Soundtracks

Due to limited space I try to keep my home library to its current size of about 2500 books. Since there are constantly new acquisitions (a box from Hamilton discount books arrived just yesterday), I have to remove books from the shelves at the same rate I add them. Shakespeare and Plutarch are safe. So are Heinlein and Herbert. But lesser known scifi or mystery authors are likely to get the boot if I deem some new purchases more shelfworthy. At a minimum, a book is shelfworthy if in principle I might read it again. (Since time also is limited, in practice I might not – in fact, probably will not – reread it, but the principle is that I wouldn’t mind doing so.) On a couple of occasions I’ve tested my choices by randomly picking one book from each of the 50 or so shelves for a reread. So far it has worked out.
 
Similar space constraints apply to the single set of shelves for my CDs and vinyl. Since the space is tighter so is the standard of shelfworthiness. It’s not enough that I might in principle listen to a CD again. To keep it, I have to be pretty darn certain I will listen to it again. Music is supposed to heard time and again. There are CDs on my shelves that I haven’t played in more than a year, but I’m suspicious of them. After two years without being replayed they should go, and most of them do.
 
And yes, most of my music is on CD or vinyl. I’m not a Millennial or Zoomer: my music library is not on my phone. There is not any tune on my phone. Since my most common location for listening to music is in my car, the fact that neither my car nor my truck (both 2021s) has a CD player (nor do most vehicles built in the past decade) is an annoyance. Fortunately, portable CD players that use an auxiliary port to access a car’s stereo are not expensive. Mine gets put to good use – or perhaps bad use from the perspective of a passenger with different tastes in music.
 

Anyway, it is hard not to notice a pattern in the winnowing of my CDs based on the replay standard mentioned above. Although sometimes I deliberately step outside the box with a music purchase (my box, that is: it might be squarely inside another listener’s box, such as recent pop music, most of which is painful to my ears), these outside-the-box CDs after the initial listen-through tend not to get replayed. So, they eventually get selected off the shelf. What remains on my shelves overwhelmingly is blues-based rock-and-roll of the type that dominated the charts in my teens and 20s (the usual suspects: Little Richard, Joplin, Hendrix, Clapton, et al.). Not entirely: there is a pretty good 1940s selection and a smattering of non-rock genres including (a little) classical, but mostly there is rock. The majority is vintage from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Again, not all: there are contemporary bands such as Rival Sons, Dorothy, and the Pretty Reckless that are secure in their places on the shelf, but most of them (including all three named) have vintage sounds. Dorothy even strays into psychedelia (as in Medicine Man or Woman) occasionally.
 
My pattern, for well or ill, is stereotypical. Most people’s musical tastes are set in their youth. We’ve all observed this, but data scientist and op-ed writer for The New York Times Seth Stephens-Davidowitz decided to quantify the effect. Spotify information on downloads and users’ ages proved to be a valuable source. Stephens-Davidowitz determined that women form basic lifelong musical tastes between ages 11 and 14. Men lag a couple years, forming their tastes between 13 and 16. Both tend to evolve a bit and to take new popular music seriously until around 24, after which they typically don’t change much. (There are always outliers, of course, who don’t fit the general stereotype.) These youthful ages are when we form out adult identities and experience key “firsts” in our lives. The music we hear is the soundtrack for that era, and is inevitably tangled with it in our memories. Perhaps the surprising thing is that our attachment to the music of our youth isn’t even stronger.
 
This doesn’t mean we’ll never like anything new and different. We probably will. But odds are it won’t dominate our shelves.
 
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Freddy had a point. So, whatever your preferred genre and whatever your life soundtrack might be, enjoy it. I’m happy with mine being mostly vintage rock. Some other generations (IMO) have done worse.
 

 

Canned Heat – Rock and Roll Music