The Soundtrack of My Life - Part 1

One of the benefits of meeting new people, is hearing new viewpoints on all sorts of topics.

To my surprise, music does not play a major role in some people's lives. To me, this seems next to impossible! In school, music was almost intrinsic in defining a person's identity. 

Socially, in high school and to a lesser extent university, the music you listened to determined who your peers were, and vice versa. From there it influences what people wore, how they spoke, how they carried themselves. You had the wannabe gangstas with the super baggy pants, the ginos with the slicked back hair and the fist pump before it became the fist pump, the indie kids with their acoustic guitars and sheets of tabs laying around, the metal kids with the multiple piercings and so on. This formation of identity plays out long after graduation. Looking at current Facebook photos, as well as posts, of friends from long ago, you can still see how the molding all played out. Maybe there's less piercings, or the hair has less product in it, the clothes are not as flamboyant, but the markers are still there.

How music may not have a major influence on somebody, I have yet to figure out. Even if the interest in the music from an artistic standpoint was only mild, it still played a big role into how people fit into the social construct of school. Having been back in the dating world for a little while, not surprisingly, it's one of the very first topics that come up. To this day, it is still a thread that holds people together and carries, fair or not, certain stereotypes that come along with it.

Because of the above, I will never understand the phrase "I like everything" or "I don't have any preference" when it comes to music. There's just no way...

*** After figuring out I had way more to say about this topic, I decided to break this into two or three separate posts. To be continued...