Through Being Cool

I’ll start this with a disclaimer. I realize nothing I describe here is a real problem. It’s just frustrating and I want to get some thoughts on my idea.

A few weeks ago I told a friend about a theory I’d been developing for the last year or so. “I’ve heard all the music I’ll ever love,” I said. My reasoning was this:

I got into music – deeply into music – around age 12. Over the next 5 years I developed a list of favorite artists, albums and songs. When I got to college my tastes expanded and changed. I found new artists and songs to like and abandoned some of my previous favorites. I held on to a few, mostly out of sentiment for how the music helped me through a tough time or made a good time even better. The albums I held on to and the ones I picked up on in college became my absolute favorite records. All of these had an emotional connection. I wasn’t necessarily feeling what the artists felt and I couldn’t always relate to the lyrics, but all of the twenty or so of my Absolute Favorite pieces of music hit me on a level beyond aesthetic appreciation.

After I graduated college, I started working. I had some bad times finding permanent employment and adjusting to living alone. I also had some really great times exercising my new freedom. Whenever I needed music to mourn or to celebrate, I turned to my old favorites.

By the end of 2007 I realized that my list of favorites wasn’t changing. I still liked records I heard for the first time, but nothing really hit me. I figured that because I had finished school and started a career that there were no more times of youthful emotional exaggeration. No more chances to open up to a record on anything more than an intellectual level.

And there are times when this is frustrating. Mutations probably isn’t Beck’s best album, but it has an unfair advantage for me. I didn’t lay on the living room floor hating middle school and listening to any other albums. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea isn’t a romantic record, but it was playing in the dark room when Linda developed photos and I stopped by to flirt after video production class. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love isn’t a New York record, but I listened to it on the train at least once a week during my internship. And what two albums could better sum up frustrated youth than Fun House and Violent Femmes? Some records are also tied to the general feeling of being somewhere at a certain time. Astral Weeks sounds like the Missouri countryside at dusk in September. If You’re Feeling Sinister is a dorm room or empty park in the rain in October and Songs of Love and Hate is a NoLIta rooftop in the snow.

There are other times when I want to love an album. I wanted to feel all kinds of ways about Fleet Foxes or the latest TV On The Radio record, but I just can’t get into them the same way I have with other albums.

I just finished Carl Brown’s book “Journey to the End of Taste.” To explain Celine Dion’s megastardom, he explores various theories on art appreciation. Much of the chapter on so-called Bad Taste explains that art critics consider lowbrow is generally appreciated by nonacademic audiences strictly for enjoyment and not because of any possible social capital that might be gained. Highbrow art is thought to be appreciated more for reasons of building social capital than aesthetics, though the perceived quality of the art is essential in anyone’s appreciation. To enjoy something for any reason beyond its intended utility is to review it with some set of personal standards. For example, if you think a rug looks good, the fact that it keeps dirt off of your new carpet does not influence your decision that it looks good. You are judging the rug as art and not as a rug. You might buy a rug that looks good and is good at keeping your carpet clean, but in that case, your decision is based on liking the rug on utilitarian and aesthetic levels – you like a rug for having all of the qualities you want in a rug.

However, if the rug is exceptionally elegant looking and if you plan to place it in an elegant room for your elegant peers to admire, then you buy the rug for aesthetic, utilitarian and social reasons. You build social capital when your friends see the rug. They assume that anyone with such an elegant rug must also be elegant.

I wonder if my attachment to certain albums is based on some kind of emotional capital. Some of my favorites might be considered terrible by peers or critics, so I doubt the list is based on social capital. I think I like these albums because I’ve attached feelings to them and in my new, not quite completely adult maturity I don’t have much emotional capital left to give.

It’s kind of hard to cope with the idea that I won’t be emotionally attached to music I haven’t heard yet. I love music and I want to hear new music. At least if I get too miserable thinking about it, I know exactly which record to put on.