Me against pop.

[violajane]

I'm taking a great class called "Classical Music in an Age of Pop."  It's taught by Greg Sandow (www.gregsandow.com), a great critic and music thinker who has some pretty radical (read realistic) views about the state of classical music as we know it.

So, today we talked about pop music.  May I begin by saying that punk/hard core/all things I know

Comments

[muse_81]

Oh, my favorite is when I try to draw parallels between the pop music snob's extensive knowledge of pop music and mine of classical genres.

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Me: "I might not be well versed in pop music, but I can name many symphonies, concertos, and arias by only hearing a few notes."

Them: "Yeah, but that's not important to be able to do. You can't have conversations about classical music at parties."
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Yep, that's right. I get value judgments thrown in my face about how my preferred music isn't important! I even know a guy who wants to give me homework of 10 songs/week. Learn the lyrics, melody, artist, album from which it came, and year of release. For me, it's not their disbelief that I don't know a pop song, it's their feeling that I need to correct it. Need I remind them that without MY music, theirs wouldn't be around.

I want to say that it might be even worse as a gay man who doesn't know "the gay canon", for lack of a better description. (That would be the entire discographies of Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Celine Dion, Bette Midler, ABBA, Queen, Gloria Gaynor, etc.) Because there is a collective gay identity, of sorts, it's as if I invalidate other gays and "the gaydom" by not knowing when Whitney sang such-and-such song...in their eyes, at least.

I could care less, except it pisses me off that a subculture that preaches "tolerance" to the heterosexual population at-large refuses to acknowledge the inherent diversity in it's own population. (But that's a whole different conversation.)