Cocktails and Records

I was out with a colleague this week to a work networking thing, the kind of event that is only made bearable by the free booze.

Stood by the bar and fastidiously avoiding doing any actual networking, my colleague and I engaged in shoptalk until her attention was captured by a black and white photo of a classically mid 70s looking guy clutching a beer. She wondered who it was.

‘Oh, that’s Phil Lynott, you know from Thin Lizzy’ I said.

She looks at me and says with an accusatory tone ‘So is that the kind of music that you like then?’

I don’t, as it happens, particularly love Thin Lizzy, but then I wouldn’t exactly throw the radio out of the window if they came on either. I am sensing ‘issues’ here though and respond wearily in the way you do when you like lots of music but don’t really want to reel off 500 bands or singers to someone to illustrate the point.

‘Well, not them especially, but I like rock music I guess, I like loads of stuff.’ I then decide to risk returning the question. ‘What kind of music do you like?’

‘I love Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos’ she says.

Now I am used to people looking appalled when I tell them what kind of music I like (see earlier post on the musical Carousel) so I try to be non-judgemental about what other people listen to. And as I have pretty wide taste in music this usually isn’t an issue anyway. Unfortunately though, I really loathe both Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. Angsty American female singer/songwriter’s are not my thing.

But it is too late. A look of dismay/contempt/disbelief has already swept across my face. She obviously senses this and explains that they have ‘personal’ meaning because they apply to a particular time in her life.

This is worse. As the Horse Overboard blog noted a while back in a review of Nick Hornby’s Songbook:

‘People whose favourite song reminds them of their honeymoon, their student days, a foreign holiday, and so on, don’t really like music much: “if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany it throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use”’.

Nick Hornby is so right. I quickly changed the subject back to bitching about work.

Tags: music = opinions

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.