One of the most satisfying parts of being a member of the Brown community is getting to know people with interests and lifestyles that starkly contrast with your own. Still, it's nice to reach that breaking point with your friends when you can start talking about your favorite foods instead of your favorite post-modernist literature, or how you spent your weekends in middle school instead of how you spent your summer developing a more efficient health care system in a third world country. Not that those latter discussions aren't stimulating, but they can make it difficult to establish common ground with someone.
For me, an easy way to find such common ground has always been to talk about music, like how weird it was when the Black Eyed Peas came out with "My Humps" after "Where Is the Love," how downhill the band Train has gone, whether Lady Gaga is cool and how obnoxious it was when the Fray's "How to Save a Life" was the background song in just about every TV series' dramatic final scene.
We can all agree that music has an incredible nostalgic power, and since it is unlikely that you went to middle school with someone from Brown, reminiscing on your independent experiences when this or that song was climbing the charts is perhaps the closest thing you have to a common past with your best friends.
Yet people are often reluctant to share common musical interests with the masses, except maybe with a few close friends who will come to their obscure favorite band's concerts and meet more people rather like themselves. The logic seems to be that when you like the same song as everyone else, it's too bandwagon or reveals a lack of true appreciation for good music. But in reality, half the appeal of music is sharing and experiencing it with others. Maybe we are trying too hard to individualize it.
What, then, will be the songs we all have a story or a memory to reminisce about if we are each concerned with avoiding the mainstream? Maybe it would not be as tragic as I'm implying, but it doesn't seem appealing to look back and say, "Bro, remember that semester when I couldn't stop listening to that one band you didn't know, and you kept listening to that one artist I had never heard of either?"
I completely appreciate that we are individualistic and confident enough to explore our musical interests beyond the scope of what the mainstream music industry pushes, and I am well aware that there are plenty more significant memories that we can relive with our college friends someday. But for myself and many others, music is an integral part of those memories.
Yet another problem with the counter-mainstream music culture is that now, the only music in which we all share a common interest is bad party music. And since that is the only music we collectively listen to, it's the music for which our generation will probably be known. That, or "Hey, Soul Sister" — I don't quite know which would be worse.
There is a linear relationship between how frequently we criticize mainstream music and how much worse it gets as we do so in our desire to keep the good songs undercover. Then, when a talented artist like Bon Iver wins the Best New Artist Grammy, I expect to hear much less from my peers about how great he is, since he now seems to have crossed over to the evils of mainstream music.
Do we really want the music of our generation to be remembered for its references to heavy drinking and smoking and having sex with strangers? That's hardly representative of the music we actually enjoy in our daily lives. We all listen to music that has more redeeming qualities than auto-tuning and bizarre Nicki Minaj animal noises — the problem is that we listen to it behind closed doors.
I fear that while we are busy soaking up the deep, broody music we discover on our Pandora stations, the established love song from the 2010s will become "Grenade," and the most meaningful message will be found in "Born This Way." We can do better.
Consider how almost all of our parents, and most of us, too, love what would be considered the "mainstream" music of the 1960s and 70s. Further consider that at this rate, we're likely to wind up embarrassed by what our own decade produces. So instead of rejecting mainstream music, let's try harder to share the artists we love with a bit more enthusiasm than "You probably haven't heard of them," with the ultimate goal of incorporating our favorite music into the mainstream.
Matthew Brundage '15 probably doesn't know your favorite band but would like to find some common musical interests anyway.
He can be reached at matthew_brundage@brown.edu.
