Music with Benefits

If there's one thing self-obsessed, culturally illiterate plebes have in common, it's that they share a pathological fondness for the art of social networking. MySpace has bred a society of impetuous form fillers, banging out scraps of amateur poetry on edgy, offbeat topics like hobbies and heroes. Judging from the amount of viewers American Idol still has, it shouldn't surprise me that so many are publicly confessing to having the most pathetic taste in music ever. Ambiguous, pervasive and annoying above all, it's an answer I've gotten used to hearing from the kind of people who think supposably is a word. So if you're one of the lucky millions who's written that you'd rather listen to anything, anything at all...except country, then it's time to take a look in the mirror and admit that you suck.

Whether you like it or not, your taste in music is a scale by which strangers will judge your level of awesome. It's subjective, of course, but if we meet and I think you have pretty cool taste in music, chances are I'll come to find you're a pretty cool person...or a sociopath with a bunch of stolen records iPod. People who willfully admit to hating country seem to do so because MTV hasn't auto-tuned the genre to near extinction and sprinkled it with fairy dust from Paris Hilton's vagina. Country music is casually omitted from Nancy O'Dell's nightly news reports, so it's completely irrelevant to the media savvy egotists of America, much like proper nouns and unlocked caps buttons. But the issue here is not with these people's distaste for country music itself, rather, it's what Everything Except Country can tell us about them as rational agents with free will. Music has a meandering way of dictating who we relate to and ultimately hang around, but is it really possible for a person's musical taste to accurately suggest their personality?

A little over a month ago, Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland began a psychological study on this urgent international affair, asking 36,000 people around the world to rate musical genres and complete personality questionnaires. What he discovered was something we never needed group therapy, hypnosis, or mind-expanding psychedelics to tell us: you really are what you listen to, and not in a stereotypical way at all...

To enjoy the soothing sounds of reggae means you have high self esteem and are creative, gentle and outgoing. It also means that you're fucking lazy but what the hell do scientists know? Learning how to roll a blunt takes a lot patience and coordination, and you're not gonna get anyone to teach you by being a self-absorbed crybaby with the mental prowess of a donkey.

Indie music listeners are creative but have low self-esteem and are inherently whiny assholes. I could really go off on why this specific inference is retarded because we all know indie bands work much harder at writing, touring, and (self)promoting than major-label bands, and that's without factoring in marketing strategies, money, and Schedule I drugs. In defense of Heroit-Watt's psychology department, I can only point to art schools around the world that crank out shitty noise punk bands as partial proof of their conjecture, and move right along.

If you dig classical, you're an intelligent, gentle soul. And maybe a serial killer.

Mainstream pop breeds high self-esteem in people who are essentially outgoing, gentle, and maaaybe a little disturbed. Your artistic abilities are the donkey that reggae's are not, and if we've learned anything from the sheer workmanship that Miss Spears and Mrs. Miss Ciccone have displayed over the last few years, you might also be a robot.

So returning to our culturally illiterate masses, according to this study, to like Everything Except Country would indicate a person who is both confident and withdrawn, creative and unimaginative, hardworking and lazy, gentle and intense. In other words, you'd be an incredibly confused motherfucker. If life has taught us correctly, then maybe we should just concede the stereotypes and cheerfully agree that Professor North is theoretically, presumably, supposably right.

Name: ryan
Date posted: January 19, 2009 - 07:16 pm
Message:

what if i like all of them?