What's the Point of Liking Music?
December 10, 2024
Twice in the past few months, a coworker has asked me, “What kind of music do you listen to?” I guess I seem like the sort of person who might listen to a kind of music. In order to provide an interesting answer, I have, both times, said, “I listen to a lot of Japanese music.” One time I provided further clarification by adding, “I listen to a lot of Japanese pop music.”
The truth is that I listen to a lot more Japanese rock music than Japanese pop music. And yet, when forced on the spot to provide one genre of music that describes my taste, I always say “Japanese pop music” instead. When I do listen to Japanese pop music, I think to myself, “This is the music that I listen to.” When I listen to Japanese rock music, I don’t think anything at all.
We can say then that I listen to two types of music: “listening” music and “identity” music. Listening Music is the music that I listen to when I just want to listen to music. This includes bands that I have been listening to since childhood, such as The Beatles or The Who. Probably, I wouldn’t get into The Beatles or The Who if I heard them for the first time right now. I mostly like them because I know them so well.
This also includes bands that I got into during my transition into adulthood, such as Neil Young, Modest Mouse, or The Smiths. These bands are important to me, and if someone brings them up, I will say, “Hell yeah!” but I would never say that my main genre of music is “American/British rock bands” (even though it is.)
Identity Music is music I listen to that no one I know listens to, except for weird people that I talk to online. It is music that I would put on to surprise people and introduce them to a different world. This music is, in fact, also music that I listen to when I just want to listen to music. It is that, and it is also something else. A band like Zazen Boys feels more integral to my identity because I’ve only ever talked to one other person who listens to them. In certain circles, they are quite a popular band! People go to see them play. However, most of those people live on the other side of a great big ocean.
Then, there is Japanese pop music. While Japanese rock music sounds fairly familiar to North American listeners, Japanese pop music can feel much more alien. It is a genre that includes songs I’ve put on in my car and had people say, angrily, “What the hell are we listening to?” This adverse reaction causes me to latch on even more strongly. I feel a need to protect the music; in this way, it becomes my music. When I can find someone who will sit with me and appreciate an artist like Susan, it feels like I’ve made a true connection. I know that Susan sounds ridiculous; at the same time, I love her.
Even the Japanese pop music that is more immediately listenable is still distinctly different. If you tell someone you listen to hip-hop, they will talk to you about hip-hop. If you tell someone you listen to Japanese pop music, they will ask, “Why?” How did this happen? How is it that I, being the man that I am, came to listen to and enjoy this music? Well, there’s truly no answer. It happened due to a chain of events that began a long time ago. I heard some music and liked it, and then off I went. One time I told someone that I liked it because I lived in Japan for a while. This is a truly comical distortion of the truth; in reality, I lived in Japan for a while because I liked Japanese pop music, and I never once met anyone there who liked the same music I did. This is because the Japan I lived in existed in the year 2015, twenty years after the release of Tanimura Yumi’s album 「圧倒的に片思い」, and twenty eight years after the release of Kawai Naoko’s “Japan as Waterscapes.” When I went to karaoke and sang my favourite Japanese songs, people would ask me, “Why do you know all these old songs I’ve never heard of?”
Our identity is the result of a paradoxical procedure by which we differentiate ourselves from others via our inclusion in a variety of groups, resulting in a Venn diagram wherein the centre includes only oneself. As a starting point, I am a white male Canadian of English ancestry born on the Pacific Coast. Now, on a global scale, this places me within a fairly small group. However, this group still includes millions of people. We need to divide further. This formulation of my identity might end with a clause such as: “who likes both Fleetwood Mac and Kahimi Karie.”
Let me tell you an embarrassing fact about myself: I have maintained a spreadsheet of my most-listened-to artists going back to the year 2015. I can tell you exactly how many more times over the past decade I have listened to songs by Neil Young as compared to songs by John Denver. (5546 more times.) Back in the day, I compiled this spreadsheet via an hours-long process of adding up the listening counts of individual songs in my iTunes library. Nowadays, much of the counting process is automated; all I need to do is transfer the data to the spreadsheet.
Now, why do I do this?
Please tell me: why do I do this?
I can only say that it is the same impulse that caused me to create gigantic tables of hockey statistics when I was a child, using almanacs and the backs of hockey cards. I didn’t — and couldn’t — use this information for anything. I just liked to look at it. I liked to see how the numbers changed from year to year. The second year I updated my music spreadsheet, I got to see how the rankings had diverged from the previous year. This communicated to me something about the change of my music taste. Now, we are approaching the end of the year 2024, and I am about to do this for the eighth time. The last few years, I have maintained the spreadsheet out of a sense of obligation. It would be foolish to stop now, wouldn’t it? After all this time?
This spreadsheet abstracts all the time I spend listening to music into mere numbers. It does not differentiate between music listened to in the car or in my house; by myself or with others; between music I was actually listening to and music I just had on while my mind was elsewhere. It doesn’t have anything to say about the importance of albums I only put on once a year to listen to in a lonesome, intense manner. In fact, the spreadsheet doesn’t tell me anything about music at all, nor my relationship to it. I’m shrinking and averaging all these experiences out into a number that expresses the only thing a number can express: quantity.
I know what music I like! I know what music I like now, and I know what music I liked in the past. I know which subset of the music I liked in the past still appeals to me, and which is a relic of a man long dead. I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me this! When my coworkers ask me what music I listen to, I don’t appeal to my spreadsheet. I just say the first thing that pops into my mind. The answer, I have realized, may not even be correct, but who cares? They’re not asking in order to ascertain facts; they just want to talk to me. They want to learn something about a person that they have to spend their time with. When it comes down to it, we will only end up talking about music that either we both like, or that comes up incidentally during a conversation. I found out my coworker and I both like The Smiths when he was telling me about how many edibles he took at a Morrissey concert. He didn’t need to tell me that he’s listened to Morrissey 1656 times over the past decade. All I needed to know is that he listened to (and liked) him enough to want to go to his concert, and that while there, he took far too many edibles.
A reader of this website is only concerned with the music I like to the extent that I can write about it in an interesting fashion. They might know about my fascination with Neil Young, Rush, and Zazen Boys from essays I have written in the past. They may have caught on to my adoration of Modest Mouse from my insertion of their lyrics into every other essay I write. Aside from that, who cares!
My identity has no meaning as an objective fact. That Venn diagram I proposed earlier is of no use, because the only person who would know enough about me to compile it would be myself, and I’m the last person who needs help differentiating me from anyone else: I do it every time I use the word “I.” Each person I interact with constructs their own version of my identity using the impressions that only they receive. My coworker can identify me as “the apprentice he worked with last week” — because I’m the only apprentice he worked with last week. He doesn’t need to construct this elaborate picture of who I am. He certainly can, if he wants to, but it’s not necessary for our relationship.
No one needs to know who I am. I don’t need to communicate to anyone who I am. I used to want to talk to everyone about the music I liked, because I felt that they wouldn’t understand me properly unless they understood what was important to me. This was prompted by a thoroughly misguided sense of how people understand each other: a sense derived from my fascination with objective facts and statistics. It’s like trying to convince someone that Michael Jordan should be their favourite basketball player just because he has the most blocks by a guard in a single season. The fact that Michael Jordan was a guard who blocked a lot of shots is certainly a facet of Michael Jordan’s essence as a basketball player, but it’s not necessary to know that statistic in order to judge Michael Jordan as a player, and furthermore to decide whether he’s your favourite or not. It’s probably more important to, I don’t know, watch a game of basketball (something I have not done.)
No one cares about the statistics you’ve compiled or the spreadsheets you’ve made: they just want to talk about basketball. They like basketball because, at a certain moment in time, basketball appealed to them as either a thing to do, or a thing to watch. They chose their favourite player when they saw someone put the ball in the hoop and went, “Wow, I like the way they did that.” All the number-crunching in the world is secondary to the fundamental joy they derive from watching people play basketball.
In the same way, a person’s judgment of me stems more from whether they enjoy having me around than it does anything I like or dislike. My presence in this world is just that: an actual, physical, social presence in the world. As someone who grew up online, this took me far too long to understand. The internet is a world of signifiers; of likes and dislikes; of belonging and not belonging. You can choose where you go and who you interact with. So many communities on the internet are founded upon a shared interest in a particular topic or a particular work. This is fine for what it is, but it does not translate to life in the actual world, where proximity is the dominant factor. You have to get along with those around you, by hook or by crook, and the way you do that involves your actions at particular times and particular places. The people you meet can’t read your bio or your post history. They can’t stalk your photos or read your tweets. They just have to make do with what they’ve got in front of them, and what you can communicate to them via sporadic, meandering, and often mundane1 conversations.
The internet has taught us to curate our profile, to create a homepage where people can see all we wish to show them, all at the same time. Our bio describes us in a few sentences, and our profile picture captures our essence within a few hundred pixels. Whether this is an Instagram page, a LinkedIn profile, or even a personal website, it still amounts to the same dumbing-down, the same shrinking. I noticed in high school that there is a strange joy to be found in being captured in a simple sentence: to see that you have been placed in the correct box, and that people know who you are. But what it amounts to is a closing off of one’s infinite potential.
My friend saddleblasters has recently been talking about finding one’s “original face,” after reading a novel in which this Zen koan is presented to the main character:
Your original face prior to your parents’ birth — what is that?”
As is clear from the phrasing of the question, one’s “original face” has little to do with one’s “personality,” which is developed over the course of one’s life. One’s “original face” exists prior to one’s corporeal existence. Because of this, it’s difficult to even conceive of it as a face that belongs to “you,” since the entity that you think of as “you” came into being after this face that is ostensibly yours.
I’m not going to tangle myself into too many knots about this at the moment, but I felt it a useful concept to introduce at this particular juncture. When attempting to determine who we are — whether by maintaining a curated profile, creating a Plato-esque Venn diagram, or reverse-engineering from the impressions of others — we would be remiss to ignore the possibility that there are elements of this equation that we simply do not have access to. In fact, it’s possible that our entire equation rests on an illusion: that we even have a self at all.
As we live, we act and think and feel. Our actions interact with the physical world. Our thoughts interact with the conceptual world. Our feelings interact with our emotional world. All these three worlds interact with each other. We feel and we think and we act, and we think and we act and we feel. And then at the end of the day, we crumple all this into a little ball and exclaim, “This is me!” Everything is so large, and even that which is small contains within it the largeness of everything else, and yet we are always crumpling and always exclaiming, saying “This is…!” and “That is…!” and “I am…!”
Well, I’m not going to tell you to stop. I’m not going to stop, either. How would I even go about doing that? It’s unreasonable to try. It seems that the least and the most we can do is occasionally pause and wonder about it for a little while.
1.“Sporadic, meandering, and often mundane” — it seems I’ve stumbled upon a new slogan for this website.
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