Blog → I am folded, and unfolded, and unfolding...

Music is a fickle mistress who not only fills your life with joy but can also come to dominate your very connection to the people, places and memories which define the very fringe of your existence. It's due to this intimate link that many of us fall head and heart first into her loving embrace. It's also because of this that we tend to guard the music that means much to us ferociously, but we, or at least I, also find myself using it as kind of gauge of someone's awareness of life. It's as though a person's musical taste and more importantly, their interest in pursuing one, are like the two desperate paragraphs on the back of a novel vying for your attentions and eventual capitulation.

You know it's wrong to base your entire judgement of the whole on those two paragraphs, but it's the human condition which implores us to constantly categorise, pigeonhole and essentially distill the tsunami of information perpetually washing over us and threatening to drag us out to sea. I often catch myself simply trying to write a person off, or devalue my internal league table of their worth based on their musical taste. It's a horrible, shallow thing to do, but I've come to truly realise, especially recently, the significance of music in my life and therefore the weight that such a quality in another holds for me. I'm sure there's a balance that can be established, i.e. not completely excommunicating a person because of their passing interest in a single song by Kei$ha, but rather, accepting that it is truly a subjective value in each of us. I hope that I subscribe to my own mantra that it's more important to care about about why something is and why you believe in that than necessarily what that is.

I struggle with that though. I both love and loathe a service like last.fm because not only can I instantly, from a profile, see that person's two paragraphs, but I also then feel that my attempts to reach out to a person are unfairly compromised by that initial judgement that I struggle not to make. And no doubt that's to my own detriment just as much as anyone else.

Is it a function of getting older? Is it a realisation that time is of the essence and that it's more important to put much time into few than to spend more time filtering? Am I just as shallow as someone who judges superficially on looks or physical attributes or wealth? Maybe. I haven't really reconciled that conflict yet. Many a sleepless night to come, no doubt.

The conflict is further compounded by the fact that I no doubt love music that others find repulsive or baseless or have little regard for. I don't worry so much about my choices, because I know they're the right ones for me, but one can start to wonder if others are basing their own decisions using something akin to my own paradigm. Am I therefore being unfairly and shallowly judged because of my love of say, Counting Crows, or early Spandau Ballet? Or do I have enough 'base cool' in music because the breadth of my musical taste allows for the occasional aberration? Does anyone else actually care or are these neuroses that may simply be my own, purely internal in nature?

Sitting here listening to the aforementioned 'Crows, a song like Colorblind comes on and is instantly recognisable. I'm in an airport transit lounge. It's generally quiet because my cab had a great run through late afternoon traffic and I'm the fourth person to the gate. People are milling about, an occasional conversation occurs between the gentleman in the wheelchair who is travelling today, and his family. The first strains of piano roll from the tiny speakers in my ears and I'm instantly cast into a reflective mood. You can't help but be reflective with a song like Colorblind.

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To find out how it ends, including how Sufjan Stevens fits all this (as he resonates like so many seismic reverberations through my life), please head over to the entry on my site.