In November, 2007, ESQUIRE magazine featured the latest in Chuck Klosterman's AMERICA series "Me, On Shuffle," an exploration of the stake the one's music has in defining them. The tagline for the article was:
"True or False: The music a person listens to reveals many truths about that person"
The full article is available here.
Klosterman postulates that while it is usually posed in the innocuous and time-filling forum of chit-chat or first-meeting, the question "What kind of music do you like?" is an unfair way to assess the type of person one is and whether you'd get along, be friends or more. The unfairness is based on the assumption that the questioned party "consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings." Klosterman feels this position is "predicated on the principle that you know why you like certain sounds or certain images, because that self-awareness is how we establish the internal relationship between a) what someone loves and b) who someone is."
Klosterman took to answering the above indicting question without mentioning genres, eras or albums but, simply, "Music that sounds like the opening fourteen seconds of Humble Pie's 'I Don't Need No Doctor,' as performed live on their 1971 album Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore." This technique would either stop the conversation dead in its tracks or incite further questioning - either way, would someone know the man any better?
What does your music say about you? Can you control it?
This was so thought-provoking, it's taken nearly three years for me to discover that the proper way to appreciate it was not to keep it clipped, with so many other never-read-again articles, in a filing cabinet, to yellow with age and be pondered unnecessarily by scrutinizing family members and detectives upon my death. Instead, I've recently decided, the best way to appreciate it would be to take the author's method and apply it to myself.
I'm certainly a victim of a self-afflicted condition: iPod shame. You know the symptoms: misleading playlist titles [my emo, lay in bed and sulk, need a good cry mix is "Playlist 1"], never letting the damn thing simply shuffle in the car for fear of the embarrassing revelation that you drive to parties blasting the soundtrack from Hairspray, or lowering the volume below a comfortable listening level on the train lest your neighbor detect you like to prep for your day at the office with ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me". For this reason, Klosterman's investigation was of great interest to me. I've grown to "own" my selections without fear of humiliation ["You don't like the orchestral score to "The Goonies"? Your loss!"]. Despite that confidence, I still want to know what it is about my varied choices that makes me like them.
While Klosterman seems to attach himself to early-seventies boogie rock, I think my anchoring sonic attachment goes farther back.
"Nice to meet you, Manoli. So, what kind of music do you like?"
"I enjoy music that sounds like the end of the Ronettes' 'Be My Baby' - from the repeat of the opening "Bum...BumBum," especially the drum-rolling and final staccato snare series before the fade out."
It's there, literally, in the acoustics. I love the "Wall of Sound", Phil Spector girl groups. I love that the song wraps me up and doesn't let me go, body and mind, for its duration. I love that the clean instrumentation doesn't push me away, but invites me in. I love that the lyrics, and Ronnie Spector's singing of them, are simple, direct and dripping with love.
I love that is sounds like its recorded in a real place by real people and not in some digital wonderland where all things come from now, in outer space.
Klosterman looked for a "unified field theory" that would somehow explain the connections that music could form in his brain. For me, the rationale is more visceral. The music I love, and the 'types' all have one thing in common: I love them because they incite an emotional response in me. Also in that bucket:
- The piano flourishes Danny Federici would insert into the opening of Tenth Avenue Freeze Out when the E Street Band would play it live.
- The driving progression in The Four Seasons' "Opus 17 (Don't Worry 'Bout Me) and just before the end when the high harmony comes in
- The fast-rhyming middle section of The Cure's "Friday, I'm in Love" when Robert Smith pinpoints the site of his lover eating as one of the reasons he loves them.
- Prince's invocation at the top of "Let's Go Crazy".
- The moment in 'Dream On' when Steven Tyler becomes 'Steven Tyler'.
- Everything about Cyndi Lauper. "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough" (and everything else).
- The wistful backing strings/winds behind Frank Sinatra's heart-breaking vocals on "It Was a Very Good Year".
- In Queen's "We are the Champions", between the second and third reps of the chorus, there is a short squeal sound that connects them that amps me up like no other.
- The way "Flesh Failures" organically becomes "Let the Sunshine In" on the Hair soundtrack.
If I were to attempt to use science and math to break down and understand why these songs illicit a reaction from me, it might produce a chart somehow reconciling high-pitched vocals, driving rhythms and emotional lyrics. One might deduce that I spent a significant amount time listening to my mother's radio selections and oldies stations as a child and therefore my musical taste is almost anachronistic today and woefully nostalgic when it comes to appreciating new music.
Furthermore, there is an incalculable relationship between my autobiographical history and the context in which some of these songs were first heard. If a song was first heard in a time and place that the listener later looks back on fondly, it is reasonable to predict that the listener's inner-workings will begin to associate the sound of that song to happiness, thereby making an aural pleasure criterion from an autobiographical causality. Some songs crossed the thin line from hate to love only after certain real-life experiences (such as the music of Journey, which I only realized I loved after the anointing of Don't Stop Believin' as a Camp Fatima anthem, as well as it's inclusion in the finale of The Sopranos, my favorite show). These connections, briefly mentioned in HIGH FIDELITY, are perhaps the only true way to judge your own music collection or taste at all.
Klosterman was somewhat acerbic in his reaction to the original question and the subsequent impossibility of accurately categorizing someone based on their answer. I find the exploration of that answer to be the grander pursuit, the results of which might allow the listener himself to further understand what makes him tic and reach enlightenment, or, at least, have an easier go the next time he visits the record store.
Tape stop.
