I'm with with Chuck Klosterman, on both points really. I'm extremely unskilled at the art of small talk, and I don't like answering the oft-asked question, "What sort of music do you like?" I used to say, "everything but country", but this is no longer true as the Hank Williams, Carter Family, Willie Nelson and Jimmie Rodgers tunes oft-played on my iPod will attest. A definite advantage of living in the post-digital age is that it is compelling to explore music previously unknown, and that the journey itself takes one both forward and backward in musical history. Hmmm, so what does one say to this question, as described by Mr. Klosterman?
I spend a lot of my life attempting to avoid situations where people make small talk. As a rule, I generally don't enjoy conversing with anyone I haven't already spoken with on at least 120 previous occasions, which makes acquiring new friends difficult. But whenever I do find myself meeting a stranger for the first (or second or third) time, I'm struck by how often they ask me one specific question: "What kind of music do you like?" For many years, I did not know how to answer this. I experimented with a litany of abstract responses: "rock," "active rock," "hair metal," "disco metal," "girl metal," "everything," "nothing," or whatever I suspected the other person might not actively hate. But (I think) I've finally found a response that is both accurate and honest: Whenever someone asks me what kind of music I like, I say, "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."
Beyond being true, this reply also has the added bonus of significantly changing the conversation (or ending it entirely).
But I'm starting to suspect this seemingly innocuous inquiry (and my unnecessarily specific answer to this unspecific question) might be weirder and more complex than I originally assumed. When someone asks me what kind of music I like, he is (usually) attempting to use this information to deduce things about my personality; this is (usually) the same reason we casually ask people about what TV shows they watch or which NBA franchises they support or what political movements they align with. It's the normal way to understand who other people are. But here's the problem: This premise is founded on the belief that the person you're talking with consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings. It's also 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. But this process is complicated and (usually) unconsidered. It's incredibly easy for me to grasp that I love the first fourteen seconds of "I Don't Need No Doctor." A harder task is figuring out exactly why I feel that way.
[Click to read more, including listening to sound samples, of Me, On Shuffle - Chuck Klosterman - Esquire Magazine - Esquire]
Since I read this article last week, I've been wondering what my favorite musical snippets might be. I won't bore you with them at the moment, perhaps I'll bore you with them later. Ha ha. The list is too big, I'll have to winnow it down. I currently have 1610 songs rated 4 star or higher in iTunes (these are the songs I like the best, the songs that always are loaded to all of my iPods, the songs I've identified as identifying me), and I don't have the keyboard stamina to comment on all 1610 of these tunes, especially right now. My eyes would glaze over, yours too. Small talk, if you will.
Anyway, to paraphrase Henry Miller, "listen as you like, and die happy."For the record, Humble Pie is a new history lesson for me, and they do rock.
"Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore" (Humble Pie)
But not as much as Mott the Hoople
