Why does cohesion matter?

[xoxo Craig 55,649]

1 hour ago, brizoda said:

cohesive can be very boring also

I prefer variety

There's variety, and then there's messy. Chromatica gives both variety and cohesion. But, Born This Way or ARTPOP (and even Joanne at times) is pretty messy.

Future Nostalgia is an album I'd say has cohesion, but its pretty boring because it all sounds the same. 

[REALITY 76,837]

54 minutes ago, tomsches said:

Listen to Kate Bush's "The Ninth Wave", every song is about a different aspect of death,

"An Endless Sky of Honey", every song describes a different moment of a summer day.

Björk's "Vulnicura" where every song describes a different aspect of a break up

Bat For Lashes "The Bride", the story of a bride whose husband dies on his way to the wedding

Like, it's actually very common

But in those albums, they're describing different aspects of whatever the entire theme is.

With Future Nostalgia, the songs were all just about love and break-ups with the exception of Boys Will Be Boys. There was no variety or nuance. 

[Chris Thomason 963]

6 minutes ago, tomsches said:

And imo this is the exact problem of the music industry nowadays. If you want to listen to a variety of bops or a shuffled playlist, fine. You have every right to do so, but that's not the point of an album if you take music seriously as an art form.  Like, if music was just about that, a singer could just release song after song after song. Why would they go through the troubles of putting them on an album? Imo it's also the reason for the ever decreasing quality of pop music and streaming is to blame for this to a large extent, because it motivates people to only listen to random songs and shuffled playlists instead of sitting down for an hour and listening to what the artist actually tried to say with an album.  

No I think the problem with the industry is that it has become very oversaturated in general with a lot of artists releasing very samey music. Not many artists are actually willing to push any sort of boundaries (or at least their record labels aren't) and are there just for the money and fame. The definition of an album is just a collection of pieces of music, there are no rules on cohesion, no rules in music. That's the point, you're free to release whatever you want, it's just a collection of music you want to release at that time. If the artists want to have an overarching deeper meaning to put across that's fine, that's their decision.

I'm actually very picky when it comes to music and variety allows me to find songs somewhere that I'll like. I like songs for different reasons, some i like the sound, some i connect with lyrics, it's not all about the message. Some of my favourite pieces of music are instrumental, that's the beauty of music you don't necessarily even need lyrics! I do actually listen to full albums and then pick out my favourites after a quite a few listens, I think that's what most people do and why I ultimately think cohesion for the sake of it is almost pointless. Besides if it takes an hour to put across a message how effective is your messaging?