You know the movie High Fidelity? It's easily one of my top five movies of all time. I may qualify as a nerd in several of the genus' subspecies, but I am most definitely and finally a music nerd. This is a movie for people like me. It shows the types of obsessions that we have about record labels, limited releases, track order, and the like. Perhaps given the ubiquity of Top 40 (and Top 10, Top 20, Top 50, and Top 100) lists, it also shows our passion for ordering. Top Five Track One, Side Ones of All Time. Top Five Songs about Death. Top Five Crimes Perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s. It's true: we really do that. I can remember conversations with like-minded friends about top five (or ten) Art Blakey sidemen, break-up songs, underrated bass players, country covers, and pop records of all time. Oh, and saxophonists. The list is a staple of the music nerd's life.
Of course, inherent to the list is the idea of ranking, i.e., determining who is the best. It's kind of a weird obsession with music fans, but it's pretty universal. "You think Sonny Rollins swings harder than Trane? Are you freaking kidding me?!" "In what world is The White Album better than Revolver?" "Only a complete imbecile would think Screamin' Jay Hawkins sings 'I Put a Spell on You' better than Nina Simone." Music lovers strongly attach to their opinions. They can make a discussion of the Top Five Folk-Rock Duos after Simon and Garfunkel more contentious and of seemingly greater gravitas than the First Council of Nicaea.
Which brings me to one of my favorite scenes in High Fidelity. The record store staff are talking to a regular customer, Louis, who has just witnessed them belittling another store patron and this exchange happens:
Louis: You guys are snobs
Staff: No, we're not.
Louis: Yeah, seriously, you're totally elitist. You feel like the unappreciated scholars, so you shit on people who know less than you.
Staff: No!
Louis: Which is everybody . . .
Staff: Yeah . . .
All this list-making, all of this obsession over minutia, all of the fierce defense over one's opinions leads almost inexorably to being a music snob.
I used to be okay with that. When I was growing up, I seemed to think that becoming more opinionated was somehow the point of it all. After all, even the most famous of musicians and critics are virulent in their attacks on others. I've mentioned it elsewhere, so I won't rehearse it again here, but older generations of musicians disparage the music of younger musicians almost as a point of honor. It's not just old versus new, of course. Country fans can't stand hip hop. Blues fans think jazz is pretentious and egg-headed. Hard rock fans think that "disco sucks." Etc.
As I've mentioned previously, I was a huge Prince fan when I was young. It started with the 1999 album when I was just 10 years old (yikes!) and continued through my junior high school years. But when I joined the school band, I started playing saxophone and listening to jazz. Soon my listening habits began to change. Instead of Prince, I was listening to John Coltrane. Miles Davis replaced Morris Day and I dug on Ella Fitzgerald more than Vanity 6. Needless to say, not many 13-year-olds in my zip code were head-bobbing to Horace Silver in 1985. On one hand, that made me a bit eccentric and outcast. On the other hand, it kind of made me feel superior. Superior in taste, in intellect . . . even morally superior in some way, as if the decision to spin Blue Train instead of Purple Rain was of ethical significance.
And so, over the next few years, I began to "refine" my record collection. I not only bought more bebop, I actually got rid of most of my pop records. I can even remember when I sent a crate full of them — including my Prince albums — with one of my sisters to be sold at a flea market for 10 cents apiece.
Fast forward a couple more years and I find myself in college majoring in music. I had a few great professors and a whole bunch of similarly-minded musicians as peers. My ears opened up to all kinds of new sounds that year. Also new that year was a book that came recommended from my professors and made the rounds in our studio — Miles: An Autobiography. You felt cool reading it. Hell, you felt cool just carrying it around so that girls could see that you were reading it. It's very entertaining. (E.g., from page 9: "But shit, I wasn't alone in listening to them like that, because the whole band would just like have an orgasm every time Diz or Bird played — especially Bird. I mean Bird was unbelievable. Sarah Vaughan was there also, and she's a motherfucker, too." There's pages of this stuff.)
So I'm reading this thing and feeling all cool — I remember I was home for a weekend riding in the back of my parent's car going somewhere, reading this book. Then I come across this passage: ". . . I really love Prince, and after I heard him, I wanted to play with him sometime . . . he plays his ass off as well as he sings and writes. He's got that church thing up in what he does. He plays guitar and piano and plays them very well . . . Prince is a very nice, a shy kind of person, a little genius, too."
Say what?!
Miles Davis, the Miles Davis, jazz legend and icon, thinks Prince is a genius. Not just, "Yeah, I can dance to that stuff," but "genius."
I'll be honest with you, it shook up my world. Not least of all because I remembered all those records that someone got for about $2.00 a few years back.
Well, I was still learning and apparently hadn't heard the whole story, you know? Yeah, evidently Miles had been singing the praise of pop music and musicians for a couple of decades by that point, even though my listening hadn't gotten past his mid-Columbia output. In fact, he'd even released an album where he covered Cyndi Lauper's "Time after Time." Oh man.
I kind of took it hard. At first, I wanted to side with all those jazz musicians who accused Miles of "selling out." The thing was, this guy was there at the birth of the cool. There was no one who could school Miles Davis on what was cool. He practically invented the notion.
So, I started picking up copies of all those Prince albums I'd sold off, this time on CD. I was watching Saturday Night Live the night Miles Davis died during my sophomore year. The musical guest was Public Enemy and they observed a moment of silence in his honor. That seemed right.
I also started a slow shift in my thinking about music that continues to this day.
The thing about music is that most people listen to it because they find meaning and joy in it. When you're a music snob, it's like saying, "You shouldn't find meaning and joy in that thing that seems to be giving you so much pleasure." Why would you do that? This world is hard enough. We need joy and meaning wherever we find it, and we don't all find it in the same place.
These days I enjoy more music than I ever have. I have a couple of college degrees in music and I get why some of it is more complex or sophisticated or technically difficult or whatever, but I have to say: I don't really care. What matters to me when I'm listening is if the performer is connecting with me emotionally. They don't always, but I can always appreciate the attempt.
That doesn't mean there isn't some music I'd rather eat chalk than listen to. Kenny G still turns my stomach. You can keep your Jimmy Buffett, too. I could list a bunch of them, but I don't want to get in the way of your aural bliss. I don't have to dig what you're spinning, but musical taste is not a moral issue for me anymore. The power of music is.
Oh yeah: I'm also gonna keep making those lists. I may have mellowed a bit, but I'm still a nerd.
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