What Kind of Music Do You Listen To?
When I was a kid, my parents wouldn't allow us to listen to anything except classical music. And they didn't listen to much of that, either. So all I knew growing up was Johann Strauss' waltzes, and Dvorak's New World Symphony. They constantly referred to rock music as crazy, loud teenager music, and being impressionable little kids who adored our parents and enthusiastically embraced all their opinions, my brother and I would turn the radio dial faster past the rock stations so our minds wouldn't be contaminated by it.
Rock music was hard to avoid, though, since my friends and teachers listened to it, and I heard it played at school, in other friends' moms' cars, and at the pool. By fourth grade, I'd heard of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson. Ironically, when I got to college and all the DJs at parties played retro-80s music, I was hearing a lot of the songs for the first time while my friends rocked out in a nostalgic frenzy.
I think it's unfortunate that I wasn't exposed to music as a kid. I feel like I'll spend my whole life catching up on what I missed out on, and being judged for my musical ignorance (and don't even get me started on MTV; my parents didn't get cable until about five years ago.) I love discovering new music. The great thing about not having been exposed to as much music as everyone else is that a lot of stuff is new to me. I do believe that I'm a bit lacking in natural music skills like remembering tunes and lyrics, and artists and titles. And singing. Definitely lacking that skill. But sometimes I hear music and it just hits me perfectly. Something about the tune, or the instrument, or the lyrics, or the rhythm just fills me up inside, and I know I'm touching beauty. Bongo drums are amazing. Percussions, cellos, acoustic guitars, acapella groups. Remember that Kodak commercial they used to run at Christmas time about 15 years ago? It was a choir singing, I see your true colors, shining through... I thought it was beautiful. Stop laughing, I did.
I went to hear a string quartet perform last year. After the performance, I struck up a conversation with the violist.
"Are you a musician?" he asked.
"I, uh," I stuttered. "Well, I played piano for twelve years."
He stared at me for a long time with a slight grin. "So the answer is...yes," he said, looking as if he were ready to explain it further if I didn't understand how that could be.
It was the first time I'd realized that technically, I am a musician. And yet, a lot of good it does me to be able to recognize and name all four of Chopin's ballades and Beethoven's five piano concertos and Mozart's 8,000 symphonies. Most people who consider themselves music aficionados have no interest in my classical music training. When I start talking about it, their eyes glaze over and they start looking at the art on the walls. They start thinking things like, "Justina doesn't know anything about real music. How dull." In the entire huge universe of music, they've decided that if I don't know what they know, I must not know anything.
When I was living in Chicago, I knew this guitar player who called himself a "music expert," although as far as I could tell his only expertise was being whiny and deluded by a self-exaggerated sense of his own greatness. One weekend we were driving around town when he commented that at with all the different kinds of music out there, he could still name every song and artist being played out of people's windows and cars. We weren't traveling through very diverse neighborhoods: Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Wrigleyville, all bastions of yuppie frat kids newly sprung from college.
In the great universe of music, what people know is only a fraction of it, but it's also the same as what their friends know, because they all come from a musical background that includes a disposable income to buy hundreds of CDs, parents who allowed them to listen to crazy teenager music, and lots and lots of music that suburban white people listen to. So they're confronted with me, a weird Asian chick with a repressed musical childhood and no memory for tunes or lyrics, and they can only write me off as an ignoramus because I only discovered Bruce Springsteen in 1999.
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I didn't know that Pink Floyd is a band and not a dude. Does that make you roll your eyes? Screw you, then.
Rock music was hard to avoid, though, since my friends and teachers listened to it, and I heard it played at school, in other friends' moms' cars, and at the pool. By fourth grade, I'd heard of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson. Ironically, when I got to college and all the DJs at parties played retro-80s music, I was hearing a lot of the songs for the first time while my friends rocked out in a nostalgic frenzy.
I think it's unfortunate that I wasn't exposed to music as a kid. I feel like I'll spend my whole life catching up on what I missed out on, and being judged for my musical ignorance (and don't even get me started on MTV; my parents didn't get cable until about five years ago.) I love discovering new music. The great thing about not having been exposed to as much music as everyone else is that a lot of stuff is new to me. I do believe that I'm a bit lacking in natural music skills like remembering tunes and lyrics, and artists and titles. And singing. Definitely lacking that skill. But sometimes I hear music and it just hits me perfectly. Something about the tune, or the instrument, or the lyrics, or the rhythm just fills me up inside, and I know I'm touching beauty. Bongo drums are amazing. Percussions, cellos, acoustic guitars, acapella groups. Remember that Kodak commercial they used to run at Christmas time about 15 years ago? It was a choir singing, I see your true colors, shining through... I thought it was beautiful. Stop laughing, I did.
* * * * * * * * *
I went to hear a string quartet perform last year. After the performance, I struck up a conversation with the violist.
"Are you a musician?" he asked.
"I, uh," I stuttered. "Well, I played piano for twelve years."
He stared at me for a long time with a slight grin. "So the answer is...yes," he said, looking as if he were ready to explain it further if I didn't understand how that could be.
It was the first time I'd realized that technically, I am a musician. And yet, a lot of good it does me to be able to recognize and name all four of Chopin's ballades and Beethoven's five piano concertos and Mozart's 8,000 symphonies. Most people who consider themselves music aficionados have no interest in my classical music training. When I start talking about it, their eyes glaze over and they start looking at the art on the walls. They start thinking things like, "Justina doesn't know anything about real music. How dull." In the entire huge universe of music, they've decided that if I don't know what they know, I must not know anything.
* * * * * * * * *
When I was living in Chicago, I knew this guitar player who called himself a "music expert," although as far as I could tell his only expertise was being whiny and deluded by a self-exaggerated sense of his own greatness. One weekend we were driving around town when he commented that at with all the different kinds of music out there, he could still name every song and artist being played out of people's windows and cars. We weren't traveling through very diverse neighborhoods: Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Wrigleyville, all bastions of yuppie frat kids newly sprung from college.
In the great universe of music, what people know is only a fraction of it, but it's also the same as what their friends know, because they all come from a musical background that includes a disposable income to buy hundreds of CDs, parents who allowed them to listen to crazy teenager music, and lots and lots of music that suburban white people listen to. So they're confronted with me, a weird Asian chick with a repressed musical childhood and no memory for tunes or lyrics, and they can only write me off as an ignoramus because I only discovered Bruce Springsteen in 1999.
=================
I didn't know that Pink Floyd is a band and not a dude. Does that make you roll your eyes? Screw you, then.
posted by Justina at 1:52 AM
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