You are your Music

Lately I've been doing a lot of surfing around the Goth sites - because I do have a heavily Goth scented book and I thought that these would be the places to let people know. But on the way, I've also stopped by a few Blogs and sites and especially one called Fetish Kitten the pain of ... something or another. It has a few blogs, told mostly in a sort of diary form, but the one I keep reading is by a nineteen year old British girl which I find endlessly fascinating simply from finding out what she considers ordinary for her life.

These blogs have profiles and a main aspect of the profiles is a list of the music they listen to. As a matter of fact, I took as little time as possible to fill out my profile for this Weblog and I was almost embarassed to list the music that I listen to. Not that there's anything wrong with any of it, it's just that it's so ordinary and I absolutely know that there are tons of music snobs out there who define themselves and, of course, everybody else by music. The more obscure and adventurous or unusual your music is, the more you are, too, is the way it goes. Or as Jon Cusack famously said in the movie High Fidelity, 'It's more important what you like, than what you are like."

The fact of the matter is, music is almost always a background activity for something else that I'm doing. I listen to music on the way to and from work. I listen to it when I'm out running. And I listen to it when I'm writing. But I don't believe I've just listened to music by itself for the longest time. It isn't central to my life and I know that my disinterest in music means that I'm virtually nonexistent to a major portion of the world.

I've got a buddy up in the Twin Cities who co-hosts a music review show on cable. It's on a Monday night and they've ingeniously timed it so that the show comes on almost exactly during half-time for Monday night football and when all the guys are remote controlling their way through the channels they come across his show. Like I said: It's ingenious. To my buddy the most important part of any movie is the sound system in the theater. He has gotten his money back from theaters when they've misrepresented what system they were using. It's that important to him, but I'll bet most of you have never, ever thought twice about it.

Like many people, my musical tastes got stuck in an era. I'm not going to reveal that era, but it had a type of music called 'Rock'. I hear now that Rock stations are going off the air in droves, K-Rock in New York which also sponsored Howard Stern is going to an all talk format, bringing in David Lee Roth as one of their hosts. Hip Hop is the music that's sweeping the country. I wish it weren't so, but I only get one vote on this one.

I hear you. Hip Hop isn't really music. It's just musical talking or if you want to be real grumpy about it, it's unmusical talking. And you know what? I couldn't agree with you more. The problem is that it's not my agreement that you need. Get all of those silly kids to agree with you and we'll be well on our way to ridding the Earth of this noise.

But when it comes to matters of taste, as the old latin tag goes, there's no dispute.