Challenging Music/Movies/Books
12-03-2013, 10:56 PM
So, for the past few days I've been trying to understand this album called Trout Mask Replica. It's been constantly hailed as one of the most influential and best rock albums of all time, even if a lot of people find it sounds like complete trash. In the beginning I hated it, at the moment I find it slightly more bearable and I keep listening to see whether it'll finally click with me or not.
This got me thinking a lot about music, movies or books that you simply have to continually expose yourself to until you either reach the point where you understand the purpose or feel like you're at least "grasping" it in some way that allows you to finally enjoy it. A lot of times this moment never arrives and you find that you simply dislike the thing, even if you sense a greater value behind it or even if people who know more about the subject than you do have praised it.
A lot of my favourite books, albums and movies are ones that I hated initially, or ones that I still have a hard time going through even if the reward is ultimately satisfying. With all of them (Naked Lunch, The Marble Index and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' amongst others) I spent a lot of time trying to approach the art from different angles. I couldn't stand them at first, but after giving them more and more chances and reading about the circumstances under which they were produced I started feeling a lot differently about them and now I love them all deeply.
Do you have any examples of an album, a book, movie or whatever that really challenged you but that you ended up liking? Do you think it's stupid to continually expose yourself to something you dislike, hoping to finally understand it? Are the deepest and most beautiful works of art sometimes hard to actually ENJOY from an entertaining point of view? I often find myself amazed and satisfied but then again slightly bored by the movies of, say, Bergman.
This got me thinking a lot about music, movies or books that you simply have to continually expose yourself to until you either reach the point where you understand the purpose or feel like you're at least "grasping" it in some way that allows you to finally enjoy it. A lot of times this moment never arrives and you find that you simply dislike the thing, even if you sense a greater value behind it or even if people who know more about the subject than you do have praised it.
A lot of my favourite books, albums and movies are ones that I hated initially, or ones that I still have a hard time going through even if the reward is ultimately satisfying. With all of them (Naked Lunch, The Marble Index and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' amongst others) I spent a lot of time trying to approach the art from different angles. I couldn't stand them at first, but after giving them more and more chances and reading about the circumstances under which they were produced I started feeling a lot differently about them and now I love them all deeply.
Do you have any examples of an album, a book, movie or whatever that really challenged you but that you ended up liking? Do you think it's stupid to continually expose yourself to something you dislike, hoping to finally understand it? Are the deepest and most beautiful works of art sometimes hard to actually ENJOY from an entertaining point of view? I often find myself amazed and satisfied but then again slightly bored by the movies of, say, Bergman.
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