Owing to my sending the link to two-thirds of the people in my address book, I got way more responses to last week’s column than I can process, let alone respond to, including a post from an old high school friend who’s maybe heard from me once in the last 30 years. So hurrah! And now I have fodder for about 10 columns. But keep the replies coming: on comments, threads here, or to [email protected].
The way this works is that I post a full column on Thursdays, often containing a question of mine that I don’t know the answer to, and on Mondays (e.g., today) I post a brief follow-up, sometimes addressing your replies. I ended last Thursday’s column with this question: “How is it that individual visceral responses align -- or realign -- so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music?”
Martin Skidmore replied that even when people like similar things, it’s often for very different reasons. This is quite true, and points out what I think is a problem with the way I worded my question, “How is it that individual visceral responses align?” In fact, the visceral responses don’t have to align; all they need do is bring about the same result -- for example, that a bunch of metal kids all love metal! I employed the word “visceral” in order to emphasize that the individuals were liking metal for apparently internal reasons (liking the sound, being moved by the rhythm) and that they weren’t loving the music just so that they could make their tastes match up with their friends’, which is simply too weak a reason to love something, to feel the music. And I was stretching the phrase “visceral response” to encapsulate a whole bunch of reasons including “I’m taken intellectually and emotionally by the lyrics” and “I’m fascinated by the music’s form.”
Mike Barthel forwarded my column to his friend J. Stenar Clark, who says, “Kogan's reference to metal kids as a community reminds me of the very sophisticated moral schemes, asymmetric with other music fandoms, they seem to invent and use to analyze the world. What is it about growls, alacrious beats, and industrial onomatopoeia that inspires ethical thought? I suppose the extremity of the style and the content overlaps with the considerations long turned in ethics -- hell, suffering, punishment, mortality.” And Mike adds, recalling a talk by Scott Seward: “Scott explained that metal fans like it because they enjoy thinking about very classic Big, Serious Things, like death, and war, and gods. It seems faintly ridiculous now but these are what people thought about all the time not so long ago, or at least Serious Men did.” And -- steering away from metal -- I hear in Ashlee Simpson a hurt rebel kid’s moral imperative to understand the world and reconcile with it. And I find this quite touching.
All this under the rubric “visceral response.”
But there’s still the question, why do these responses tend to fall along class lines? To make a very preliminary stab at a potential answer: One thing that happens is that we tend to take an interest in what people we know and admire like, and taking an interest leads to getting to know the music, getting to understand the music’s reasons and its life -- or at least, getting to know our friends’ reasons and lives. Mary Gaitskill once told me that she hadn’t liked Bryan Ferry until she saw a friend of hers do a strip routine to Roxy Music; then the music started to make sense. (“She brought out the romance and longing of the music, and not with her crotch, with her eyes, her hair and shoulders.”) This is often hard to articulate, why something seems to change its character when you get to know it, but it’s a common experience. This doesn’t guarantee liking the music, but it makes the liking a lot more possible. And of course rebelling against the music of one’s social set and looking outside can be another motive for attending to a particular song.