This is Benjamin

i like music better than you

October 15th, 2008 | benjamin

Why is it that the music I enjoy most is that which lies at the borders of credibility, and by credibility I mean that which has currency within my peer group first, and society in general second?

A whole raft of act are now unpalatable to me, initially because they came to be enjoyed by my friends, and more recently because as they have found space on commercial nostalgia outlets like Gold 104 and TT.

I refer to Human League, to name one outfit subject to my love-cum-disgust. And Modern Talking as a group newly assimilated into this schema.

This impulse is most bizarre, not an endeavour to venture forwards, but to retreat into a personal musical paradise in which I am both supreme and alone.

It is especially bizarre given that I am compelled when discovering something new to show it to my friends, to selectively and strategically play it in their ear shot until it gains recognition and, as time passes, the very currency that leads me to turn my head in disgust.

I am sure that I am by no means alone in this anti-populist music idiosyncracy. Take Beethoven-fanboy and social theorist Theodor Adorno, for example. He despised jazz just as it was beginning to find fans among the intellectual class of the 1930s to which he belonged. And he went to incredible lengths to justify his contempt, basing a theory of human freedom on contempt for Glen Miller.

I submit that this movement to and away from music be designated a topic of high importance for the social sciences.