What I Think About When I Think About Music

I haven’t posted in two months mostly because of laziness, and partially because I haven’t been able to think of anything worth saying. 3 minutes ago I decided that I’ll write a post about something that doesn’t matter so that I stop using my lack of anything important to say to justify my laziness. I’ll just write about something that I like talking about anyways but that I suspect that people don’t want to hear me talk about. Then best case scenario, somebody reads this and actually does want to hear it. Worst case, nobody reads it (well I guess the real worst case scenario would be that this blog post somehow causes a chain of events leading to something so bad I can’t even imagine it. But the odds of that are probably less than 5%).

So here’s what I’m going to do: Write about the music I like that I imagine I have interesting opinions on. And then maybe ponder about why it is that I feel like my music tastes somehow give me identity as a person.

First things first: Klein Four was an A Capella group made up of Northwestern math grad students. I love everything their song “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” represents. It’s about love and math, which are contenders for the two most important things in the universe. It’s about multidisciplinarity — the dropping of math metaphor after math metaphor is only possible because the songwriter(s) really know(s) math in addition to being able to write great lyrics. It’s also a great example of a song where the lack of perfection in recording and performance only adds to the beauty of the song (a trait epitomized by The Mountain Goats near-perfect album All Hail West Texas, consisting only of single takes recorded on a tape recorder). It’s also mad catchy. Its opening line is “The path of love is never smooth/But mine's continuous for you” and it only gets better. They have an entire album called Musical Fruitcake that’s worth checking out if you like math.

Taylor Swift’s album folklore rules. It’s definitely too long for my taste, but cut out the 30% of songs that aren’t great and you’re left with an amazing 40-minute album. Songs like “seven”, “epiphany”, and “mirrorball” are unlike any we’ve gotten from her before, and “betty” is her best narrative storytelling since “Love Story”. Sometimes I think of how cool it would have been to be around when some of my favorite musicians were consistently at the top of their game creatively and also massively popular — Paul Simon releasing Graceland or Led Zeppelin releasing Houses of the Holy. it’s fun to feel like the art that affects you personally is also culturally and socially relevant. Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar I think are the two artists I love who are at that level right now, so I am truly grateful to be around at a time when T-Swift is writing music.

I’ve been listening to lots of Chicago hip-hop recently, and feel a strange connection to these rappers from the city I only moved to a year ago. They live in very different areas of the city than I do, and I don’t see much of my personal life experience reflected in their lyrics outside of the occasional mention of a part of the city I know. But rightly or wrongly, there is something powerful about just knowing that I live in the city they live in, that we are part of the same community in a large sense. This makes me somehow feel closer to Noname than to Ms. Lauryn Hill. And when a song like “PTSD” (G Herbo, Juice WRLD, non-Chicagoan Lil Uzi Vert (Philadelphia), and Chance the Rapper) discusses violence in the city, I feel like I get a perspective that is more valuable to me than when Kendrick raps about violence in Compton.

I want to say something about ambient music but don’t have the words right now. Songs like “Teenage Birdsong” by Four Tet and “Xtal” by Aphex Twin both capture emotions that no other music does for me, and I feel that music like this brings me to a part of myself that is deeply important to who I am.

So let me try to step back and analyze myself: Why do I want to talk about my music tastes? Why do I desire other people to know what music I listen to when I’m by myself? I think a lot of it is just wanting people to be impressed by my taste. It’s not an accident that the four types of music I wanted most to write about were so different. Because not only do I get to show off that I have diverse tastes (hear me scream “I’m a cultivated and complicated person!”), but each of them helps signal something different and positive. Obscure math A Capella group: I’m a nerd. Taylor Swift: I’m unafraid to be sentimental. Chicago Hip Hop: I’m hip and woke. Ambient: I’m weird and introspective. Whether any of those things for true is up for debate (metaphorically. I doubt anyone actually wants to debate anything related to my music taste — even any poor soul who’s made it this far in this post), but some part of me wants people to think of me in those ways based on the music I like.

To some extent, I at least define myself by the art I consume. I think this is common. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I won’t try to answer that here though, because this post was supposed to be about something that didn’t matter. Looking back on it, it seems to be all about me. So let’s call it an unqualified success.