Decades ago, I had a roommate who didn’t like any of my music. I don’t mean just my musical theater albums, which I have always known are a niche taste. This guy didn’t want to hear even the Beatles (“corny”), Prince (“affected”) or Ella Fitzgerald (“old”). “Porgy and Bess” was “too busy.” Jazz left him numb (“Why is this good?”).
After a while, I figured out the difference in our tastes. I like music with melody and harmony in the forefront; what he found most affecting was rhythm and vocal emotion, especially of a rawer kind that parallels speech — the blues, African pop, Smashing Pumpkins, Melissa Etheridge. I never happened to play him Billie Holiday, but am sure he would have gotten her. I suspect that a thought like “That’s a pretty tune” was alien to him and harmony was about as imperceptible as ultraviolet light (just as most of what moves people about ballet is to me, alas).
Our difference in sensibility fascinated me. He had never known anyone his age who didn’t thrill to his music; I had never known anyone who couldn’t listen to Ms. Fitzgerald or Prince.
If you survey pop music today, his sensibility won.
I thought of this while taking in “Hell’s Kitchen” on Broadway, a musical with songs by Alicia Keys. The audience was wild for it. Me? I found the music … thoroughly admirable.
Ms. Keys is a fantastic talent; there’s a good reason she’s a megastar. But I can’t say I vibed to the songs, nor could I hum even a part of one the next day. My cousin, on the other hand — a musically knowledgeable theater professional who accompanied me to the show — loved it.
Seeing her response helped me to understand mine. “I’m just not hearing it right,” I told her. I was listening for deftness of melody and harmonies that change every two seconds, tracing quirky pathways. At “Hell’s Kitchen,” that was like hollering for ketchup at a Japanese restaurant: I was missing the music’s essence and value, the snatch and rapture of the beats and the texture and dazzle of the vocal fireworks, including the melisma in Shoshana Bean’s roof-raising rendition of “Pawn It All.”
Art ever evolves: Artists typically do not want to do the same thing generation after generation, and it is natural to seek to break the old rules in search of new highs. In ancient Greece, music for public consumption was at first austere, rendered by pious ensembles rather than individual performers. But after the fifth century B.C.E., public music in Greece became more sensational, more about the solo star and lyrically concerned with profanity, love, sex and fame. It’s a typical life cycle in art that begins with constrained forms, such as representational painting and the often tidy rhythms of early classical music, but morphs into more subjective and even oppositional frameworks (the poet Paul Éluard’s “The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange”). In American pop, all of this takes us from “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Just the Way You Are,” with their easily parsed melodies and pretty harmonies, to the more raffish, ragged realness of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Rehab.”
A study has shown that pop has gotten markedly less melodically and harmonically complex over the decades. Meanwhile, I doubt we need a study to teach us that modern pop is, for one thing, rhythmically richer overall. Styles change. So do tastes. Not everyone’s tastes change at the same pace, however, which is one reason we so often find ourselves bewildered by what other people like to listen to.
It can be fun to try imagining yourself into someone else’s head to hear music the way he does. There are opera fans who take in the music as a kind of extended reverie or psychedelic journey; some will recall Tom Hanks’s character in “Philadelphia” swooning to “Andrea Chénier.” I kind of get that if I try. Or “Teen Spirit”: It took me a bit to understand what everybody loved so much about it, but mentally squinting, I finally gleaned that the lyrics (“a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido, yeah”) are a kind of poetry with which Paul Verlaine would have felt a kinship. And the music grew on me — that guitar snarl after the “yeah,” the hypnotic power of the piece’s droning repetition.
But beyond the fun of it, thinking your way into other people’s musical tastes can be a great exercise for understanding other perspectives generally — and reminding yourself that your beliefs are often based on subjective orientations, not immutable truths.
This is especially relevant in these times of bitter polarization. It’s easy to assume that those with views opposed to ours are either ignorant or evil. Trying to understand people’s taste is a good exercise for democracy — and might even lead you to budge a bit on your own. I once asked a heavy metal fan, with genuine perplexity, “This really interests me. What gives you pleasure about this music?” He explained how the dissonance excited him and how the high volume made him feel he had entered another world. Now I felt I was listening to the music for the first time. It was one of the most valuable exchanges I ever had about music and paralleled ones I have had since about things like racial preferences and, of course, Israel and the Palestinians. It’s worth trying. You might like what you hear.
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Incidentally, a few weeks ago I wrote about the modern tradition of giving all shows standing ovations. I wondered whether people would soon be standing up for numbers during the show, and — wouldn’t you know? — it’s happening at “Hell’s Kitchen” for that song “Pawn It All.” Not that I begrudge the magnificent Ms. Bean the approbation. But still.
One more thing: I can’t help recommending a marvelous new score I have gotten an earful of that combines the old school and the new: the electro-swing musical “Whisper Darkly.”
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