On Ever-Changing Tastes and Preferences

I try to understand the biases I may have in my rankings. I don’t care about trying to avoid them. Ultimately my rankings are more about my preference than about what I suspect is quote-unquote “good”. Of course I’ll take note of those biases as part of my rationale, but they’ll still be a part of my rationale. I enjoy being thoughtful, but this is about me and how I make the music I listen to mine.

…It’s not not about the music, but I want it to be explicitly clear that any amount that it is about the music is only insomuch as the music is filtered by me and my understanding.

hey there

This blog is about me. I made this pretty explicit in the above quote taken from the homepage, but I want to elaborate a little bit. It’s not about a static me, it’s not a justification for why my opinions are good or valid. It’s about a dynamic me, it’s about me and how I interact with music. I’m not just listening until I can say, “Whelp, now I know this sucks, moving on.” I’m not just trying to form and confirm my opinions. There’s some element of that, sure, but far more than that I’m trying to learn. I’m trying to discover what I like and don’t like, yes, but I’m also trying to understand why and how that changes over time.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to go back and retcon, or at least recontextualize, past posts on this blog. It certainly won’t be the last. What I’m getting at in this post is that that’s kind of the whole point, right? It’s true that I’m taking in external inputs and applying external judgements— and that’s definitely interesting and engaging (at least, I’d like to think so). But if I look at that without understanding the personal dimension, without considering the effect that process has on me, I’m missing such a core element of the experience. I think that applies everywhere. If you look at your own experience as solely a series of externally generated inputs followed by internally generated and externally applied judgements, you miss a core element of that experience. You lose out on the beauty of your own change. I don’t think you lose out on the change itself, I think that happens regardless of what you do. But, I do think there’s great value in the act of observing and participating in the change, and you lose that.

That’s the key thing, that change, change over time. In this blog, how I change over time. I’m trying to “make the music I listen to mine”. I’m trying to “filter the music, by me and my understanding”. Those aren’t things that leave me untouched. They’re not supposed to be. Filters pick up bits of what they filter, they become the pollutant, they change. Making something mine is an assimilative process; what’s mine is a part of me, it becomes me, I change. That’s not to say my preferences are necessarily temporary or superficial, or that I’m opposed to having established preferences. It is to say that those preferences are one factor among many, and that they are absolutely a mutable factor. If I fail to recognize and welcome that mutability, I fail to fully engage in the process of claiming the music for myself. Developing ownership over new things necessarily involves a change within myself— refusing to change disables me from developing ownership.

This ability to be willing to be changed in order to take truer ownership is a learnable skill. It’s something I’m still learning, something I’m trying to get better at all the time. It can be a struggle to listen past things I’ve historically had a negative disposition toward, to not let that consume my listening and overpower the other things that are happening. It can be a struggle to differentiate between opinions that are merely influenced by my biases and opinions that have succumbed to the weight of those biases entirely. It’s not easy, it’s not automatic. It requires an intentional malleability of self that is difficult to achieve. It’s a struggle.

I find it to be incredibly worthwhile. Not everybody does, and that’s fine. Making the shift from listening with preferences to listening through preferences is work, and a lot of the time your initial preferences will actually be pretty effective— even in the long run. They do a great job of helping you predict what you will or won’t like. Being tied to your initial preferences can be useful.

It can also be limiting. I want more from my music, from my listening. I want to listen to music I’m not naturally inclined to, to music I will dislike immediately and be predisposed to continue disliking afterward. If my primary motive were to check against my static current self, that would be unpleasant, and it would continue to be unpleasant as long as I continue to resist what I listen to. But that’s not my primary motive. My primary motive is to check against my dynamic self, and to check that dynamic self against everything else. So I choose to not resist, I try to investigate, to be willing to embrace. When it’s unpleasant, I don’t turn the volume down until I can barely hear it (but it’s still technically playing near me)— I turn the volume up and start asking myself questions. Responding to dislike with airs of finality is, I think, so much less interesting, fulfilling, and enjoyable than responding with questions and curiosity.

But maybe it’s not, for other people. You can think of the listening process as a way to first figure out which artists you like and which you don’t, and then be set up to enjoy the ones you figured out you liked and avoid ones you didn’t. That’s fine, that’s great. That is, I think, the norm. That was my perspective when I first started this project. But that perspective dissolved for me as I continued to listen, as I exposed myself to more and more. I discovered that I felt the most powerful and engaged when I was willing to be changed to take truer ownership, that the mere effort to match to existing preferences felt empty and superficial in comparison.

I’ve learned that tastes and preferences are ever-changing. They aren’t set. I’ve decided to learn to lean into that, to take it to its fullest conclusion. I don’t feel that I’m doing anything drastic; I’m just encouraging an already occurring natural process to happen faster and more thoroughly. I’m facilitating the interaction between myself, the music, and my natural preferences. Remember, this project isn’t not about the music, and it’s not not about my preferences and biases. It’s about how the music and my preferences interact with me. It’s about how those interactions bring about change. It’s a way for me to document those interactions and use them to better understand that change. Tastes and preferences don’t stand still. They’re alive, and it’s through this blog that I hope to get to know mine a little bit better.