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Of course you can listen to music ironically, just like you can experience any cultural artifact ironically. Haven't you two heard of camp? Well, apathy probably has not, but I am sure DRKKK, you have.
"The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way"
And
"This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday."
That's what Landadel is alluding too, albeit not altogether successfully.
Here is an example of ironic listening - when I was about 13 Sandra was popular in the Soviet Union (DRKK, I assume since you are German I don't have to explain who she is to you), and I listened to that. Two years or so later I discovered better music and was ashamed that I listened to such garbage. Recently, I was mulling over an idea of doing a synth-pop/euro party and all of a sudden Sandra popped into my mind. I listened to a few of her popular songs and because so much time passed and I have critical distance from it + nostalgia, I was able to enjoy it in a way that is silly, not thinking much beyond a catchy beat. I knew that as a cultural work it's a failure, but with passage of time this failure no longer matters, and I am able to tease out details that are superficially enjoyable.
"The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way"
And
"This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday."
That's what Landadel is alluding too, albeit not altogether successfully.
Here is an example of ironic listening - when I was about 13 Sandra was popular in the Soviet Union (DRKK, I assume since you are German I don't have to explain who she is to you), and I listened to that. Two years or so later I discovered better music and was ashamed that I listened to such garbage. Recently, I was mulling over an idea of doing a synth-pop/euro party and all of a sudden Sandra popped into my mind. I listened to a few of her popular songs and because so much time passed and I have critical distance from it + nostalgia, I was able to enjoy it in a way that is silly, not thinking much beyond a catchy beat. I knew that as a cultural work it's a failure, but with passage of time this failure no longer matters, and I am able to tease out details that are superficially enjoyable.
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