Why Your Personality Shouldn’t Be Based Around Music.
Having a Personality based on Music feels so… insignificant.
Coming from a dude who puts music-listening at the forefront of his identity; to make one person feel unique, it’s kind of getting old.
The more I meet new people, the more I see that, really, everybody has their own favorites. What makes me so different, then?
Though I’m not the first time who made this point online, I considered making a point at how many of them felt like sensationalistic, heavy, wake-up call essays that depend too much on opinion.
Until, I realize… we all play with our own little opinions.
And in this case… experience.
I don’t consider myself a music nerd, I especially don’t consider many of my friends all-out music nerds (friends, what a shocker).
But whenever I do have conversations with people whose taste I really like, it feels. so. boring.
Especially when your conversation starter is a song they either don’t know or don’t really grow fond of, continuing that discussion can feel out of the question.
Though to be fair, maybe the people I talk to are boring; But really, there’s something in being overly zealous that repels me away from it.
First off, to “listen to music” is about as common a task as breathing. Michael Spitzer said it best that music is as accessible as running water.
This couldn’t be truer in the advent of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, even beforehand, with the rise of pirated Mp3s and the thriving of radio stations.
If you have any of those services, or even just YouTube for that matter, you can essentially just build your own bubble and never even come out of it.
Without the open listener, people setting each other up as valid tastemakers feels more mundane than ever, let alone the algorithms galore already doing that to you in a more personalized manner.
Granted, it’s more of a state of mind I see in myself more than I see in others, and it’s practically an easier problem.
But guess what? Music is very subjective; one man’s unpleasant, buried mix is another man’s avant-garde masterpiece.
No matter how a casual listener’s bubble consists of “basic” Top 50 Spotify Top Hits, if it brings enjoyment to them, it’s good.
On the other hand, adjacent to the “close-minded” casual listeners, comes the eclectic music listener, which is more common than we might think.
In the world of NPCs with the same basic music taste, and the mavericks and vanguards combating through their immaculate vinyl collection, comes another observation: people barely care about genres nowadays.
The internet can bring us to many niches and helps us discover new records in the tip of our fingertips. (Very cliché to say, I know)
As Tiktoks and short-form content become people’s main discovery tool, they certainly help in making the most random songs go viral and chart with no rhyme or reason.
Yet these Tiktoks don’t adhere to a single genre, not even to the aristocratic line between serious and meme.
This, along with streaming services once again, make an “eclectic music taste” that spans artists, genres, and decades, more accessible as ever.
But what do certain people do? Gatekeep until the artist declares bankruptcy? Make a weekly 3x3 chart of their listens? Post their yearly Spotify Wrapped and how they listened more to 97% of people?
As much as it’s cool to spot on our own, wearing it as a badge of honor feels so insignificant.
At this moment in time, I see through its perceived purpose and ask myself “What even is the point?”
When really, all that we did was press play and keep on the records everyone can just search in an instant. People fake up their Last.fm statistics to look cool, game the industry, putting their group to Top 1.
Though it’s more about the albums we listened to. I don’t care about the toxicity of Tiktoks and Reels, but I don’t like gatekeeping.
I don’t know what motive people had for that, but I was essentially this elitist gatekeeper in order to make myself look cool, when if anything it made me more of a jerk.
And with what I’ve brought today, in the era of what seems to be music’s detiorating value, comes my existential crisis the more my musical personality’s insignificance unravels.
Diego Castillo said it best when nothing seems to be obscure anymore because of the reach of the internet, coming from an eclectic musician, radio host, and DJ like him.
As much as he brings out undiscovered gems in his podcast Foaming at The Mouth (highly recommend), he’s aware of how less of a big deal it really is.
Instead, he seems to be just fine with tagging us along with his finds on his year-end lists.
And though if I seemed unusually pessimistic in my little think piece, I don’t think it’s all useless. Remember there is still some significance in articulate online discourse.
At least for me, I still enjoy music journalism, if you consider this or AOTY ratings to be like journalism.
And of course, there will always be worth in supporting your favorite artist, through their craft, to which you enjoy.
In an individual level, it’s still great that we keep tabs on what music we tend to enjoy. If you’re going to take away anything from my observations, it shouldn’t be that you should never enjoy music.
I guess just pick up another hobby along with music listening; like woodworking, I don’t know.
Anyways, take care.
