Pop music
Dreaded question
Marcus Berkmann
The Christmas party season has finally passed, and we are all tending our wounds. Most of mine seem to be selfinflicted, the engrained habits of talking too much and listening not quite enough having worked their usual deadly magic. It was strange, though, how often the subject of music seemed to crop up in small talk this Christmas, especially among men when all the usual subjects had been exhausted. And then the question would be asked. The terrible, dreaded question that might silence even regular members of the Late Review panel. What sort of music do you like?
‘Well,’ you say, playing for time. ‘Where do you start?’ ‘I don’t know,’ says the other bloke. ‘Where do you start?’ Radio DJs ask their callers the question all the time, supposedly just to make conversation. The callers always snuffle and panic and say, ‘Oh, all sorts of stuff,’ while trying to decide whether they should describe their taste as ‘eclectic’ or ‘catholic’. (They invariably go for ‘eclectic’, as they think ‘catholic’ sounds a bit threatening.) They then try to change the subject as quickly as possible while the DJ guffaws silently off-mike.
It is a cruel question. Anyone who is still obsessed with pop music past the age of 30 will probably have amassed a sizeable record collection full of all sorts of old rubbish, and no one wants to be pinned down to any one genre or subgenre. Whatever you say, it will say too much about you, and not necessarily what you want the other person to hear. For instance, if you say, ‘I really like the Beatles’, that implies that you are a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, you are resistant to new music, you listen to the same stuff that you were listening to in the womb. And yet who of us doesn’t like The Beatles? Similarly, if you say The Velvet Underground, you are telling your questioner that either (i) you are a student, (ii) you are in a band that won’t get anywhere, or (iii) you were once in a band that never got anywhere and you will never recover from the disappointment for as long as you live.
In short, you can’t win.
You could be mainstream-cool, and say you like the Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party. Or, as I heard one person do over Christmas, say you’d been trying to decide between the Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party, and had come to the conclusion that the Kaiser Chiefs edged it. There comes a glint into a man’s eye when he knows he is talking rubbish, but he has started the sentence so he must finish it, however painful it might be for everyone present.
You could be mainstream-uncool, and say you really liked the James Blunt album, but that’s to misunderstand the purpose of the game, which is to demonstrate to people slightly drunker than you that you possess musical gravitas. Besides — and this is all based on extensive Christmas party research — the current party line on James Blunt seems to be that you bought the album, played it a few hundred times and then decided you didn’t like it. Similarly, the consensus on Coldplay is that the previous album was much, much better, and you have confirmed this by having played nothing but the new album for months.
You could be obscure, and say you like Crispy Ambulance or someone, but that’s an instant conversation killer, unless you have had the misfortune to bump into the band’s greatest fan, who runs his own Crispy Ambulance website and once spotted the bass player in Sainsbury’s.
You could say you really like Bob Dylan, but that may be the gravest risk of all. Mere mention of the great man has been known to suck all breathable oxygen from a party and send all those present into a coma from which they never recovered. After all, you don’t want to make enemies. Or be arrested for mass murder.
I know someone who says he particularly rates some of the later, less well-known incursions into dub reggae by Status Quo, and has a rare valuable acetate of an unreleased speed metal album by Boney M. But he always goes too far and starts talking about Kurt Cobain’s Christmas album. One must practise moderation in all things at Christmas, especially lies.
The question may actually be unanswerable. I might have to come back to it soon in this space, or start asking it myself.
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