IdleRich
IdleRich
(I wrote this post in response to something someone said in another thread but I realised it was too much of a digression for that thread and so I deleted that post and wrote it here cos I do want to discuss this issue)
What thing that interests me is the degree to which music that you hear in shops etc registers with people. Some people are at the most open end of the spectrum and soak it up like a sponge, they hear music in a shop or a taxi as actively as they would a tune that they have deliberately put on their own stereo at home, while some don't hear such things at all. And, as with many things, most people's reactions are in-between. They do hear songs and register other things fed to them in public but not in the same way as they would with a thing that they actually went out and bought in a shop and brought back and opened up and placed lovingly on the gramophone.
I've come to think about this a lot because I've realised that (my other half) Liza lies at one end of this and is possibly the most extreme example of which I've ever been aware. I've been trying to work out - or perhaps just decide - whether this is a good thing or not. This phenomenon is not just restricted to music, one time it particularly struck me was when that film with Thomas Hardy playing both Kray Twins was coming out. The film was greatly hyped and it had been mentioned in articles in newspapers and on telly programmes, plus of course there were billboards everywhere, trailers in the cinema and adverts in magazines and on tv - in fact, to my mind, the saturation was so great I felt it ought to have been impossible for anyone who lived in the UK and who could read to be unaware of the imminent release of this film. But the two of us were stood at a bus stop and a bus stopped right in front of us, held up by traffic for a good five minutes a couple of metres from our noses, the entire side covered in a huge advert for the film. As the bus drove off I casually made some conversation along the lines of "I wonder how different the two roles he plays will be?" and she said "Who?" - and a few moments of conversation revealed that she had no idea about the film's existence, and furthermore, she had not read the advert which, only a few seconds before, had filled our entire field of vision. This fascinated me, her ability to quite literally not see things that didn't interest her. And once I'd seen it once I was able to notice it more and more; I quickly grasped that she was the only person in the world who had never heard Get Lucky - of course she had heard it in a million bars and shops etc, but she didn't know it, didn't know Daft Punk had a new album out.... in one sense she doesn't know anything about what is going on at all.
But at the same time she spends ages digging for obscure experimental dance-music and finding weird tunes that no-one else knows with bizarre beats that still make people dance. In some sense I find this degree of compartmentalisation fascinating and possibly useful for what she does. This ability to ignore - to simply not hear - what she considers (or finds) uninteresting and trivial is useful I guess, but personally I think that being that blind to the majority of popular culture would leave me feeling totally untethered...
What thing that interests me is the degree to which music that you hear in shops etc registers with people. Some people are at the most open end of the spectrum and soak it up like a sponge, they hear music in a shop or a taxi as actively as they would a tune that they have deliberately put on their own stereo at home, while some don't hear such things at all. And, as with many things, most people's reactions are in-between. They do hear songs and register other things fed to them in public but not in the same way as they would with a thing that they actually went out and bought in a shop and brought back and opened up and placed lovingly on the gramophone.
I've come to think about this a lot because I've realised that (my other half) Liza lies at one end of this and is possibly the most extreme example of which I've ever been aware. I've been trying to work out - or perhaps just decide - whether this is a good thing or not. This phenomenon is not just restricted to music, one time it particularly struck me was when that film with Thomas Hardy playing both Kray Twins was coming out. The film was greatly hyped and it had been mentioned in articles in newspapers and on telly programmes, plus of course there were billboards everywhere, trailers in the cinema and adverts in magazines and on tv - in fact, to my mind, the saturation was so great I felt it ought to have been impossible for anyone who lived in the UK and who could read to be unaware of the imminent release of this film. But the two of us were stood at a bus stop and a bus stopped right in front of us, held up by traffic for a good five minutes a couple of metres from our noses, the entire side covered in a huge advert for the film. As the bus drove off I casually made some conversation along the lines of "I wonder how different the two roles he plays will be?" and she said "Who?" - and a few moments of conversation revealed that she had no idea about the film's existence, and furthermore, she had not read the advert which, only a few seconds before, had filled our entire field of vision. This fascinated me, her ability to quite literally not see things that didn't interest her. And once I'd seen it once I was able to notice it more and more; I quickly grasped that she was the only person in the world who had never heard Get Lucky - of course she had heard it in a million bars and shops etc, but she didn't know it, didn't know Daft Punk had a new album out.... in one sense she doesn't know anything about what is going on at all.
But at the same time she spends ages digging for obscure experimental dance-music and finding weird tunes that no-one else knows with bizarre beats that still make people dance. In some sense I find this degree of compartmentalisation fascinating and possibly useful for what she does. This ability to ignore - to simply not hear - what she considers (or finds) uninteresting and trivial is useful I guess, but personally I think that being that blind to the majority of popular culture would leave me feeling totally untethered...