Playlists and Anxiety

For my birthday this year, I asked one of my close friends to make me a playlist. It was a good idea for a present for multiple reasons, including the fact that music is something he cares about.

He gave me 3.5 hours of new-to-me music, except for one song which I already knew by heart. It was a really fun, really good gift. It caused me a little bit of anxiety at first because I kept thinking, "Eugh, what does it mean that he wanted me to listen to this song? Does it have some kind of hidden message?" But I decided that was stupid, and I applied Kate's Awkwardness Theory #1 and just told him about my stupid feelings, probably as a way to ensure to myself that I really was officially deciding not to think of it that way. This resulted in some worry on his end. Should have applied Kate's Awkwardness Theory #2. Ugh.

One very unexpected result of this playlist was a sudden intense desire to reciprocate. Like, where were my tunes? I started to go through whatever music is on our google play app, and our home server - and I basically picked one or two of my favorite songs from each album or artist that I like. I ended up with a playlist 150+ songs long, but still unshareable.

It was fun to make. The process taught me a few things about myself. Here they are:

- The thing that made me worry the most when I was making this playlist was, "What is my friend going to think of me if that is on my playlist!?" Not, "What kind of subliminal message am I going to accidentally send." Not, "Will he like this song?" - it was super personalized, like, "Will he think worse of me?" "Will he think I'm an idiot/a poser/a sell-out, will he think I have bad taste?"

- I realized that this is not a new worry. In fact, it's probably the very reason why I stopped listening to music actively. Around the time I was graduating from college in 2009, Pandora started to be a thing. The algorithm could find the songs that you were likely to enjoy listening to, so I didn't have to exert effort anymore in finding music that I liked. The way I had always done it before was to say to a friend, "Hey! Here's a blank CD. Burn me some of your favorite songs!" Not exactly legal. But it was much more important to me, the social referencing, than the actual music. It was legitimately fascinating to me what music my friends liked.

- ...and because it's such a blatantly amoral issue, like, outside the realms of right or wrong and squarely within the realms of taste, I found myself often skipping the stuff my friends liked. I just didn't like it back. I didn't have the time, patience, or energy to navigate the learning curve of trying to find myself new music on my own. I was also really into NPR at the time. Politics, not music. Music kind of fell off my radar for about a decade, at least actively deciding what kind of music I liked.

- This boy who I dated for a year, who was in complete and total denial that we were dating, was really into music. He was one of those people who can tell the difference between an MP3 and another kind of sound file that has way more data. He often gave me music. For my birthday he gave me a Ray Charles disk set with him singing with some other really big names. He burned me several CDs called "Music that Makes Michael Happy, volume 1" and then volume 2. On those mixes were an extremely wide variety of stuff, from classical to They Might Be Giants goofy, to Disney! The fact that he put Disney music on these mixes was kind of like giving me permission to like the songs of my past. I knew (and still know) every lyric to every Disney song that ever was. I've had entire conversations with my sister using just lyrics from various musicals. Once we played a game where we could only sing one song from a single musical once, and whoever couldn't think of a new musical lost. The game lasted for hours, and nobody won or lost because the car ride just ended. #dorkiestdorksofdorkdom

- Danny likes to tease me about a lot of things. When I was making this playlist, he said, "Eugh, you like that song?" For example, he got completely sick of EFY music, since his missionary companions used to blast those same few compilations over and over (and over and over) for two years. There's a couple EFY songs that I really like. I recognized inside myself an impulse to remove the songs I like from this playlist because they don't fit what he likes. I stopped myself.

- I would often come across a song and think to myself that I should add it, even though I actually don't like it. For example, the fact is that I really don't like Weezer, and never have. But they were always "cool." But their songs make me feel slimy. I don't know why. It's not specific to their lyrics - just the emotions I feel when I hear the whole thing together: the lyrics, sound, the contexts in which I heard them in high school, the associations with people who like them, vague memories that I can't even pinpoint. But I wanted my friend to think I'm cool, so I wanted to put cool people music on it. That is why the playlist in its current state is unshareable. It's got too much of that and not enough of what I actually like right now.

- Figuring out what I actually like right now is not easy! Am I allowed to like something mainly because of a memory associated with it? So much of my music is tied to memories of specific times in my life, or specific people. Senior year of high school when I was dating Paul and driving my sister around, and it was basically punk rock all the time. Junior year when I was in France, so there's all this French music, from StarAcademy2 (hahahaha) to Jean Jacques Goldman. Those two verrrrrrrry long years when I was writing Danny on his mission and I made two "I Miss Danny" mixes (which ended up being the favorite playlist of my best friend, Cindy - and which I don't actually have in its entirety anymore!). How do you decide what you like? How can you learn that about yourself?

So my task for the next little while is going to be to try to do just that. I guess it requires some exposure, so it's great to have some totally new-to-me stuff from my friend. I will likely also read some stuff and go on a music hunt. I am never going to be a crazy "music person" like that boy Michael I dated, but maybe there's room for me to be interested in it, nonetheless. I mean, I have come to terms with the idea that I don't have to be an expert to like music. And it's okay that my playlist will include some classical, musicals, and probably even some Disney.

For the playlist I give back, the metric is going to be simple: if I hear it, do I skip it? I always skip the "cool" songs after a few bars because they're boring and stupid (and I've always done that, even back when I pretended to like them). I'll call it "Unskippables 2019." I still wonder what in the world he'll think, but in the end, I'll have this nice playlist for myself, not just to share.

Even the hastily scraped together 150+ playlist I've currently got has been a lot of fun to listen to, and especially to run to! I went on a 5 mile run on Saturday (the last warm day in Iowa) and completely lost track of time because I was so absorbed in the music that I already knew by heart. It was meditative, almost hypnotic. I enjoyed it so very much. How much more will I enjoy it after culling the grating punk rock screeches?

***

"I want to know about the places and people with whom you can be entirely, 100% comfortable being yourself, including your flaws."
"Well... it's not binary."
"No, it's not. And you don't have to answer now."

Later I made that list. It was very short, and nothing that made the 100% list included other people. I made a second list for 95%, and it included a very short list of people around whom I sometimes, often, or even usually feel comfortable with my flaws.

This relates to the music discussion. Like I said earlier, music taste isn't really something with a strong moral association attached to it. I have been worried for way too long whether my tastes align with what I think everybody else expects of me or wants of me. It's okay for me to own my own tastes. It's okay that they won't always align with those of the people I care about. I'm probably a bit late to this discovery, but better late than never.