In these columns I’ve been asking, “Where does taste come from, and why do people in the same social group tend to have similar musical tastes?” But since my love for music seems to involve my feelings, I’m asking where feelings come from, too. Of course, “feeling” is a word with a rather large realm, and when I think about it I wonder why I use the same word, “feel,” when I feel a touch on my arm and when I feel a chill from the night breeze, and feel a chill in my heart, and feel a rhythm, and feel melancholy, and feel I’ve outstayed my welcome, and feel that I want to get to know someone better, and feel angry, and feel hatred, and feel puzzled, and feel the logic of someone’s position. For that matter, I wonder why it makes sense to me that Maria in West Side Story feels pretty, or why I’ll sometimes say that I used to dislike a song but now feel differently.
I go along with standard usage here—linking these disparate things feels right, even if I can’t really justify including heat and coldness in the same species as love and hatred, or putting melancholy and joy in the same species as ugliness and prettiness. In any event, “the riffs are catchy” and “this melody is gorgeous” seem to be about my feelings as well as about the riffs and melodies. And feelings (or whatever) permeate the way I describe music; for instance: “Even at its most rah-rah, party music such as crunk feels beautifully sad.” (It’s the minor-key riffs.) “And when it’s not sad, it’s menacing, with all those suspense-film chords.” (And the times that I want to split the difference between “sad” and “menacing” I’ll use the word “haunting.”) (By the way, does anyone know any good synonyms for “beautiful” and “gorgeous” and “haunting” and “eerie” and “menacing” and “ominous”? I’ve long ago used those words up.)
What’s dangerous here is that feelings seem to be incontrovertible. How can a beautifully sad melody not feel beautiful and sad, at least to me? Could I hear it differently, even if I wanted to? It might be odd that someone, say, feels chills on a hot day, or finds a funeral dirge catchy, but can he be wrong?
Well, take the following statement: “An idea is no good until it’s been tested.” I’ll bet that many people will agree. But how about “A feeling is no good until it’s been tested”?
How can a feeling be no good? And how can it be tested? If you touch a stove and it’s hot, how can “hot” be no good until it’s tested? If you eat contaminated food, and it turns your stomach, how can the feeling of nausea be no good until it’s tested? If the blinking lights make you feel dizzy, how can dizziness be no good until it’s tested? After all, the stove caused you to feel hot, and the contaminated food caused you to feel nausea, and the lights caused your dizziness, right?
Okay, now suppose you’re an anti-Semite, and the sight of a Jew turns your stomach. So, the Jew caused your nausea?
You see where I’m headed. You most certainly can question whether your feelings are appropriate for the circumstances just as you can question whether your ideas are; or you can question why the circumstances produced the feelings that they do. The reactions to the hot stove and the contaminated food are built-in biological responses (though if your hand’s just been in the freezer, an unlit stove might nonetheless feel hot, so the hotness of a stove isn’t an attribute of the stove alone). The nausea an anti-Semite feels is also a biological response, but it’s been learned—as I assume have many of our “feelings” with regard to music.
Now, there’s a lot more at stake when someone is revolted by Jews than when someone finds “This Is Why I’m Hot” catchy. And the world would be better off if anti-Semitism disappeared, whereas it would be worse off if everyone agreed on what was and wasn’t catchy. But what the revulsion and the catchiness have in common is that neither is immutable, and both can be questioned.
Changing one’s mind about a song seems like changing one’s feelings, which is a lot harder than changing one’s ideas, or reconsidering the facts. (I’ve heard of magazines with fact-checking departments, but never a magazine with a feeling-checking department.)
But Tom Ewing asked last week on his LiveJournal, “Does anyone else get that thing where they play a record they like to someone, actually physically with someone there in the room, and there’s a silence while it plays, maybe a look of mild skepticism on the other person’s face, and during the silence you find yourself listening with their ears and suddenly everything that MIGHT be lame or weak or crappy about the music is REALLY OBVIOUS to you?”
My answer to that one is, “Yes, absolutely, but the uncertainty doesn’t last.” But is it integrity on my part that I rarely come to dislike anything I’ve ever liked? Or obstinacy? It feels like neither, since I don’t feel in control of the likes or dislikes. In general, listening through other ears is a virtue, and I guess the skill is being able to turn off the other ears when necessary, but then being able to find one’s way back into them.
In any event, I’ve rarely been able to argue myself (or be argued) into liking or disliking something, but, as Exposé once sang, seasons change, feelings change, and there have been significant shifts in my taste. I’d never liked Howlin’ Wolf’s voice; then I read Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, and the Wolf’s dry growl now was the opposite of dry, was haunting, ominous, gorgeous, was rich with beauty coming through the rasp (and rich with eeriness and menace, too). This change wasn’t due to a particular argument Palmer had made, just his telling Wolf’s story and giving his own appreciation of the music. The voice now had a world in my mind where it meant something.