Today, I convinced a coworker that 4'33" is music. I've been training for this moment for years.

What you'd get if Archie Bunker, Hunter S. Thompson, some Swedish bloke and a used car salesman had a baby.

Robert De Niro from Casino.

I've sorta come around tbh. If music is an arbitrary concept that only exists in the human mind then whatever a human considers to be music is music. If some guy walks by a factory and the assembly line noise speaks to him and he pulls up a chair and just partakes in the noises, then that's music. Honestly though I'd say that John Cage's opinion of 4'33 being or not being music is irrelevant, since it's still not music to Chula, and just like music that you like isn't good, sound that you don't think is music isn't music. And, you know, vice versa. 4'33 isn't music to me, but whatevs.

I wish Chula was here to get upset about this.

The sounds are still music, they're just at their most abstract and deconstructed. If those sounds were taken and arranged into a 4 on the floor rhythm, I doubt that you'd have the same kind of apprehension. These days I don't think that anyone can get away with picking out a specific sound and saying "this can never be music."

Get ready for a flurry of ****posts at about 4:01 AM tomorrow.

The 80's version of what Frown just said:

I might have picked the wrong day to get drunk at home.

Well yeah, but if someone doesn't think something is music then it still isn't music to them. With a concept like music (or art itself) where its very existence is subjective (i.e. made up) you can't just say that something is objectively music. It's just music to those who hear it as music since that's all that music is. I can say that perhaps you're just being pretentious but it would be pretentious to think that my concept of music is inherently more valid than yours simply because it's my concept.

Let's keep this going so he'll definitely see it.

Quality of music is subjective, concept of music is not. That would be like arguing that Dee wasn't played on guitar (that's me keeping it going).