Album Rating: 3.0

Why is that first premise so unfathomable to you people? I can't separate the singer from the songs they sing and may also write. If they are gay and a woman they are not singing about a man (assuming it's a love song). Are there universal elements to any love song? Sure. But I don't presume to know the dynamic of a same-sex relationship. It's more distant from my own personal experience. Again, we're just rehashing the argument. It is what it is and you can just consider me retarded.

Album Rating: 3.0

You know it's also very coincidental that this got brought up in this thread where people are struggling with separating the personal life of this singer from his music...

Album Rating: 3.5

yep if the singer isnt singing to someone with my exact demographic then i cant make the absolutely massive leap of imagining the genders being reversed



i also make sure to research the ethnic background of the singers love interest to make sure it matches mine

Album Rating: 3.0

Do you actually think you can relate fully to some songs that are very specific to a Black experience (assuming you are not Black here)?

Album Rating: 3.5

that has nothing to do with the universal love song lol

Album Rating: 4.5

i agree zorg



petitioning band-aid to get back together and re-record do they know it's christmas



how the fuck am i supposed to relate to a bunch of africans

Album Rating: 3.0

You brought in the flippant remark about ethnicity. Back pedaling now on identity having an impact on ones ability to relate to music?

Album Rating: 2.0

moving goalposts much?

Love is literally one of the most universal experiences humans can have. I’m sure a lot of the themes are commonplace and don’t require you to be exactly the same as the songwriter in question, whether that’s gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity etc.

Album Rating: 3.5

Not being able to imagine myself as the object in a love song decreases my enjoyment



this is the only statement i was refuting



i was making a joke about the ethnicity of a love interest not matching yours affecting your enjoyment of a song and how absurd that would be

Album Rating: 3.0

isn't there a distinction between a song whose intrinsic content is universal (e.g. a generic love song) c.f. a song whose intrinsic content is not universal (e.g. a song literally about the unique experience of a particular demographic). my ability to enjoy or relate to the former is largely (maybe wholly) independent / non-reliant on the identity, sexual orientation, demographic or other personal characteristic of the artist. i could see the argument for the latter, but that's tied to and based on the actual content of the music/art, nor merely the artist's identity, sexual orientation, demographic etc. (and also the fact that an experience expressed in art relates to something inherent to someone who I do not have very much in common with often makes that art more interesting, no? you get to learn about another human beings different lived experience? the argument that that difference makes the music itself less enjoyable is where the weirdness of that take comes in)

Album Rating: 3.0

No, that's all fair and maybe I'm solipsistic for letting the personal life of an artist alter a song that is universal in its subject matter of a relationship regardless of the sexual orientation, sexes or genders of the people involved because it's simply not my experience.

Album Rating: 3.0

"u must have no imagination at all"

honestly impressed that there was any need to expound on this argument

stop skulking in the margins of whatever weirdass venn diagram you're imposing on human experience and put yourself back in the middle with the rest of us there is no way in the world your understanding of love is unique enough not to have at least a dash of lesbian in it

Album Rating: 2.5

LMAO, rating a song based on the impossible possibility that me and the singer could ever be interested in one another is not something I’ve ever considered. This is a new meta, my eyes have been opened.

Album Rating: 3.0

You've never dated a woman who thought Brown Eyed Girl was about them?

Album Rating: 3.5

What about hate songs? Would I enjoy them less if I assumed that I can’t be the victim? Or more?

Album Rating: 3.0

Depends if you wanted to be victim or not, wouldn't it?



Bringing it back to Daughters, doesn't his actions, previously unknown, now permeate the music? Doesn't it have an impact on ones ability to enjoy it? Not saying these are analogous situations beyond that the artist is often inseparable from the art.

Album Rating: 3.0

literally imagine hearing lines like

Wondering what you're doing, what you're listening to

Which quarter of the moon you're viewing from your bedroom

Watching all the movies, drinking all the smoothies

Swimming at the pool, I'm thinking of you too

and deciding that 1) the you rather than the I is the main position you're invited to relate to, or that 2) the gender of either party weighs on the track, like, at all

90% of courtney barnett lyrics are first-person musings about boredom, memorable characters or aussie gentrification, absurd how far you'd have to go out of your way to force sexuality in as a dealbreaker to any degree

Album Rating: 3.5

“ Bringing it back to Daughters, doesn't his actions, previously unknown, now permeate the music?”

of course



“Doesn't it have an impact on ones ability to enjoy it?”

maybe

Album Rating: 3.5

I guess S/M tendencies modulate the degree of immersion in music as a function of perspective-taking, as well as the valence of interpersonal relationships expressed in the lyrics.



Yeah, I loved Sweet Sixteen when I was a teen, now I don’t.

Album Rating: 2.0

One of my fave albums of all time has the lyrics ‘27 miserable years’ contained within it, that really resonated with me as a 20 year old

I’m shell-shocked at the revelation I could only have legitimately enjoyed it for a twelve month period (that’s now long passed) and my earliest memories of that album are in complete tatters too