Taster's Choice Is Coffee, Not Advice

It is true that our minds do not all work in the same way, and I am reminded of that every time someone tries to give me a piece of unsolicited 'advice'. Most of the time, the things people say are not only implausible or impossible for me, but make no logical sense whatsoever. Recently, I encountered one of those moments that made me stop and question if I am simply not made to coexist with this world.

I had been commenting that this year has been particularly bereft of interesting new music, and that finding anything that excites me has turned into more of a chore than it has ever been in the past. Someone took it upon themselves to give me 'advice', which consisted of saying, "change your taste".

I'm at a loss; can that even be done?

Taste is not a conscious choice we make, or at least it isn't for me. I was thinking of this in terms of loving a person, to make the idea more concrete. If we say we love someone, do we intend to say we wake up every day and choose to do that as if we had another option? I can see a degree of nobility in making the claim that we are choosing the person each and every day, but beneath that sentiment is an implication that we could change our minds at any point, because the person has not made any lasting impact on us. That feels like a terrible thing to put upon someone, a transactional relationship that does not at all feel like the sort of thing we want to consider love.

The same thing is true when we are talking about music. The songs and albums I love are not conscious choices I made. I did not wake up one day and decide I wanted to be a fan of certain styles of pop and rock, nor did I tell myself there were certain vocal tones that would be my favorites. Those were decided for me by chance, neurology, and chemical reactions. The music I love is the music that stirred something in me, that lodged in my head, that challenged my thinking and my emotions. I don't believe any of that can be done by making an argument in my own mind.

But what if it was possible? I think about the implications of being able to shift my allegiance from one genre to another, from set of bands to another, and I find it disconcerting. If the songs that echo in my head are only there because I told myself to like them, it renders emotions into a choice, which means everything we feel would be entirely in our own control. I think most of us have experienced situations that prove we are not in control of our emotions. Additionally, my particular strain of philosophy centers on emotions as the center of our experience, which requires us to accept the ways situations make us feel so we can then figure out how to navigate around the pitfalls and chasms. If it's all a choice, every bad mood or fit of sadness is not just a patch of darkness, it is a moral failing.

To get back to the main point; if we can choose what music we love, can we claim to love anything? It seems to me that if we can change our mind on a moment's notice, our attachment to the music we would be leaving behind was too tenuous to have ever been love. You can't walk away from love without feeling pain or loss, without regretting what you no longer have.

I think a lot of this stems from a disparity in how we think about music. For most people, music is a distraction from the rare times they have a thought in their head. If something makes them tap their toes, they say they love it. For someone like me, music is what makes me think, it's what fills my mind with questions that lead me toward truths about both myself and the world. The music I love is a relationship with a form of the truth, and the idea of being able to talk myself into having that kind of connection with something merely because I say it would be more convenient strikes me as the height of hubris.

Just change my taste... I don't think that is possible any more than talking yourself into not being allergic to your allergen. There are things that exist beyond our rational understanding, and love is one of them. What I tend to forget at times is that many people don't love music at all, but they convince themselves they do. When music means more to you than to them, the language we use to talk about it doesn't translate between us.

That leads to confusion when we can't explain what is going on in our heads, and it leads to frustration when people suggest you attempt the impossible. It also means that, once again, I'm left feeling as if I am completely misunderstood by everyone around me. It's a lonely feeling, and despite how many words I just wrote here, I'm goddamn sick and tired of trying to explain myself to people who don't care, and don't care to understand.