Imagine if you will… you are out at a restaurant having a meal with a friend, and you’ve found yourself in that horrible interim period between receiving your meal and the waiter waltzing over to ask whether everything is alright — hoping beyond hope itself that you are indeed fine and he doesn’t have to do anything, but still convincing you that he truly does care for any answer you may give.
To fill the time, your friend reaches over to try a bit of your meal, which you think is just an innocent move. Trust me, it’s not. For some reason they’ve decided to compare your meal (which they saw on the menu and didn’t choose) to their own (which they saw on the menu and, after providing you with regular updates regarding the whittling-down of their shortlist, chose). Unsurprisingly they prefer their own meal, and that’s fine. None taken, right? However, they then try to claim that their meal is better than yours. Well no it’s not. They chose the meal they preferred the look of, you chose a different one which seemed nicer to you. It’s an opinion based on subjective measures. You’ve got to look back on what has just happened and concede that this whole interaction has been a little presumptuous.
Well, telling me that your music taste is better than mine is just as ludicrous. It’s all down to preference, which is incredibly nuanced. My friends will walk past my door hundreds of times (not in one go because that would be rather creepy and I’d like you to please not do that) and hear all kinds of songs playing from my laptop, some of which they’ll like, and some of which they’ll love. No, not really. I’m sure they’ll dislike a few.
The worst thing they could do at that point (and by worst I mean with regards to my perception of them as human beings — which for some is hanging in the balance after seeing them wave their top around and put the pesto knife back in the mayo jar) would be to walk in and assert that their music is of a higher quality than mine. They do indeed proceed to do this. They shouldn’t have.
The music on my playlist is there for a whole range of reasons. Some songs were played on long car journeys by my dad, some are ones I heard other people playing, and others are songs I found myself. The songs on their playlists will have similar backstories to them, I’m sure.
The bottom line is don’t walk in and say this because I will have to read you this entire article and will likely recommend that you dismount that high horse you’re sitting on and join the rest of us on planet Earth — where music taste is a matter of exactly that: taste. Now get out of my room.
Image credit: Siddharth Bhogra via Unsplash
