Scattershot

Being a bit lazy and obvious in my tastes, I sometimes forget that the breadth of my musical tastes is not merely an amusing oddity, but actually makes me a little smarter about music than I like to give myself credit for. My radio station at work this morning took hits at Cameo, Dre, TSOL, John Denver, and Anthrax right in a row, and for me it didn't really skip a beat, though I did hit skip on JD, not being in the mood for the country road just after TSOL's wildly indulgent vocal style. Probably the strongest songs for my mood today were Keep Their Heads Ringin', a fantastically seductive California gangsta track, and Anthrax's Joe Jackson cover, "Got the Time" - not exactly a similar pairing, but somehow harmonizing for my tastes.

Anthrax has always been an odd one for me. On the one hand, if I'm not listening, I always seem to dig their sound - but, sometimes, paying attention to what they have to say (and this is a metal band that indulges in Having Something to Say) can be detrimental, because I actually find myself a little embarrassed by the music, looked at for its component makeup. I have this problem OFTEN, which is interesting, considering how much I am able to enjoy some artists whose components I find downright silly - and yet, there's an awful lot I prefer not to look at critically, and just listen to without allowing myself consideration or a technical view.

This probably explains the fact that I can enjoy Type O Negative so much, and appreciate the satire more than I worry about the violence or misogyny.

It doesn't explain why I cannot hear a note of Toni Braxton's strange nasal-grunt-as-emotional and hollow head voice singing without being mortified - but so it goes. I guess having certain taste excuses us from maintaining too much integrity (it's not as if Peedah Steele was prone to naturalistic singing - and if you watch that clip, it's obvious I don't require "pretty" amongst my musical predilections as a baseline requirement ...).


The thing about all this is that I usually plead musical ignorance if the topic of any particular style ever comes up in conversation - and I make a lot of fun of myself for being a middle-aged suburban woman dancing in the office to g-funk ... but the fact is, as oddly composed as I seem to be, and as incongruous ... I'm no less valid a consumer than anybody else.

At the end of the day, though, I may fit in a more predictable-box than all this likes to defy. I married a hair metal musician once, and that wasn't an accident; I like it loud, I like hair, I like things that make me want to bang my middle-aged suburban head - and I like cranking it in my car.

It may not seem a lot less incongruous, from the outside, for a woman dressed for a drone-job, outside the 80s and significantly far past 30, to be as interested in thrash as in Ice T (and T had a metal band of his own, after all), but contextualizing the age and everything, it probably at least fits *better* anyway.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to admit that as self-effacting as I am about my musical taste and its weirdness - it is of course a source of self-appreciation, if not actual pride or vanity per se. My blog even says, "I contain multitudes" and it's no small part of my satisfaction in my own skin ... that I shed certain "skins" from time to time, wearing one or another - and that I can do that. The facets of my taste reflect the facets of my tendencies, and I am a bit insufferable on the point of my own multiplicity.

But really, at bottom, beyond all my egotism about being a nonconformist, or at least being weird, I genuinely enjoy variety. The limits we choose for ourselves seem in many ways so constricting, and I revel in creativity, surprise, and certainly in unpredictability in certain aspects. I'm not a mercurial, elusive, arresting archetype of the Strange, Unattainable/Maddening Ideal our culture has created - but it would be a job to pigeonhole me with any success. It would be too unspeakably boring to be ANY one thing all the time - the object of romance, the doting aunt, the competent professional, the silly girl, the hard working homeowner, the author, the six-ways-to-Sunday nerd, the devoted friend, the lazy, entitled, middle-aged, well-off American. I have to be all those things, and I have to try other things too, and sometimes I have to think about some of them and wonder even about myself.

Then again ... sometimes I have to walk the dog.

And from everything I am hearing: now is getting to be one of those times.