I haven’t blogged very much about music, except to tell y’all what I’m listening to and what festivals I’m attending. I don’t have much confidence in my ability to talk about music–I know just enough about it to be dangerous, just enough to pretend to know what I’m talking about. Despite that, I’ll confess to musical snobbery: I turn up my nose and cover my ears at anything Top 40. And don’t even talk to me about Dave Matthews Band.
Recently, I’ve had a couple really interesting conversations about music with a new coworker (we’ll call him John C.). He’s brought up some challenging musical questions and he inspired me to download Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” And that, at the very least, deserves some explanation.
I haven’t always been a music snob. In fact, I grew up listening to what my dad did: 80s country (think: Kathy Mattea’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and Patty Loveless’ “Timber (I’m Fallin ‘ In Love)”), the Kingston Trio, the oldies station. My dad used to quiz me while we’d listen to radio, prompting me to name the singer or group and the year each song had been released. I got pretty good at it, too, but as a result, the popular music of the 80s rocked and synthesized on without me (with a few notable exceptions, namely The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian”).
The Year I Became A Music Snob was the year I lived in Oxford, the year that changed my life in a hundred other little ways. By some cosmic grace or chance, I had a lucky stroke of foresight–remarkable, even–for a barely-20-year-old. I knew I had the luxury of a single year to live 4000 miles away from everything familiar and comfortable. It was all mine. If ever a circumstance demanded open-mindedness, this was it, the time to pry open my white-knuckled fists and fall into whatever experiences awaited me. My preconceptions muddying this sliver of foresight were simple, and laughably narrow; I thought cultural and intellectual knowledge would be my pots of gold. My little stroke of foresight suggested only the broadest categories and failed to forecast the minutiae. Like music.
But God is in the details, and the minutiae is as important as the last drop of melting ice cream. You just can’t let it slip away.
One of my Oxford housemates, Tim, played blues guitar with twice the conviction of any school assignment he did, strumming and wailing and bobbing his head until four in the morning. Another housemate, Brendan, bought a stereo immediately upon arriving in England and spent more money at The Polar Bear (the used CD store on Cowley Road) than he did on groceries.
I let go. I listened. I think it was the keyboards in Wilco’s “A Shot in the Arm” (off Summerteeth) that really did it. As soon as Brendan hit “play,” the bouncing chords got under my skin and my fingers itched for a piano. “You finally slept / while the sun caught fire / You’ve changed.” Something in my veins, yes, yes, and bloodier than blood, catchier, more interesting, more provocative, than the two hundred CDs I’d armed myself with for my year abroad.
And so I traded in my insipid pop country tunes for Belle & Sebastian, Pulp, Wilco, and the low wail of Tim’s guitar two floors beneath my bedroom.
. . . to be continued with my possible re-conversion to pop music (possible, I said, not probable), but in the meantime, read John C.’s post about the return of pop music into his life to understand the forces that convinced me to pay $0.99 for a Britney Spears song . . .
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current book: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street
current music: All Calexico, all the time. I’m nervous that I’ll overdose on it, but nothing else sounds good to me right now. Except that I listened to “A Shot in the Arm” while I was finishing this post, and it sounds pretty good. Always does.
current socks: gray with brightly colored butterflies.
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