i think one of the common things is an adverse reaction to expressions of "genuine" feeling. I'm sure loads of kids think Louis Armstrong's sweet ballads are "cheesy". i don't, at all. when i hear his voice i feel it straight, without any irony what so ever. but there was a time i did. (though i do think Celion Dion is cheesy).
but why is genuine feeling ever considered cheesy? is it because substandard artists have cheapened it? too much indulgent, unreflexive, "fake" heart tugging, tear jerking; so that even when faced with "real" emotional content we think it's cheesy?
at times it has something to do with cultural age, like Louis Armstrong. or Marvyn Gaye or Bryan Ferry or Leonard Cohen, or, for that matter, Franz Schubert. so maybe a kind of expression i guess becomes so over used and loaded that many of the younger generations can no longer take it seriously. unless they really give it a chance, and "enter" the work; after which they see the substance and feel the power and are able to overcome the initial "cheesy" feeling -- i like Bryan Ferry now, but when my ex first played him for me i thought it was the cheesiest 80s shit ever.
Edward from Dissensus clarifies:
genuine emotion is never cheesy, fake emotion is always cheesy.
reality=lush, fakeness=pimping
minnie ripperton, a bit out of tune but so warm and human = not cheesy
any pop r&b singer singing 24 different notes up n down around the melody because she has the ability to do it but not imparting any feeling= cheese
i think using obvious signifiers instead of trying to express YOURSELF is cheesy.
so there are certain rock ballad chords that say "moody" but aren't really, certain techno sounds or snare fills that say "uplifting" but aren't really.... doing music by numbers, to a template, within a genre is cheesy.
originality, emotion, striving for self-expression: not cheesy
in addition to that, also something to do with personal age: seems that when i was younger i thought a lot of things were cheesy, like jazz as i mentioned. so as i get older, less things sound cheesy to me, and I'm able to appreciate more things on deeper levels. things like disco, R'n'B, Soca, Kizomba, are for sure in this category (but no not the horrible cheesy kind!)
also there are obviously cultural lines along with the Cheesy demarcation is constructed: 1 hour into my set at BOOMBX party last week, just got into some awesome sweet Hiplife (like this) after a few rather hard Electro-Kuduro hitters, this guy comes up to me and says: "can we move away from Ibiza and a little more toward Berlin please?" when i told him that this wasn't Hed Kandi, but Ghanian dancehall, he said "all this cheesy stuff sounds like Ibiza to me." ------ i guess all happy music is cheesy "Ibiza". and all cold, dark, monotony is "Berlin".
and someone called my South African House mixes cheesy in the comments a while back... i wonder if he thinks all club music is cheesy? or all feel good music is cheesy? or all non-angry/non-moody/non-"dark" music is cheesy?
i think more often than not, it is the person who cries "cheesy!" who has not given the work a chance on its own terms, enter its world, with its own logic. and it is only his/her own loss, naturally. it is really sad when people come to premature conclusions of a certain style of music based on exposure to only its cheapest or worst examples, which, admittedly, are both soul destroying and ubiquitous. for example cheesy Latin music and the cheesy "Latin Lover" archetype -- a lot of people in the west have robust prejudices when it comes to this music. it is sad when people close their minds so much, even if i can understand why - the amount of rubbish which they have been exposed to in the same style, that when faced with the real thing, they can not recognize it for what it is -- the most exquisite expression in the world:
i want to say to these people who write stuff off, who maintain ironic distances: forget your preconceptions, drop your prejudices, forget what you think you know, and give this new sound a chance. your life will only be richer for it.
(within limit, of course. no i am not going to give Celine Dion another chance, smartass.)
addendum:
and then there is the other side: the people whose ipods solely contain things like Hulk Hogan & His Wrestling Boot Band (real ipod owner, real band), which they would play for friends while laughing hysterically. there are the very popular parties in every major city across the world which only play 80s trash. it's an entire culture fixated by the "cheesy". irony for irony's sake. i think it's more than a sugar-high... something to do with The Uncanny? feels a bit necrophiliac... but i don't know enough about the scene to say what people get out of it exactly. if anyone has anything substantial to say about this i will post it below.
the badman from Singapore, my oldest friend on earth, Sufist drone architect, scribe of the apocalypse, the one and only Derek Wisdom, weighs in on the subject:
I've read a number of studies on kitsch in Gay American Culture that were quite interesting. Basically kitsch was used there historically as a means of re-purposing cultural detritus, to create a new language through inverting the oppressive values of american culture. This is a strategy typically employed by oppressed subcultures or cultures emerging against colonial rule, a means of collectively defining and then asserting themselves, a survival strategy. I'm sure some of that carries over into the pabst blue ribbon crowd but they obviously aren't oppressed. I think it's a mirror image actually, the Gay use of kitsch was to invert a value against an elite, whereas with "hipsters" (and I loathe to use that word, as it's most often used as a conversation stopping insult, but you know what I mean here) it's a technique used to assert themselves as an elite, the never ending series of name-droppings and irony contests.
I think there's an interesting territory here between cheez and kitsch, what can we laugh off and accept and even enjoy even if with heavy doses of irony and insincerity (which is still a form of social pleasure after all), and what just gives us the gas face? I think it's a social process, if we hear music we find cheesy when we are alone, we find it cheesy and reject it. It tends to only graduate to kitsch if it's experienced with other people if it gives us an avenue to assert our own social value via our allegedly clever sense of irony (and I'm making an unsaid distinction between music we find cheesy and later actually enjoy because of our tastes maturing as music listeners, and that which we accept explicitly as kitsch). One consistent use of Music in all cultures is as a means of creating and reinforcing cultural bonds. Back to the hulk hogan album example, I suspect if that music was heard in a vacuum, it wouldn't be interesting to the audience you mention. But as part of a social experience, it becomes valuable as a way to assert ones tastes and bid for status within that peer group. Hearing the same music alone, if one had no knowledge of a way to create such a social value or experience, one would then have to fall back on evaluating it's compositional values alone. The compositional factors though are actually bypassed in such a social group, instead what's focused on is the cultural apparatus, the fact it's music with lyrics by pro wrestling superstars about pro wrestling. Remove that apparatus and there's nothing of any interest to this social experience, as they aren't exactly sitting around examining the key changes and bpm of the songs in question. That's true of most pop culture though, very little of it makes sense to anyone who doesn't have fluency in the cultural signifier at use, and that can go both ways, it can be bewildering or it can also make it much more interesting and alien than it was in it's original context.
10 comments:
what a cheesy post
just as i suspected: sincerity itself is cheesy to some.
i guess only irony is not cheesy.
irony is a cheesy, outdated po-mo cliche
Its all subjective, isn't it?
Generally, people who would describe any kind of music with a word as simple as cheesy haven't thought much about what they want to say, and should be disregarded.
of course "it's all subjective" to a degree... (i actually have a huge problem with this claim, at least when it comes to qualitative judgements - http://thesameriver.blogspot.com/2006/08/against-subjectivity.html)
but it's still interesting to think and talk about where those cultural lines are drawn, who is drawing them, and according to what criteria...
What I respond to most as cheese isn't even composition, it tends to be production techniques, specific tones and mixing styles, specific uses of specific equipment that became production cliches. I won't bore you with the technical details on that, but I tend to be more forgiving of cheesy music at the level of performance or composition then ... See Moreproduction, I think because of the idiosyncrasies with how I hear music.
As for the WWF record parties, I've read a number of studies on kitsch in Gay American Culture that were quite interesting. Basically kitsch was used there historically as a means of re-purposing cultural detritus, to create a new language through inverting the oppressive values of american culture. This is a strategy typically employed by oppressed subcultures or cultures emerging against colonial rule, a means of collectively defining and then asserting themselves, a survival strategy. I'm sure some of that carries over into the pabst blue ribbon crowd but they obviously aren't oppressed. I think it's a mirror image actually, the Gay use of kitsch was to invert a value against an elite, whereas with "hipsters" (and I loathe to use that word, as it's most often used as a conversation stopping insult, but you know what I mean here) it's a technique used to assert themselves as an elite, the never ending series of name-droppings and irony contests.
I think there's an interesting territory here between cheez and kitsch, what can we laugh off and accept and even enjoy even if with heavy doses of irony and insincerity (which is still a form of social pleasure after all), and what just gives us the gas face? I think it's a social process, if we hear music we find cheesy when we are alone, we find it cheesy and reject it. It tends to only graduate to kitsch if it's experienced with other people if it gives us an avenue to assert our own social value via our allegedly clever sense of irony (and I'm making an unsaid distinction between music we find cheesy and later actually enjoy because of our tastes maturing as music listeners, and that which we accept explicitly as kitsch). One consistent use of Music in all cultures is as a means of creating and reinforcing cultural bonds. Back to the hulk hogan album example, I suspect if that music was heard in a vacuum, it wouldn't be interesting to the audience you mention. But as part of a social experience, it becomes valuable as a way to assert ones tastes and bid for status within that peer group. Hearing the same music alone, if one had no knowledge of a way to create such a social value or experience, one would then have to fall back on evaluating it's compositional values alone. The compositional factors though are actually bypassed in such a social group, instead what's focused on is the cultural apparatus, the fact it's music with lyrics by pro wrestling superstars about pro wrestling. Remove that apparatus and there's nothing of any interest to this social experience, as they aren't exactly sitting around examining the key changes and bpm of the songs in question. That's true of most pop culture though, very little of it makes sense to anyone who doesn't have fluency in the cultural signifier at use, and that can go both ways, it can be bewildering or it can also make it much more interesting and alien then it was in it's original context.
interesting take on the irony portion of the post, Derek, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume that "hipster" camp is so different from gay camp
yes, obviously "hipsters" are not an oppressed group, but don't all subcultures feel as if they are in opposition to "the mainstream"? isn't that the definition of a subculture? in that sense, camp is used in the same way as it is used by gay subcultures - "inverting the oppressive values of american culture"
this stuff is all very hard to define... another reason I hate the word "hipster" and am hesitant to use it, besides the reason you indicate, is because it's not really a definable subculture... more of an overlapping nexus of various subcultural trends, styles, attitudes, etc. (many of them recycled from previous subcultures)... I could go on, but this probably isn't the place... suffice it to say, when it comes to talking politics about "hipsterdom" you get into some really sticky waters
"Cheesiness" has nothing to do with sincerity. I simply expect artists in any media to be sincere by default. If someone isn't sincere, I ignore them. If they are sincere, I'll judge their work on its own merits. I look for craft, skill, originality, genius even. If a work has none of these, it's bad. It might be cliche—and cheesy is another word for cliche. If all we're looking for when we enjoy a piece of art is sincerity, what's the point pf art? At that point it becomes merely a middleman, a pretension that actively gets in the way of communicating emotion. If I just want sincerity, I won't bother with art, I'll just sit down with the person and have a face-to-face talk.
This isn't to say if I think a work is bad, cheesy, cliche or whatever that I'll just shut the artist down and tell them to shut up. All artists have to go through a phase of—well, bad-ness. That's what support and constructive criticism are for. I'll say something like "That's really cheesy, bee done that way a million times, what you might try instead is..." Obviously that doesn't work in every context. When I'm responding to a post on a blog like this with my opinion of an album, I can't offer constructive, supportive criticism with the expectation that the artist will hear and consider it. Instead I'll just post my plain opinion, and if my opinion is that's it's shit, I'll post that it's shit.
tl;dr -
The poem John Doe wrote when he remembered his first kiss is a bad poem.
"But he's so sincere!"
That doesn't impress me, because so is everyone else when they remember and talk about their first kiss. It's still a bad poem.
Also, use capital letters dummy. Constant lowercase doesn't make you cool, and in fact detracts from the readability of your writing. I don't care how fashionable it is, and you shouldn't either, given the content of this post.
haha thanks banned last fm user :)
of course sincerity is not all we should look for. i was just saying that it is considered cheesy by some.
"all artists go through a phase of badness" --- except i didn't (as dj or painter. and i'm serious) :)
lowercase = laziness + perhaps closer to the way thoughts actually work, without discernable beginnings and ends. they blur into eachother, and not like this thought is finished, next! hmmmmm maybe periods will go next! like Henry Miller or Keroac lol (see i do cap names)
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