A (somewhat) Musical Autobiography, Part 2

           Tastes change. We change. It’s comforting to know that, according to Stanford University, you grow a completely new sheath of skin every week, and each individual cell in your skeleton is replaced every seven years. But do our tastes evolve to better suit our surroundings, or do we choose surroundings to suit our tastes? And if our tastes (and skin, and skeleton) change, are we still intrinsically the same person?

            I went to school at a small mountain college in upstate New York. I spent a lot of time in my dorm room listening to the Grateful Dead, Phish, and various other similarly mellow groups. Then I moved to Buffalo and, while courting my future wife, plied her with mix CDs of my favorite jam bands and bluegrass groups. She liked one Phish song, but that was about the only track that made it into regular circulation on her iPod. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t find the bass lines infectious, the guitar solos nod-worthy. After two years in Buffalo my own mp3 player became bloated with the Pixies, Sonic Youth, the Clash, and Dinosaur Jr, all independent of my significant other’s tastes. By the time we packed up the truck for Chicago my once-modest record collection was bountiful, and my playlists included a plethora of indie/alternative bands—most of which my fiancé had never heard of. I was (and am) perpetually choosing Freelance Whales over Phish, Japandroids over Jerry Garcia. What happened in that two years? Did being removed from the mountains (and my barefoot hippie dorm mates) cause me to search for a new identity, or did my preferences simply progress without regard to location or surroundings?

            Music isn’t the only barometer by which I’ve noticed a difference in my life. I’ve changed in other ways since moving to Chicago—I can’t say when I actually changed, but I can tell now that I have. For one thing, I don’t (much to my fiancé’s vexation when we’re walking together) wait for visual confirmation that a car has stopped at an intersection before crossing the street. I suppose I feel entitled as a pedestrian. (It helps that this particular sense of entitlement is validated by Illinois state law.) But I’ve never before felt entitled to anything in my life. Did living in a big city change me, or had I always had this underlying “next self,” waiting for the right time to emerge? In other words, is it fate or free will? I’m still inherently the same person—I walk my dog every day, I still love my fiancé, still love Thai food, tea, and bad movies. But I’m also slightly different—a new version of myself.

            So I find myself wondering an age-old question: what makes me me? I still look more-or-less the same, despite different haircuts and new glasses. But even at the cellular level I’m a different person than I was just a few years ago, and at the surface level I inhabit a completely different person’s skin than I did last week. My tastes have changed, which begs the ancient question of the Ship of Theseus--whether a different physical person, having acquired the same likes and dislikes I once had, would, in essence, be me. My personality has remained mostly stable, but there are a finite number of personality types, and I’m sure there are countless others who share a type with me. So, who am I? Am I defined by my preferences, my personality, the shape of my face and the color of my eyes? Or how about my tastes—if I identify with a subculture, does that make me necessarily a part of that subculture? Am I nothing more than the medley of physical markers by which I display my interests and loyalties? I sometimes think back to myself in middle school, before I had acquired any musical or cultural tastes, and wonder who that fresh canvas was, or if I was anybody at all. I don’t know when I started definitively being me, and given my protean history, I’m not sure I’ll ever arrive at a definitive me.

A Musical Autobiography, Part 1

This is my first post on Blogger, and frankly my first attempt in a long time at blogging. It should be evident from the title of my page that I'm extremely interested in music, but that's not all that I'm interested in talking about. I'm interested in life, in people, in why we feel, think, say and do the things we feel, think, say and do--all subjects which, in one way or another, most music (read: good music) addresses.

The human body, on a cellular level, completely reconstitutes itself every 7 years. Why shouldn't a person's tastes change with them? My current beat is indie rock and grunge. I've been interested in this vein of music for a couple years. This could very well change in time (though I sincerely hope it doesn't). My musical tastes have changed several times throughout the last 10 years, and it's conceivable that they could further change in another 10 years. I think most people who have a connection to a song, a band, a genre, develop that connection because it's one that they need at a given point in life. There is, of course, the random song that is just so fucking timeless that it sticks with you across the board, but for the most part, I think the average person's musical palate changes with them in their life. So: what, you may be wondering, do I need in my life from a connection with indie/grunge?

Having grown up in the 90s, my first exposure to grunge was, like most people at the time, Nirvana. I'm of a certain generation who did not hear songs for the first time on the radio, but, more often than not, on MTV. I remember the music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I also remember the Weird Al parody, but that's not important. What's important is the way that song made me feel. It gave me chills the first time I heard it. I'll admit that I was still in middle school when Cobain died, so I wasn't really old enough to listen to or appreciate Nirvana's oeuvre. All I knew was that I was a lonely, socially awkward and isolated kid, and something about that song, that band, that genre spoke to me in a way I couldn't really understand at the time. Maybe I found it comforting because of the visual elements their music video incorporated: a school auditorium filled with other awkward, isolated people, many of them older than I was.

I didn't start listening to my own music in earnest until junior high, and somewhere in that swath of time I did pick up "Nevermind," and a year or two later I discovered "In Utero." It makes sense that someone in junior high would need a band like Nirvana. Unlike a lot of bands who portray a certain image just to sell records, you get the distinct impression, looking at pictures and video footage of the band, that they were all a bunch of awkward dorky kids. They weren't the first band of dorks to make dorky cool (I think Beat Happening were possibly the forerunners in that proto-hipster undertaking), but they were the first band doing it who became a household name. And you can understand the visceral frustration someone like Cobain must have felt, how anyone of that mindset would feel: you set out to be honest, confrontational, no-bullshit, to just be yourself, and suddenly millions of kids who don't fully understand what you're doing want to be just like you--even if they don't feel and think the way you do, they want to put on Cobain airs, to fake being honest and confrontational, to bullshit being no-bullshit. So you write the most intentionally pop-friendly anger song you can, a song trying to mock the very idea of pop music, and not only does it become a hit, journalists and pop culture analysts call it the anthem of a generation. How do you cope with that?

So, all this is to say that I started listening to the rantings of a lonely, frustrated man at a time when I felt the loneliest I'd ever been--from the early sadness of a middle school savant who had perfect grades and no friends, to a high school slacker who was severely anxious and depressed. I remembered the way that video had made me feel the first time I saw it, and I went out and bought the CD. I can't say that listening to "Nevermind" made me feel any better about my problems, but it was the music I needed to hear, the music I still often need to hear. Why do we choose the friends we surround ourselves with? Why do we listen to the music we choose to spin? These are both asking the same thing.