Does environment affect music taste?
 |
Does environment affect music taste?
I have been in Southern California for about a month. It is a sea change from Brooklyn, where I spent the past year. I live near the beach, in no danger of getting robbed, knifed, or otherwise menaced by neighbors. It is quiet, sunny, and rather un-metal here.
As a result, my music tastes have shifted. Black metal has no place here. I don’t feel cold, grim, or kvlt. In fact, I often feel relaxed. (This is a novel feeling for the New Yorker in me). I find myself listening to slower and slower music. For the first time ever, I am voluntarily listening to doom metal. Stoner metal is starting to make sense to me. I never thought this would happen.
Perhaps it’s simplistic or wrong to correlate environment with taste. People listen to all kinds of music everywhere. Recordings enable one to experience sound far away, in distance and time, from its origins. Other technology enhances this displacement. The Internet delivers information from anywhere in the world. Headphones help override our environment with this information. We can imagine ourselves in Norway’s forests, New York’s concrete jungle, or Lita Ford’s boudoir. Well, hopefully not the latter.
The reach of recorded music yields fun juxtapositions. Deep in the ghetto of some American city (Baltimore, perhaps), I saw a resident wearing a Fleetwood Mac shirt. At a recent metal show in Los Angeles, I saw someone wearing a Burzum shirt and flip-flops. That’s the logical equivalent of wearing a Jack Johnson (the musician, not the boxer) shirt and combat boots. It does not compute.
Maybe I am just simple and sensitive. Put me in slower surroundings, and my tastes slow down. Others are undoubtedly more resolute. They will listen to their metal of choice wherever and whenever. Walk the dog: grim black metal. Water the plants: grim black metal. Seduce the wife: grim black metal. Tombstone epitaph: “Husband, father, grim and frostbitten.”
