A few months ago, I wrote about the wonders of Spotify, voyeuristic consumption, and the exciting possibility that technology was making music social again.
Yeah. I take it back.
There is a fatal flaw in having a reputation as a “devoted champion of the local music scene”: people begin making assumptions about your musical tastes based on whom you associate with on weekends. Now, thanks to Spotify, they can actually inspect the evidence in real time. Apparently, this is fine. I’m told the Spanish Inquisition was quite a social experience, too.
So, before anyone starts assembling a psychological profile of me out of my listening history, there are a couple of things you should know. Most of my online listening consists of streaming radio stations (which I often choose because I like the presenters more than the music) and random shuffles, because, like Captain Kirk, I enjoy exploring strange new worlds … and sleeping with green-painted women, but that’s for the other blog.
In other words, you cannot reliably infer my musical tastes from my listening history. Anyone who has actually talked music with me for more than half an hour knows my two favorite genres are progressive rock and jazz. Neither appears prominently on Indy In-Tune Radio for three reasons:
- Like pepperoni curry, musical pretension appeals to a small but fiercely committed group of people with unusually strong constitutions.
- Indie rockers are generally more fun to hang out with.
- Indianapolis appears to have misplaced all but three of its original prog bands, while most jazz musicians stopped returning my calls after the “Chatterbox Incident of 1995.”
The funny thing is that all this musical socialization has led me to notice something interesting: If someone comments on my music while standing in front of me, the comment is usually positive; if they comment online, the odds reverse dramatically. Similarly, online feedback about Indy In-Tune Radio seems to run about five complaints (“You play too much hip-hop!” “I hate that hardcore metal crap!” “Why do you play this stuff?”) for every positive comment (“Holy cow, I’d never heard this band before.” “I am now completely obsessed with this song. Thanks!”)
Face-to-face, the ratio is almost exactly reversed in both cases. It’s as if the moment I stop physically watching people, they’re kidnapped and replaced by Gordon Ramsay. I try not to take this personally. But it does suggest something unfortunate about us: when freed from the niceties of actual human interaction, we seem much more motivated to announce what we hate than to champion what we love.
Nowhere does this bother me more than when someone announces that they hate an entire genre of music. Really? All of it? Did you personally investigate several decades of country music, jazz, hip-hop, metal, electronica, folk, punk, reggae, and whatever the hell Frank Zappa was doing, and determine that an entire branch of human artistic expression has nothing to offer you? Or did you hear three songs you didn’t like and declare the investigation complete?
Some music simply doesn’t speak to some people. That’s fine. I have specific tastes too. Indy In-Tune plays plenty of music I wouldn’t voluntarily put on at home. I can respect the people who wrote and performed it, however, without wanting to buy the album. (Don’t try to guess which artists I’m talking about. You’d probably be wrong.) The distinction I’m interested in is between disliking a song and actually hating one. I dislike hundreds of songs. Songs I genuinely hate? Six.
That’s it.
To qualify for actual hatred, a song must possess virtually no redeeming social, musical, or entertainment value. I must, despite reasonable effort, be unable to say anything complimentary about either the song or the decisions that produced it. Hearing it unexpectedly must be able to ruin my mood. If practical, I should be willing to cancel my remaining plans for the day and join a crusade to have the recording removed from the space-time continuum. We’re talking serious hate here. Bile so concentrated that a cable-news commentator would eventually lean over and say, “Whoa, dude. Maybe dial it back a little.”
By that definition, I can find only six. (Care to guess? And no, none are by local artists.)
There are plenty of songs I desperately never want to hear again, but most have something that saves them. Take “Brown Eyed Girl.” I loathe “Brown Eyed Girl.” If I never hear another bar band launch into “Hey, where did we go…” I will consider my remaining years on Earth marginally more successful. But listen to the moving guitar figure underneath the verses. It’s really good. You know—the guitar part most cover bands leave out.
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” makes me contemplate putting a fork through my thigh just to introduce a competing sensory experience, but those bends in the guitar solo are pure rock and roll. You know, the bends most cover-band guitarists almost play in tune.
And then there’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” which has been covered by approximately every aspiring female singer who ever discovered Janis Joplin. I understand why. Janis impresses people, and “Bobby McGee” is considerably safer territory than attempting “Cry Baby.”
Go ahead. Cover “Cry Baby.” I dare you.
But even after hearing “Bobby McGee” roughly nine million times, there is still that gorgeous little moment around “called him my lover, called him my friend,” where the poetry and performance fit together perfectly. That’s enough. I don’t hate the song. I just don’t ever need to hear it again.
That’s the distinction I wish we’d make more often.
So, here’s an experiment. Step outside your normal listening habits. Browse a genre you normally ignore. Seed Pandora with something bizarre and see where it takes you. Stalk the Spotify playlists of your more eclectic friends. (Stay away from mine. Chaos and madness await thee there.) Then, for every song that comes up, try to identify one thing you like about it before identifying what you don’t. It doesn’t have to be enough to make you a fan. Maybe it’s one clever line in a rap song. Maybe it’s a chord change in an electronic track. Maybe it’s an interesting keyboard sound buried inside a pop song. Maybe you just caught yourself tapping your foot to that twangy country tune. That’s okay. Nobody needs to know.
I’ve discovered music in plenty of weird ways. I recently got into Daft Punk partly because I liked their marketing. I listen to desi electronica and Chinese folk music while writing because they’re interesting without constantly demanding my attention. None of this means you have to like everything. What a horrible world that would be. The point is simply to train yourself to look for the interesting thing before reaching for the complaint. Try to recognize craft even when the finished product wasn’t intended for you or your demographic. Find the one beautiful, clever, strange, technically impressive, or gloriously stupid thing hiding inside something you otherwise wouldn’t choose.
I suspect that’s probably a useful skill in other areas of life, too, but let’s not get carried away. They’re probably not nearly as important as music.
