Music makes the people come together

I read an article in the New Yorker years ago that talked about how most people's taste "calcifies" at some point in their lives. Musical tastes, the article says, almost never change after the mid-thirties, and only rarely after the early twenties:

Most people are twenty years old or younger when they first hear the popular music they choose to listen to for the rest of their lives. When we combined those results with a measure of how variable the data were, we figured out that if you are more than thirty-five years old when a style of popular music is introduced, there's a greater than ninety-five percent chance that you will never choose to listen to it.

--Robert M. Sapolsky, "Open Season." The New Yorker, 2005.

If my copy of The Complete New Yorker allowed me to actually export articles from the #@^$?! DVDs, I'd share the whole thing with you. Alas. It's actually a fascinating topic, particuarly if you combine it with some of the stuff Barry Schwartz and Daniel Gilbert have been talking about with regard to choice, variety, and happiness, but that's something for another time.

In any case, I really, totally loathe this idea. Knowing what I like is one thing. Calcifying is another. You might as well say "congeal" or "stagnate" for all the appeal that has.

Which is why I'm really kind of excited that in my mid-thirties - not quite at Sapolsky's cut-off, but close - I'm going through a bit of a musical renaissance. My basic likes haven't changed (I like to be able to sing along), but I'm out there exploring genres I didn't listen to before, artists I've never heard of, music that is young enough that they're citing as influences the music that happened after I was supposed to mostly stop listening. I don't know a lot about music, but I don't really need to to enjoy it. Himself once characterized my musical taste as "college radio-station." Which, you know, we can't all live on the sharp edge of knowledgeable obscurity, and I'm okay with that. I even took it as a compliment - I don't know about yours, but my college radio station was very eclectic.

So what am I adding in lately? Looking at the iTunes library by "date added" and "genre," I'm seeing "blues," "dance," "hip hop/rap," "alternative," "electronic," "r&b/soul," "world," "punk," and, hee, "easy listening" (hello, Shirley Bassey!). Now, I don't agree with all of those genre classifications (how on earth can Beth Orton be alternative, folk, pop, and rock from album to album, and who the hell decides?!) and most of what I'm adding in is kind of the "obvious" stuff off the well-known top of the genres, but the fact remains that it's not quite the iTunes spread I had a year ago. The baby came along and he likes to dance, so we have dancing music. I started working out again, and instead of memorizing poetry, this time I'm using workout music. I am part of a vibrant internet community that shares music with me upon occasion, and I'm finding a lot of new stuff that way.

Yes, RIAA, I download. Fuck you too. As a matter of fact, you know what I'm not listening to right now? That'd be my new CD of The Seeger Sessions, because it's so fucking heavily copyright-protected that it won't burn onto my computer. And since that's how I listen to all my music now, I haven't heard it yet. I'm going to have to download it, even though I already own it, in order to listen to it. Let me tell you what you can do with your DRM, no, really. < /rant>

I almost never download (or upload) full albums, and by far the majority (~95%) of my music collection is still legitimately purchased. But the music people share with me helps me branch out and find new things. Sure, there's Pandora, and I use that too, but that's a two-degree-of-separation service, not one that just blows you out of the water with something you might not have ever thought you'd like. I keep a playlist on my iPod of artists I don't know well, and every once in a while I delete the ones I didn't like or move the ones I have become familiar with and add more. When I find an artist that I like in that playlist, I buy more of their stuff all legal-like. iPod ♥!

After half a decade of mostly listening to NPR, this is just insanely awesome. Of course, now I miss out on a lot of NPR, but I only have two ears and so many hours in the day. And between this and the podcasts (I'm learning about Napoleonic history! Practicing my Mandarin! Brushing up on my stats knowledge! And, um, listening to Dan Savage give caustic advice to the hapless!) I'm undergoing an aural revolution.

Still, I can always use help. Got any podcasts, particularly educational podcasts, you want to recommend to me? Quality is more important than topic, as I am almost as omnivorous about my learning as I aspire to be about my music. What up-tempo new music should I be checking out, given that my knowledge of dance and workout music is incredibly recent? In what direction should I look to enlarge my fledgling ska/punk collection? How about listenable industrial music with a driving beat? Keep in mind that I prefer music with (singable) lyrics, so jam bands, most electronica, and instrumental jazz are pretty much out. Other than that, bring it on! Tell me what to like, and I will do my best to give it a try.

Of course, I was talking about the whole calcification idea with some online friends, and one of them says, "Hey, I read an article about how that's not true for more recent generations." But she couldn't remember where, which is really sad, because it seemed like it would have been a great read. But in the process of trying to find it I hunted around, and I don't think this is quite the article she had in mind, but check it out: Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood, from the NYT Magazine. The article freaks me out no end - the obscene consumerism and the inability to distinguish tastes from values in a lot of the people they speak to are pretty horrifying - but the flexibility in things that are less income- and image-dependent is definitely something I recognize. I think there's a certain point at which it still becomes mortifying to act like younger generations, but apparently the calcification process is, itself, somewhat generational.

Of course, there's conflicting research on everything. This article says your musical taste develops in utero and stops around age 16. Interestingly, it says that the more eclectic your taste is initially, the easier it is for you to continue expanding it later in life. Another article I read, which wasn't very valuable in and of itself, noted that breadth and depth are often opposed; people who like more genres tend to like less, quantitatively, of each genre. Also fascinating, though less relevant: The New Scientist reports on how your taste in music is shaped by the crowd.