If you don't like what I like, that's okay.

tumisu | CC0 | Pixabay

I've come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of people in this world: the kind who know what they like, and the kind that think everyone would like what they like if only they gave it a chance.

This observation came to me after a conversation with friends on Facebook this week. The discussion was prompted by a meme that said: "If you could end Coronavirus by sacrificing one genre of music, what would it be and why country music?" I laughed and nodded, because I don't like country music. And then I shared it.

Some folks ignored, or read right past, the last four words and offered up their own nominees: opera, electronic dance music, dubstep, rap and/or hip hop, head-banger music, and polka all got their moment in the sun. And then somebody stood up for country, and I said I'd shared the meme because I don't like country. And then it was open season on people's taste in music. Mostly mine.

Maybe I asked for it by posting the meme in the first place. But I honestly thought folks would get a chuckle out of it and then scroll on by. Silly me.

To be clear: I like country rock -- the crossover stuff that was popular in the '60s and '70s. I like bluegrass. I tend to like folk music. But I don't like the stuff country radio stations play. Back in the early '80s, I worked in the news department of a country music station, and I could not stand the music. I don't know what it is -- whether it's the Southern accents or the twangin' guitars or the lyrical emphasis on beer and trucks and the good ol' USA -- but it just doesn't do it for me.

Well, a couple of folks took that as a challenge. "Listen to this song! How can you not like it?" Uh, because it's country? "But if you stopped listening in the early '80s, you haven't heard alt-country. Try this!" Okay...and nope. "Now this one, if you don't like it, you must be dead inside." Huh. I guess I'm dead inside.

Why do people do that? I mean, I've been known to inflict Flook on people, but only after they've said they like Irish trad.

No, really, I get it. I do. People fall in love with something and they want to share it. And music is a natural for that, being so tightly entwined with emotion as it is. The best music evokes a strong emotional reaction. We say it speaks to us.

Some of us are primed to hear the message of certain songs -- to feel the feelings the music is trying to evoke. And some of us just aren't. And that's okay.

If you like country music, have at it. More power to you.

And if you don't like Irish trad, that's okay, too.

***

In case you followed the link above and wondered whatever happened to my adventure with the Smithsonian Boomers Chorus: I enjoyed the experience for what it was, but a lot of my fellow singers had no musical experience and we didn't have anywhere near enough rehearsals for those folks to perfect the music. Next time I'll look for a group with a higher level of musicianship, even if it means having to audition for a spot.

And also the spring session was canceled due to the coronavirus lockdown, just like everything else.

***

Who's Flook? I'm glad you asked. Here's a taste -- but feel free to skip if it you don't like Irish trad.

***

So what's going on with that #escapevelocity thing? We're closing in on the final days, aren't we?

We are. And some things are changing. The situation is still kind of fluid so I won't say more right now, but tune in next week for a full report.

***

This bloggy musical interlude has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep washing those hands and wearing that mask!

Raising the musical question.

(I was going to title this post, "Begging the musical question," but Grammar Girl set me straight on what begging the question actually means. You're welcome.)

Over the past couple of weekends, I've been spending some quality time importing most of my CDs into iTunes. Yes, I know, digital music has been around for several years now. But old habits die hard. It still seemed easier to me to plunk a CD into the Bose player than to pull all of the discs out of the drawer and load them, one by one, into the computer.

Also, the last time I tried importing CDs into iTunes, several years ago, the process seemed unintuitive and time-consuming. But maybe that was because iTunes defaulted to playing each CD as I uploaded it. Or maybe Apple has improved the program.

Whatever the reason, I had never done it. But I've been thinking about it for the past couple of months, ever since a friend remarked to me, "You don't really listen to music, do you?" Um, well, no. Part of it is that I have really weird musical taste, which I've written about here before. Also, it's been difficult for the past couple of years because one or another of the kids has been bunking in my living room pretty consistently, and not only is the living room where the CD player is, but of course they'd rather listen to their own music than Mom's. Especially when Mom insists on singing along.

And too, there's the problem of certain songs or albums being tied in my memory to people or events I'd rather not think about.

But this is certainly a sorry pass for someone who used to know how to play four instruments and who went off to college with the intention of majoring in music. So I decided it was time to bite the bullet and just load the CDs into the computer already.

The project went faster than I thought it would. And you know what? I've got a lot of really good music. The late 1960s and early '70s (well, except for disco...) produced great pop albums like Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, Gerry Rafferty's City to City, and Billy Joel's The Stranger -- albums that don't contain a single song I would skip. And I have a fair selection of classical music: J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Haydn's Symphony No. 94, Smetana's Ma Vlast, and several classical guitar CDs -- including the one I'm listening to as I write this post. It's called Rameau, Scarlatti, Couperin, Bach, and the guitarists are Sergio and Odair Assad. It's somewhat unusual, as classical guitar albums go, because it includes only one Bach transcription ("The Well-Tempered Clavier") and nothing by a Spanish composer at all.

I'm looking forward to spending some quality hours reacquainting myself with my own music collection. Please forgive me if I start to sing along.

***
These moments of musical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

You don't want me to make a playlist. No, really, you don't.

wpclipart.com

Back in November, when Kriss Morton and I first started talking about the Crosswind tour, she suggested -- among other things -- that I could put together a playlist for one guest post. I demurred. But the subject came up again later, and I finally had to confess that I didn't want to do a playlist because I haven't bought any new music, other than Irish trad, since 1983.

That might be a slight exaggeration. I mean, there's the odd new Christmas CD (Chicago, Hall & Oates, and Jethro Tull, as well as some rockin' Renaissance tunes). I picked up Raul Malo's "Today" because a friend was really, really into him (hi, Kim!) and I liked that I could almost understand the songs that are in Spanish, and could sing along with the help of the liner notes. A couple of guys from Czech class gave me a copy of a Vlasta Horvath CD, which I liked so much that I searched the intarwebz to find the lyrics to the songs in Czech so I could sing along. (I even made an attempt to translate them; the less said about the result of that exercise, the better.) Another friend once gave me a tape of gamelan music. And I bought "Sevilla" by Young & Rollins, which, it turns out, is classified as nuevo flamenco. That, together with CDs by Irish trad bands -- mainly the Chieftains, Lunasa, and Flook -- constitutes the sum total of my "new" music purchases for the past (oh gods!) thirty years. Virtually verything else I've bought has been a replacement for an album I once owned on vinyl.

I didn't set out to step so far away from popular music, honest. It just kind of happened.

The breakaway began in 1982, when I moved from WKEE-FM in Huntington, WV, to WGNT-AM crosstown. KEE was a top-40 station; 'GNT played country. This was when country was in its "Urban Cowboy" phase, and I just couldn't get into it. (Sorry, country music fans -- I like bluegrass, but not country.) We had a sister station that played album rock, but I can't listen to heavy metal for long without getting depressed.

From there, I moved to WTAR-AM in Norfolk, VA, which played oldies from the '50s and '60s; our sister station, WLTY-FM, played lite rock, but I'd long since gone off chirpy love songs due to too many bad relationships. Next stop was DC, where I eventually ended up at all-news WTOP; 'TOP's sister station, WASH-FM, also plays lite rock (see "chirpy love songs" above). So the bottom line is that from '82 on, I didn't like any of the music I was hearing at work.

And by then I had little kids, so we were listening to a lot of "Wee Sing" and Disney soundtracks at home. In their teens, one of my kids got into Eminem and the other got into Disturbed, neither of which were my thing. At the same time, they were both listening to soundtracks from Broadway shows -- "Rent" and "Wicked" in particular.

Our taste is nothing if not eclectic. But you can't make a playlist out of it.

What I'm listening to these days is Chicago -- their early stuff. I picked up a box set of their first two albums plus V and VI, and I've been playing them while I do my time on the elliptical machine. I had forgotten just how original and challenging their music was -- the rapid key changes, the unusual time signatures ("A Hit by Varese" is in 5/4) -- and how it requires active, almost participatory, listening. I can sink my teeth into it, the same way I can sink my teeth into singing along in Spanish or Czech.

If you've gotten this far and you're still looking for a playlist from me, here's what I suggest this week: "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon." Have a great week, everyone.

***
These moments of musical blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.