Sharing

As I have said before on this blog, I do not make a living from playing guitars weirdly, or playing them normally for that matter. I have a corporate day job where I am well appreciated and fairly compensated. However, I never have seen a hard and fast division between my day job and music. Just because I'm sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 each day doesn't mean that I stop being a musician during this time. I think about music a lot; I notice sounds constantly.

One of the most thrilling moments in my corporate career was when I realized I could download iTunes onto my PC and then see everyone else in the building's shared playlists. I've always been a huge fan of mix tapes and I'm always fascinated to see what people put on them and how they decide to order the music. The syntax can sometimes be just as revealing than the phonics. But that is a whole other discussion.

For the most part, as you might have guessed, most people listen to the same stuff. There's plenty of Jars of Clay, Alan Jackson, Sarah Maclachlan, Outkast. Then the people who listen to "cooler" stuff all seem to listen to the same cool stuff: Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Beck. There are very few oddities and incongruities.

Until you get to my list.

From the minute I downloaded iTunes, my playlists have been huge exercises in musical exhibitionism. If I cannot be diverse, eclectic, and odd in my work interactions, my playlist allows me to show off the tattoo I keep hidden under my sensible khakis.

So what's on my playlist? There's Slayer and Glenn Gould. There's Merbow and Stevie Wonder. There's Sidney Bechet and Morton Feldman. It's a really odd mix. Once, through a tech slip-up, my playlist was moved from my PC to the main share drive, which meant that everyone could see it (and, unfortunately, it was posted as "Larry Marotta's Library"). As one of my co-workers commented, "You have really eclectic tastes in music."

Of course, all of the music is on there because I sincerely enjoy it. It certainly doesn't shock me at all. But there is an odd thrill of creating this musical persona that is an amorphous, monstrous beast, and is quite incomprehensible to anyone who is not me. It's like having a nipple piercing that no one knows about (I don't, BTW). I like that.

It is really important to me that people discover and listen to and appreciate my list. I am constantly checking under the Sharing tab in Preferences to see if someone is listening to my playlist and I am disappointed when no one is.

Then I try to imagine who the listener is, and what song or artist he or she could be listening to at that moment. Then I imagine what the listener is thinking about the music. Of course, though, it is all anonymous. I have no idea which employee owns which playlist, and most people probably don't know which list is mine. Sometimes I do manage to figure out which list belongs to whom. But sometimes I can't find out, even if I do try. For example, there was a playlist for a while that had some really neat guitar stuff -- Snakefinger, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith -- but after the company let a bunch of contract workers go, I never saw that list again, and I never did find out who that kindred spirit was.

There are some odd things that do happen through my list. Like my conservative work friend who discovered to her chagrin that I liked Sabbath and Slayer, who then apologized for her more traditional tastes. (I assured her that it was unfair to compare most people's range of music tastes to mine. I did not, however, tell her my theory that Sabbath was the original Christian rock band.) 

And then I am sometimes confounded by odd playlists that have mostly very junky mainstream music on them and then something incongruously good like Eno or Kraftwerk or Bjork. How does that happen?

I guess it all boils down to the fact that it is music that I believe makes me interesting and worth knowing. When I started playing guitar, I was a real misfit of a boy who looked a mess and had no aptitude for anything physical. Playing guitar made me cool and worth noticing. So even to this day, I think it is the musical choices reflected in my playlist that make me interesting, not how well I do my work, or what I talk about at the lunch table. The person who listens to Boredoms, Pat Metheny, and Pandit Pran Nath is much more interesting that the person writing reports and plugging in dates on an Excel spreadsheet.