Stubbornly Suspicious

For as long as I can remember—at least going back to high school, maybe further—I’ve always been suspicious of other people’s music recommendations. Every album I bought had to feel like my discovery. Whatever age I was, it didn’t matter if it was my older brother, my best friends, my brilliant wife, professional music critics—the least trustworthy!—or amateur bloggers: I have a kneejerk response to every music recommendation made to me. Oh really? It’s great? Sure, maybe we’ll just see about that. I know it’s a stupid response. I try to curtail it but I admit I have a hard time doing so. Maybe the reaction is rooted in my experience of clumsily discovering so much music—seemingly created just for me—with no real roadmap when I was a teenager (a topic I’ve been going into great detail on for the last couple months at Do You Compute, starting with this post). Even my brilliant wife gets peeved at me when she recommends something to me and I sort of shrug my shoulders, only to buy it a few weeks later as if the thought had occurred to me without her aid.

Despite the illusion, in a way it does need to feel to me as if I have picked out an album without her aid, without anyone’s aid. I convince myself—manipulate myself into thinking—that I am forging my own way with regards to the musical paths I go down. Sure, there are sources I trust—my wife, a few friends, a handful of bloggers—but I don’t trust any of them entirely, 100%. I’ll hear a recommendation from one and sort of file it away in the back of my mind—even from a trusted blog, I often don’t click on a new mp3 link the first time I see it pop up in my RSS feed. I wait until the same recommendation comes from a second trusted source, or passes through the air and hooks into my mind, and then I go back and revisit. Through this somewhat vague, ephemeral quorum of recommendations, I arrive at a new discovery—and it feels like my discovery. You’d probably all be aggravated by my methods if you were around me enough to witness them; only my brilliant wife rolls her eyes at how arduous I sometimes make things for myself. “Just click on the mp3!” Even in this age of every song at one’s fingertips, my most common refrain is “I’ve heard of them, but I haven’t heard them.”

This habit probably hurts me more often than helps. The way indie snobs are mocked for being suspicious of anything mainstream whatsoever—well, I’m that, plus I’m suspicious of indie snobs, too. So I’m kinda doubly fucked if I don’t watch out. For instance, I’m always suspicious of new albums or bands that seem to be widely hailed. That’s why I didn’t get into Animal Collective until last year, and why I still haven’t gotten into Grizzly Bear (though lately I’ve given it another shot with them). It's the natural hate-the-hype reflex innate in most indie dicks (when they're not doing the reverse, perpectuating hype and slagging haters). But there are worse omissions in my personal history of listening than that. This reflex of mine is the reason I’m always picking up so many new-to-me blind spots. For years I was inexplicably suspicious of pretty much the entire canon of rock history. Not that I figured it was all crap—of course I didn’t—but I just couldn’t will myself to buy a capital-C “Classic” simply because it had been unanimously canonized by the critics or the popular masses. That couldn’t be the only reason I bought a record. I have to find my way to each record in my own oddly organic way. Maybe my wife simply brings a record home and loads it into our iTunes library—that’s how I got into the Byrds. Maybe it’s me going to the Beverly Hills Library and picking up albums willy-nilly in a rush of hyper-consumption—that’s how I finally clicked with Elvis Costello and Big Star. Maybe I fall down the obsession hole with specific genres or eras of music, hence finally getting around to both Faust and Fleetwood Mac in the last couple years.

But really, what’s the alternative? Whenever I try to force an acquisition—I have to buy this because it’s a classic and I’m supposed to know it—its chances of not taking increase. Plus, that organic path keeps me looking forward. I like knowing that my discovery of, say, John Cale's solo material or Caetano Veloso's early albums or the entire discography of the Fall are all still in my future. It might be days, months, or many years before I get around to these albums, but I can only take them on when I feel they are rightly in my path. Ultimately, I'm in no hurry.

Comments

[Alex]

I have no issues with the instinctive paths we take to music and trust my intuitive routes to and away from music. Ultimately, I think it's productive as we develop our own relationships and contexts for the music in the process. All of the Daptone-like retro soul is the product of crate diggers developing their own vocabulary of soul based on finding their own organizing principles for the music - something other than a linear history.

[Jared]

I'm a victim of the same reflex. It doesn't strike people as indie snobbery, though, because I generally make my earth-shaking musical discoveries while doing allmusic.com research on a subgenre that's been dormant (or co-opted into something else) since the 70's. The one reason I'm moved to fight these instincts is that I get the (admittedly narcissistic) feeling that a certain band is seeking out MY fandom with the same single-mindedness with which I'm off pursuing my own tastes in a corner, purposely and foolishly detached from any particular scene.

Of course, some artists (like late weird Nilsson and The Mountain Goats, to cite two absurdly different examples) only want to cater to the sort of listener who's just as stubborn as they are. But what about artists who have a more expansive sound and a friendlier attitude yet find themselves marginalized for some reason or other? Do you have an opinion on how they can best reach people like ourselves -- those of us who need to be forced to sit up and take a listen to something we'll probably like?