{"id":3257,"date":"2010-11-09T09:07:12","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T17:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/?p=3257"},"modified":"2010-11-09T09:07:12","modified_gmt":"2010-11-09T17:07:12","slug":"how-do-you-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/?p=3257","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Listen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So we were watching Elvis Costello on The Colbert Report<\/a> last Friday.
\nElvis performed a song off his new album National Ransom<\/a>.
\nAs the song concluded Andrew noted “Well that was a bit of a change for Elvis Costello.”
\nI asked him what he meant and he replied that the song was more upbeat in general than the majority of Elvis Costello’s works.
\nNow ignore the fact that, despite what Andrew says, I wouldn’t know an Elvis Costello song if it came up and bit me on the ass, I realized that I had no idea, absolutely NONE, what the recently concluded song was about.<\/p>\n

It’s no big revelation that Andrew and I have different tastes in music. My interest in much of what is popular peaked about twenty years ago (and I’ve got some ideas about the correlation between my beginning to ignore popular culture and my beginning graduate school, but I’ll leave that alone right now), Andrew has kept up in trends and in bands and is far more aware of any<\/em> music than I am.
\nBut how could we have both been in the same room, in the same quiet, low distraction room listening to the same piece of music and have come away with far different experiences?<\/p>\n

I think it has a lot to do with our tastes in music.
\nWhen I listen to music, especially a new piece of music, I listen…. Well I listen to the music. It takes a long, LONG time for me to be able to parse the lyrics to be able to follow the story, as it were, of the song. If the actual music of the song is unappealing I won’t have a chance to understand the story that the musician is telling. A quick glance at my CD rack shows a lot of The Beatles, Joan Armatrading, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, They Might Be Giants, and almost the entire Steeleye Span collection.
\nAnd so my tastes in music run towards the upbeat, the simple, the bouncy, the regular of rhythm, or music that is sad and tragic, but has instrumentation that makes it appealing for me to listen to.
\nWhich is, I think, why I have absolutely no interest in rap or hip hop. To me music in those genres sounds like a bad Saturday night in a cheap apartment complex and I can’t listen long enough to get interested in what the musician is commenting on or the story that they’re telling.
\nThe same for punk, heavy metal, and country. There’s just not enough about the MUSIC involved in these pieces to make me listen to the lyrics.<\/p>\n

I won’t make any comment on grunge. I don’t like grunge because I hate Nirvana and I hate Nirvana because I lived next door to those over amped little freaks one year at Evergreen when I was studying molecular and cell biology, and organic and biochemistry all at the same time. To me Nirvana is inexorably linked with biochemistry, cell structure, mitosis, and SOO-sie and I will never be able to shake that. Enough ranting.<\/p>\n

I have a friend who can’t stand ANYTHING classical. To me that’s like hating vanilla. How can you dislike something that is so patently unoffensive? But I guess she’s listening for the song, or for the story and I’ve got to admit that there’s not much story involved in classical music. At least not any story that’s easy to pick out of the music.
\nSo do you listen to the song or do you listen to the music? And what music do you listen to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So we were watching Elvis Costello on The Colbert Report last Friday. Elvis performed a song off his new album National Ransom. As the song concluded Andrew noted “Well that was a bit of a change for Elvis Costello.” I asked him what he meant and he replied that the song was more upbeat in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-margarets-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3257"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3268,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions\/3268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}