The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. – C.S. Lewis
It is an under-appreciated truth that listening to music changes your ears. With every new piece of music you listen to, you gain more points of reference that you can then apply to pieces you have never heard before. This is not a controversial view in other media; few people would argue that knowledge of the Bible is irrelevant to the experience of reading Paradise Lost, for example, or that one’s knowledge of kung-fu tropes affects the experience of watching Kill Bill. This is not always true of music. There is something threatening in the idea that we can grow out of the music that we like, which is, after all, an important part of the way that we express our identities both online and among our peers.
I try and keep my snobbery in check, and in fact, this post has nothing to do with the conclusions and opinions I have come to at this point, but rather about my first foray into the world of popular music.
My childhood home was both full of music and strangely devoid of music. I studied piano from a youngish age, so the sound of me practicing was common. Neither my mother nor my father, however, played music much around the house. Music was mostly something that we all listened to in the car. When my mother drove, that meant oldies radio. I can still sing along to most of the big Motown hits. When my father drove, it was classical music. This meant that I had little engagement with the music of the day, beyond those that were so ubiquitous that I heard them in stores, or at school. I had no musical identity apart from the music my parents listened to and the music that I heard on the radio.
There were a couple of signs that things were going to change–acquiring a small radio that I could listen to in my room, the CD I bought at a church-sponsored concert, access to the internet–but as sometimes happens, there was a particular song and a particular artist that I liked completely independently of my parents. I’d like to say that that artist was someone like Radiohead, or the Pixies, or Sonic Youth. Hell, I’d take the Beatles. But no, although now my present snobby self is somewhat ashamed to admit it, that artist was Seal, and the song was “Kiss From A Rose” (perhaps even more embarrassing, my first encounter with the song was through the soundtrack of Batman Forever).
hammer & jack 