the artist that you like is good or bad in terms of social issues, treatment of others etc. Is ‘Disintegration’ still the best album ever if it’s revealed that Robert Smith has a puppy flinging catapult in his back garden?

  2. Context in terms of backstory. Does it make you appreciate ‘Friday I’m in Love’ more if you read in an interview that Robert Smith really did find love on a Friday?

  3. Context in terms of social class. I think/hope the collective discourse has moved on but there was a time a few years ago where you’d read comments like “yeah, I really used to like 17 Seconds but then I discovered that the keyboardist from the record, Matthieu Hartley, went to an independent prep school as a child which means he’s posh and so obviously I have to hate it now.”

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Knowing about all the stuff Ariana Grande went through before Sweetener and thank u, next means a lot of those songs affect me more than they might have otherwise. Imagine having gone through the death of an ex, breakup of an engagement and surviving a terrorist attack and developing PTSD all in your early 20s (then raising a ton of money for the victims and survivors a few weeks after all that trauma by putting on a massive show when any other 23 year old would understandably just want to hide in bed).

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