Think you know rock music? Well, Duane Lundy, psychology professor at Indiana University East, knows just a little more than the rest of us—and he’s developed a guide that evaluates more than 3,000 songs through a prism of 12 criteria for judging music. His findings are collected in Professor Lundy’s Guide to Rock Music Connoisseurship (Universal Publishers), which will help audiophiles and casual music fans alike find new tunes as well as develop a better ear for quality.
Here are the criteria Lundy uses to evaluate albums and their individual songs: accessibility (easily, quickly likeable); consistency (unchangeably good); diversity (wide range of music styles and influences); durability (holds up to repeated listens); dynamics (notable variations within songs and between songs); instrumentation (playing, sound, and orchestration); lyrics (deep and meaningful ideas); melody (beautifully constructed); originality (novel, not cliched); production (sounds great); sophistication (impressively multi-layered subtleties); and vocals (singing that conveys meaningful expression, passion, technique, engaging phrasing, and overall intelligent communication).
Lundy discusses what drove him to this passion project, explains why Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska might be the greatest rock album of all time, and offers a winter playlist for anyone who wants to improve their music bonafides.
You write that your goal is to connect with fellow audiophiles, and you thank your musical mentors. What do you hope to bring to audiophiles?
My mentors led me to know what experiencing greatness in music sounds and feels like by offering essential albums for suggested listening based on what they perceived as the most aesthetically worthwhile music. I offer similar experiences to audiophiles, but I’ve developed a more reliably precise way of efficiently finding these gems within the mind-numbing amount of music that exists nowadays. I do this through minimizing nonaesthetic biases, identifying aesthetic criteria to focus on, and using a precise rating method I developed.
According to your framework, the quality of any song can be measured using 12 criteria, and your most highly rated album in the thousands you reviewed is Springsteen’s Nebraska (1982). Can you talk through some of the criteria and explain why that album scores so well?
Conveying the impact of great music through mere words is always difficult, but I like to say that an album like Nebraska “fires on all aesthetic cylinders.” It has among the best lyrics of any album, and its meaningful explorations of the human condition fit perfectly with beautiful melodies and heartfelt vocals. In this case, the sparse folk/country/rock production actually adds to the overall message of regular folks struggling to get through life by any means necessary. There is a philosophical depth couched concretely in the everyday experiences of people living in difficult circumstances.
Nebraska is also remarkably consistent, where every single song/story is amazingly well-crafted, which is rare for any album. In terms of dynamics, practically all possible human emotions are displayed in their rawest form with melodies that seem to match each emotional experience perfectly. The end result is a uniquely original piece of work.
You say that nonaesthetic personal bias can get in the way of our appreciation of great music. What does that mean, using your own personal bias as an example?
I like to say that the grandfather/grandmother of all biases is the familiarity bias, in that it can contribute to all of the others. Until we’re intimately familiar with the larger landscape of all available music and then familiar with a specific song or album to be appraised, we have no business passing judgment on it. If we can roughly equate how familiar we are with music to be compared, then we have a chance to make our perceptions defendable and potentially similar to other connoisseurs.
Growing up in a small city, with only radio to rely on for my early musical exposure, I didn’t have the cultural capital necessary to see aesthetic quality clearly. Once I moved to the big city, Toronto, I started meeting people with greater musical exposure who led me to the best books on the topic, and I started coming closer to perceiving music well. Thus, my idea of the best music when I was in high school was naive and not fully formed, so my favorites then are not my favorites now.
If you’ve never experienced the best music that’s out there, then you’ll think good music is great music. The same kind of thing happens within any area of aesthetics: literature, film, beer, etc., and so these factors fit the general idea of connoisseurship as a developing process.
What are the qualities of a meaningful aesthetic experience? What do you feel like when you’re experiencing greatness, whether in music or wine or food?
The most meaningful aesthetic experiences involve feeling that magical combination of aesthetic dimensions coming together into one “Gestalt” experience, like the 12 criteria I’ve identified for music. When all of the aesthetic criteria are high and interact perfectly, we come to know personally what it means to feel the combination that all aesthetic experiences have in common: just the right matching of complexity and order and interacting elements that combine into one harmonious whole.
You write that anyone can develop his or her musical ear by developing connoisseurship. Can you explain that?
Connoisseurship is a self-actualizing process that gets better with experience, knowledge, and practice. Most people have the capacity to experience the aesthetics “Gestalt” or organized whole that I’ve been talking about, but training makes us better. Like any skill, it benefits from hours and hours of guided practice. The focus of this time should be on minimizing nonaesthetic biases, recognizing and experiencing specific aesthetics criteria at their lowest and highest levels—melody, lyrics, originality, dynamics, vocals, etc.—and being able to translate these experiences into contrasting values of aesthetic merit/impact. Most people with a passion for an art form should be able to benefit from such experiences.
What three rock songs would you recommend that an interested aesthetic novice listen to first?
It would probably be easiest for people to move from greatness that’s popular and accessible (say a few albums by The Cars, Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Springsteen) to less and less popular and accessible greatness. Just listening to The Beatles from the beginning of their career all the way through to their more experimental period is a good crash course in experiencing what it means to develop aesthetically.
People have to ultimately get used to the fact that some of the greatest songs were never popular or radio hits. Three examples of songs that are lesser known but still have some accessible elements would be “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground, “Caravan” by Van Morrison, and “Hammond Song” by The Roches. Every once in a while a few of the greatest songs do become hits, such as U2’s “With or Without You.”
You’re a psychology professor, and this is a book about aesthetics. What’s the tie between the two fields?
Psychology is much more general than most people think. It’s the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, basically divided into clinical-counseling and experimental branches. Empirical aesthetics is a sub-area of experimental psychology that focuses on the scientific study of what we perceive as beautiful or artistically moving. I started out researching facial attractiveness—what people tend to perceive as beautiful in human faces—and eventually expanded to what regular people versus experts perceive as beautiful in the arts, especially film and music.
Many of the things I’ve found to be true about music also applies to film. For example, music critics tend to agree much more than disagree about what makes great music just as film critics tend to agree much more than disagree about what makes great movies. And connoisseurs of music and film agree more with each other than they do with nonexperts. Nonexperts, on the other hand, often tend not to agree with each other about the best and worst music or films.
What songs are on your winter playlist right now?
I created a public playlist on Spotify representing about one-third of the top songs recommended in the book, roughly in order from great to greater to greatest. It’s a little more than 1,000 songs. There’s a song from Nebraska in the top five.
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