An important comment from last week’s comment thread, once again by Martin Skidmore: “If we are inclining towards metal, we are more likely to end up having rewarding conversations with other metal fans, and less rewarding ones with people who like other stuff. This can mean we are more keen to hang out with the metal fans.”
This can create a reinforcement mechanism: you start with a preference, not necessarily strong (“I tend to like metal-sounding stuff”); this leads to your talking to more metalheads, learning more about the metal you already know -- which generally leads to your liking it more -- and learning more about other metal and about what your metal friends like and dislike. And of course they learn from you and your own tastes and reasons. So, that some people have some tastes in common can lead to many people having very particular tastes in common. And of course the things in common won’t only be musical: without necessarily even thinking about it you’ll pick up each other’s verbal habits, and more consciously you may start making similar clothing choices.
But there can be a chance element in this, and that’s what I want to emphasize today. Let’s say you’re a schoolkid in the mid ’70s and you’re in a classroom with seating that’s assigned alphabetically. Suppose you like metal and prog and funk, all about equally; by coincidence, the guy sitting to your right likes metal, country-rock, and oldies; and the guy to your left likes metal, singer-songwriter music, and glam. Now, what the three of you have in common is metal, so those tastes reinforce each other, and each one of you becomes sources of info for the other two. In that way a small preference can turn into a big liking and a part of your identity. Of course, real-life preferences aren’t as random; but this is one way tastes can cluster.
The question I’ve been asking is: Given that we don’t tell ourselves simply to like what the people around us like, but rather will like songs for visceral and intellectual reasons that are quite individual and complex, how is it that those visceral and intellectual responses align or realign so that members of the same social group respond similarly to similar music?
Let’s suppose that once you and your two classmates discover your common liking for metal, and under each other’s influence expand and deepen your knowledge and love of the music, you come to the attention of other kids, some of whom also like metal and so gravitate toward you three. So in effect you three have become the opinion leaders. But this isn’t necessarily owing to your having any special leadership qualities, but just to there being three of you and your constituting a noticeable clump.
And if this were happening in real life, followup questions would be: what happens to your and your friends’ other tastes? Do you become interested in the nonmetal music that your metal friends like, developing broad, eclectic tastes? Or do the other musics get shunted aside, you spending more time on metal and less on your other (former?) likes? This could go either way, but I can see how the latter can happen, as it has in my life (turning toward disco and freestyle and hip-hop and country and teenpop, listening less to rock and indie). In our hypothetical classroom I can imagine some metal nonfans disparaging the metal that the metalheads like; and if some of these metal nonfans are fans of Eagles-style country, I can imagine your metal friend who also likes the Eagles to start veering away from such music. Not that the Eagles would suddenly sound bad to him, but he might feel a sourness toward that type of music, so will no longer explore it as much.
These are choices that are individually quite complex (you, this complicated person, in this situation, at this time, for complex, dimly perceived reasons, prefer these songs to those songs) but that can nonetheless have a simple result (we all like metal!). My noticing such things can be a useful corrective to a general tendency of mine, which is to ask myself, “What is going on deep in the culture that results in a lot of kids responding to the sound and content of metal, and using it to think about their world?” I’m sure I’m right in believing that there are deep reasons, and that it’s not merely a historical coincidence that heavy metal tends to appeal to males, often from blue-collar families. And though it’s a coincidence that the three of you were seated near each other, it may not be a coincidence that the three of you are in the same classroom (say your dad’s blue collar, and the school’s a vocational school rather than a prep school). Still, chance plays something of a role -- a somewhat different seating arrangement, and your identity could be prog or funk rather than metal.
(Please don’t write in and say, “I’m a middle-class girl who loves metal.” I already know there are plenty of you. But there are a lot more blue-collar guys in the metal camp.)
Although you three undoubtedly weren’t the only ones in your classroom to initially like metal, you were the first three whose liking for metal had a noticeable impact on your fellows. So you gain social status among other metalheads for being the ones who led the way. And this status may therefore give weight to your further opinions regarding metal and other music. This doesn’t mean that there’s no advantage in being articulate, original, persuasive, and assertive. But these qualities may not always be requirements to becoming an opinion leader. In any event, there will be a chance element as to which articulate, original, persuasive, and assertive people become opinion leaders.
* * *
My concern here isn’t particularly with metal, which I’ve never identified with all that much, but with a more a general lesson, which is that, although it’s probably necessary that tastes and conventions cluster to some extent -- this is how communities remain communities, after all -- there’s no reason to assume that a particular community’s tastes and conventions are inevitable or all that good. This is as true for intellectuals and bohemians and journalists as it is for metalheads.