I don't think you necessarily do need to have heard a lot of stuff - vocabulary's the right word for it, you don't need to look the word up you just approximate a meaning from the contexts you've seen it in, and refine as you go along.
i'm like a lot of people in that i grew up reading a lot of music criticism without any sense of what the music sounded like, only a web of connections that had been made about it - i still rely on that for a lot of stuff.
e.g. my sense of what 'balearic' meant had to undergo a very quick revision in the past couple of years - it was an adjective associated with dance music when i was a mere bairn in the nineties but i first read it in articles about, like, paul oakenfold or something? So then suddenly in 2006 it's a kind of whooshy pulsing cymbal sound and quite a low bpm and really nothing like what i think of when i think of 'paul oakenfold'.
(basically this is writing-fanfiction-before-you've-read-the-series! but i'd argue it's wayyyy more common in popcrit thinking)
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Date: 2010-02-02 11:55 am (UTC)i'm like a lot of people in that i grew up reading a lot of music criticism without any sense of what the music sounded like, only a web of connections that had been made about it - i still rely on that for a lot of stuff.
e.g. my sense of what 'balearic' meant had to undergo a very quick revision in the past couple of years - it was an adjective associated with dance music when i was a mere bairn in the nineties but i first read it in articles about, like, paul oakenfold or something? So then suddenly in 2006 it's a kind of whooshy pulsing cymbal sound and quite a low bpm and really nothing like what i think of when i think of 'paul oakenfold'.
(basically this is writing-fanfiction-before-you've-read-the-series! but i'd argue it's wayyyy more common in popcrit thinking)