At parties, dances or in the car during late night trips to burger joints, I was never the one to set the playlist. I never messed with a sound system in public or whipped out my iPod and said, “Hey, who knows X?”
It wasn’t stage fright that kept me from the auxiliary jack; theater took care of shyness. This was something worse: a fear of becoming an impostor of musical taste, a false authority on art. It’s an apprehension that countless art appreciators, including almost all of the Recess staff, occasionally suffer from. The average student, certainly at Duke, fears becoming an impostor, in whatever discipline, at least once in their time here. In the company of ambitious peers, it’s all too easy to think, “I have no idea what I’m talking about and I don’t deserve to speak.” When discussing art, such an attitude not only keeps budding appreciators from finding their critical voice, but suppresses an honest enjoyment of art itself.
Remember high school, when everyone pretended to fit in until they actually did? Well, in the realm of mainstream music culture, I never did actually integrate. I didn’t know what a “Dougie” was, and I missed the class where the Cali Swag District taught everyone how to do it. I couldn’t “get low” like the people in music videos and the dance floor was a nightmare. I couldn’t sing along to Top 40 hits, because 1) lyrics are hard for me to hear, 2) I was too lazy to look them up and 3) singing along to Katy Perry about “daisy dukes” that “melt your popsicle” felt... unrefined. If I asked my high-school self to describe his relationship to art, he would describe himself as “culturally clueless.”
Feeling othered by contemporary pop, I looked for relief in a social niche. I fell in with a clique of bohemian counter-culturals, the types who wore hemp hoodies on eighty-degree afternoons while they trashed Ke$ha as being shallow and derivative.
Everyone in that group looked up to the de facto sociocultural leader, Trey. He was the resident music guru. Trey spoke confidently about everything from the ’60s rock canon—Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, The Doors, etc.—to ’90s grunge—Pixies, The Smashing Pumpkins—to hazy jam bands like Umphrey’s McGee and The Grateful Dead. He said things like “Oh, he was soooo high when he wrote this” and did things like watch the The Wizard of Oz set to Dark Side of the Moon. I hung out with his clique because it made me feel part of some cultural elite.
To validate my membership in the group, I studied the music to which Trey gave his seal of approval. Eager to assimilate as an indie-rock aficionado, I stumbled blindly through record shops, wishing I had inherited a record player and a sizable music collection like Trey did. I cursed my parents for not endowing me with any musical heritage (it was an unfair jab—I never asked my parents for recommendations and my dad’s cumulative post-university CD collection was stolen from his car). I took guitar lessons, bought jeans that barely fit and memorized lyrics to Trey’s favorite ballads.
It was miserable. Trey’s passion for music and classic rock culture was genuine, but I faked mine to fit in. No matter how hard I worked—there’s the rub, it was “work” to enjoy music—I never reached rock guru status. I was always one canonical album behind Trey and his gang. My suggestions of great musical works seemed always cliché, amateur or laughable.
Trey set a standard that I thought all music appreciators must meet. All respectable music lovers must be able to quote the biographies of their favorite artists, I thought. A good listener must have the latest trivia on the tip of his or her tongue. To love music, you have to know it back to front. Of course, I never met these unreasonable, self-imposed requirements.
The result? I suffered a musical coma. Fed up with being left behind by the world of music criticism, I stopped listening to and exploring new music entirely. I made up excuses why I didn’t need music in my life: straight theater doesn’t deal with music; music will distract me from schoolwork; I shouldn’t run with music because the sounds of nature are more important. Two years of potentially wonderful music appreciation were effectively wasted.
Mine might be an extreme case, an exceptional manifestation of the “impostor syndrome.” But to some degree, all potential art appreciators, especially those who don’t identify as artists themselves, question their critical authority.
Maybe there are simply so many experts out there that’s it’s too intimidating to speak up. There are, after all, many talented critics on and off campus—not only fellow arts writers, but leaders of political, social, athletic and academic conversation. Sure, great criticism often comes from veteran voices, but a fresh perspective has as much a right to the podium as any.
The act of writing my first music review for the Recess shocked me out of my coma. The need to adopt an authoritative stance towards a work of art, especially one with which I was totally unfamiliar, forced me to believe in my right to speak. I’m not yet in a place where I’d feel comfortable hijacking the iPod at a large social gathering. But you can bet that if you’re at my place, I’ll be rocking some trip-hop electronica or shoegaze, and for a moment, I’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
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