"Musically untrained blacks"? "critical force"? "extreme reductionism"?

I'd like to say that I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but, unfortunately, I do. This is just the same racist crap that sees blacks as closer than whites to something primal, and their music and art as primitive but vital. It's an easy trap to fall into, but it's still racism, no matter how much grad-school jargon you wrap around it.

Fun. Not so funny. But fun. It arouses feelings of warm recognition, with the folksy chords and familiarity of the lyrics. I liked it.

I won't say that it's pretentious. What might be considered pretentious is rationlizing your likes and dislikes, then trying to get other people to rationlize their likes and dislikes exactly as you have rationalized them.

The same thing happened with the little asian girl covering a classical piece. Don't be so outspokenly disgusted with things that it becomes a downer. Do you talk about this stuff with your friends? Over coffee?

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

A link on how to deconstruct anything. It makes me wonder how truthful and how useful is unscientific critical thought. There's a reason we're told not to say anything if we can't say something nice. It's because we'll all end up killing ourselves or each other if we were as liberal and unnecessarily malicious with our criticism as half the people on this on this little forum have been. And for what? Rationalized feelings? I didn't mean to be pretentious, too, but you arguers leave a bad taste in my mouth.