Music

[Alex K]

I'm kind of a music fanatic in my own way. The soundtrack of my teens was shitty 90s dancefloor music. I reacted by becoming a death metal and classical music enthusiast. But I kind of make a point now of being a music enthusiast and think about each piece I hear individually in terms of whether I can find something interesting in it. That doesn't change the fact that the music I will actively seek out is almost always from my favorite genres.
In ninth grade my music teacher asked us to put on music we liked in class, and the first guy put on some punk rock thing, after which our teacher went off on a rant about how this was inferior music. I wasn't a fan of that type of music at all back then but I remember that the teacher's reaction annoyed me a lot. Thinking back, today I believe that if you sit in your ivory tower where only certain sophiaticated classics even count for anything and everything else is not worthy of consideration, you don't really get music and what it's all about, the different roles it plays and purposes it serves in people's lives. So the ideal I aspire to is being not like that music teacher of mine, may she rest in peace. A GOOD musician will listen to a Beyoncé song and tell you what musical tricks and harmonies they employed to create the effect that they got, and understand why that makes it a successful pop song. Raising an eyebrow because it's not Mozart doesn't require any effort, it's faux sophistication in my eyes.