While out shopping for groceries on the weekend my ears were assaulted by some adenoidal tenor on the sound system singing ‘o sole mio’ at the top of his lungs. Sounded to me like he was passing a kidney stone while sliding down a razor blade. I recently had a medical procedure to flush earwax, so perhaps my hearing is too acute at the moment. Nah.. I just hated it. Now, I used to shop at a Trattoria in Rivière des Prairies and there was a butcher there who burst into song every now and again which I absolutely loved, Same type of voice, but not squeezed through a shitty sound system. The cavernous space of a grocery store (supermarket) provides a nice reverberation for a solo voice, but the recording was not designed for this environment.

I don’t mean to disparage the tenor, or the composer, but it got me to thinking about how different people perceive music. It is a subject that intrigues me. Some people cannot stand Bob Dylan for example. I love Bob’s voice in all it’s different presentations and permutations over his 60 year career. I don’t like Elton John’s voice. There is nothing the matter with it, and he has written and performed brilliantly for almost as long as Dylan. I just don’t like it. There was a time in the seventies when you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Rocket Man or Honky Cat etc. Maybe I overdosed on it.

I have a book by Carl Wilson (not the Beach Boy) called ‘Let’s Talk About Love (Why other people have such bad taste)’. I bought the book ostensibly to reinforce my rabid dislike of Celine Dion’s overwrought and melodramatic music. He puts the phenomenon of Celine in a social and cultural context which actually helped me develop empathy for people with less sophisticated taste than me. Who am I to say it sucks if others derive enjoyment from it? I recognize my snobbery and it opened up not only empathy, but awareness that other people may have the same visceral abhorrence for music I love. One of my music professors at University used to paraphrase a familiar quote:”Beauty is in the Ear of the Behearer”, or my dad, who often quoted: “chacun à son goût”.

Tastes change. When I was a boy, the mere mention of asparagus or liver would make me dry heave. Turns out it was my mother’s culinary inadequacies that I didn’t like. It’s not like I now wake up craving either of these foods, but I will eat them if presented. I used to wear bell bottoms…..

Many people approach subjects as if there is one way to view them. People like to lump things in categories as if they are a monolith. “I hate Jazz” is one. I used to respond that “the person who says that just doesn’t know enough about it”which is both true and arrogant. The term Jazz refers to styles of music that originated in the late 1890s and contain as many disparate styles as one might expect in over 100 years. Some of the original styles are kind of museum pieces now. Dixieland music, Boogie Woogie and swing music have been displaced by more modern styles. I still like Satchmo, Fats Waller and the Dorsey brothers, but their music fits a sub genre much like Bach is Baroque and Debussy Romantic. The jazz that I am most drawn to is post bop and soul Jazz and even more modern modal and free styles and world music. They all have their place and are as different to each other as human beings are to each other, yet retain enough similarities to be recognized as belonging to a genre. An orange is a fruit, but it is also a citrus fruit and can be found in a section called produce.

Monoliths exist in other areas of life as well. Books: Is it literature, mystery, self-help etc.? Religions: Say the word “Christian” and believers as different as tacit monks to emotive bible thumpers in mansions to humble church goers to self serving hypocrites and everything in between. As much disparity as commonality.

When it comes to pop music, I am of a demographic where the music of my youth is no longer the dominant social guidepost. I am less a consumer of new things and my tastes reflect a different era from the present. I still love protest music and counter cultural music but there is no unifying popular culture like the human rights and anti war etc. like the sixties generated. I dislike much of what I hear in new music these days. The few exceptions are artists that are still writing in a style that has humanistic meaning and reflects an earlier time. I loathe generic country music, auto tune and gimmicks. I change the station.

I care passionately about art and music, and I guess what I am trying to express here is that I care less about what others think if they are not themselves on the path to knowledge and enlightenment. Who cares what I think anyway?

“Some people feel the rain; others just get wet.” -Roger Miller