Mrs. Duff told us in first grade that music was “organized sound,” but she had us all singing along, so we were part of the sound. Mr. Duff, her husband, track coach at the nearby university, ran a day camp over the summer and gathered all the campers to sing every morning, not just sing-alongs but songs with interacting parts, handclaps in “Bingo” and counting in “Green Grow the Rushes Ho.” The real message was that music is social interaction (or as a kid might put it, “joining in”).
And if you didn’t get that message from your grade-school music teacher, you got it somewhere else, out playing or dancing. You do dance about architecture, if you think of “architecture” as not just the physical space that encloses you but the social space you move around in, including your dance partner, the other dancers on the floor, the figure you cut when viewed by onlookers. Of course music can also be background music while you’re driving and can be a subject of private, intense listening. But such listening rejoins the social dance as soon as you try to communicate it to anyone else, the private self seeing how it appears to others. Out in the world there’s a dance of opinions: likes and dislikes circling around each other, parrying, intermingling. So that’s my idea for the column, that it be a music column but “music” means the WHOLE thing -- not just what the musician does or what the recording sounds like, but the life of the music, the social dance. Your life, in other words.
The way I envision this is: every Thursday I post a full column, usually built on a question about our dance, what form it takes, what rules it seems to follow. On Monday or so I post a brief update, perhaps based on responses to the question, or maybe just some observation about a song. On the next Thursday I either ask another question or keep going with the old. (Email me at [email protected].) But before we get into it, I’ll say something about myself: I’m an unregenerate ’60s kid, which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m enamored of that decade’s musical monuments -- ’00s music is doing fine, thank you, my top albums so far being Ashlee Simpson’s “Autobiography,” Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP,” Montgomery Gentry’s “Carrying On,” and the Ying Yang Twins’ “Me and My Brother” -- but that I was shaped by the ’60s as I actually experienced it, an ongoing conversation, brawl, argument, exploration, catastrophe; many voices engaging, disengaging, pulling themselves this way and that. A motive for the column is that too much of rock music and rock criticism, too many of what I think of as “my people” -- the intellectualized quasi-bohemia that arose out of the Beats and “folk” music and jazz and rock and then punk -- have chosen to dance only with themselves while refusing the broader dance, the larger conversation. Or maybe I’ve diverged…
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Question: Where does taste comes from, and what are we doing when we say we like something and dislike something else? And why does taste cluster around what I’ll loosely call “social class”? I include in my idea of class such things as “skaters” and “preppies” and “fans of heavy metal” and “people who read the music sections in alternative weeklies,” not just the usual notions of blue collar, white collar, professionals, upper-ranking executives. So “social category” or “social group” might be another way of saying it, one that’s less loaded with ideas of class conflict and class privilege. But those loaded ideas are exactly why I want to use the word “class” rather than the more benign “group” or “category,” since conflict and privilege are very much what I want to talk about.
It’s understandable that, say, Iranians like to listen to Iranian music and Americans like to listen to American music -- i.e., you tend to like what you’re exposed to and what you understand, though of course it’s not that simple, and individual Iranians and Americans will have taste that runs far and wide. But it’s not at all obvious why some people listen to heavy metal and others listen to R&B and others to indie rock, since all three of those genres are available to anyone in the U.S. who wants to listen. And “I listen to what my friends listen to” may be true but leaves a lot unexplained, most pertinently the question “Why do my friends listen to this rather than that?” and “Why are these people rather than other people my friends?”
Given that I’m willing to call “heavy-metal kid” a social class, I’m not thinking of class being independent of taste. But heavy-metal kids tend to have other things in common as well, so heavy metal isn’t the only thing that brings them together. But also, when taste works as a social marker, it pulls you in two directions, since not only does liking heavy metal link you to people you’re similar to, it also differentiates you from your near neighbors, say an older brother or an emo fan. And then taste can also be used to differentiate oneself from other metal fans (I like these seven metal bands most, which differentiates me from my friend who only likes four of the seven). And, taking the class “people who write for and read the alternative press,” the writers, at least, tend to split on the basis of whether they veer towards indie or veer towards pop. So belonging to a subgroup such as “heavy metal fan” or “writes about music for the alt-weeklies” means not just holding particular tastes but engaging in particular disagreements with other members of the subgroup.
The thing is, I doubt that many people -- or any people -- like a song or performer on the basis of what their liking of that performer symbolizes to themselves or others. Let’s say that my taste diverges from my near neighbors’ because I like X and they all like Y. But isn’t it also possible that (say, on a subconscious level) I like X so that my taste will diverge from my neighbors’? So my taste doesn’t merely differentiate me from my neighbors, it is something I use to differentiate myself from my neighbors. But how does that work? I don’t say to myself, “I will like X so that I can differentiate my taste from yours.” That’s an awfully weak reason to like the way something sounds. My liking takes place viscerally -- I like the sound, I like the way the music makes me feel, I like the mood, it’s got a killer beat and I like dancing to it, I’m taken intellectually and emotionally by what’s going on in the lyrics, I’m fascinated by the music’s form. Any one of those things will trump “Liking this music will differentiate me from you.” I’ve pretty much got to like the music anyway. This is exactly why we need to think about why taste clusters along class lines. It’s hard to believe that all skaters are genetically predisposed to like punk and emo, for instance, or that people who read alternative weeklies are genetically predisposed to like indie rock. (“Las Vegas Weekly” may be an exception, since Scott Woods writes for it, so the readers may be genetically predisposed to like dance music.)
How is it that individual visceral responses align -- or realign -- so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music? And how is it that individual visceral responses further deviate a bit, so that individuals will be enough at odds with other members of their social group so that they will be individuals? Is what I wrote in the last two sentences a good explanation of what happens (that tastes align or realign so that they will be shared, yet they also deviate to create significant dissimilarities)? Do conscious intentions ever play a role, or does this just happen? A mixture of intentions and just happenings? Are there opinion leaders? If so, how do other people’s visceral responses learn to follow the leaders’? How would we go about testing these ideas and answering these questions?