Be who you were created to be, and you’ll set the world on fire. --St. Catherine of Siena
Growing up in the 70s as a Brainy Music Geek (BMG), I naturally listened to a lot of the same music as my Brainy Music Geek friends. Consequently, I spent many hours trying to convince myself that I liked Progressive Rock. Some, like Rush, I actually did like; some, like Pink Floyd, I still do. But such flagship ProgRock groups as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer never gained any purchase in me, no matter how assiduously I tried to absorb Brain Salad Surgery.
Committed as I was, ideologically, to brainy music, I generally looked down my nose at AC/DC, Guns n Roses, and other hard rock groups (though for some reason, I was able to admit that I liked Van Halen.) And though I flirted with Grunge in the early 90s, heavy metal was never on my radar. (Also, I never liked punk rock, but Led Zeppelin was complex enough to pass muster in my BMG world. Southern Rock I can take or leave.)
It took being over 50 and partially disabled to make me finally admit to myself that I actually like heavy music. So now I embarrass my children by playing my AC/DC Pandora station in the car, regaling their friends with Scorpions and Metallica. (Also P!nk, who scratches the same itch in a more contemporary way.) In revenge, they delight in reminding me that the two metal rods in my neck make it inadvisable, if not impossible, to bang my head.
Why do I bring this up? Because being true to myself is about more than bad-ass guitar solos and another midlife crisis. Liking what we like keeps us aligned with the people we were created to be. In C.S. Lewis's novel The Screwtape Letters, a mid-level demon bureaucrat advises his young nephew Wormwood during his first temptation assignment:
The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings...The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books.
For years, I abandoned the music I really liked in favor of more "important" music. In doing so, II parted company with the person I was made to be, and tried instead to be the person I had made up in my head. If catching up with what I missed during my pretentious youth means inflicting "weird old people music" on my children, that seems a small price to pay.
Growing up in the 70s as a Brainy Music Geek (BMG), I naturally listened to a lot of the same music as my Brainy Music Geek friends. Consequently, I spent many hours trying to convince myself that I liked Progressive Rock. Some, like Rush, I actually did like; some, like Pink Floyd, I still do. But such flagship ProgRock groups as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer never gained any purchase in me, no matter how assiduously I tried to absorb Brain Salad Surgery.
Committed as I was, ideologically, to brainy music, I generally looked down my nose at AC/DC, Guns n Roses, and other hard rock groups (though for some reason, I was able to admit that I liked Van Halen.) And though I flirted with Grunge in the early 90s, heavy metal was never on my radar. (Also, I never liked punk rock, but Led Zeppelin was complex enough to pass muster in my BMG world. Southern Rock I can take or leave.)
It took being over 50 and partially disabled to make me finally admit to myself that I actually like heavy music. So now I embarrass my children by playing my AC/DC Pandora station in the car, regaling their friends with Scorpions and Metallica. (Also P!nk, who scratches the same itch in a more contemporary way.) In revenge, they delight in reminding me that the two metal rods in my neck make it inadvisable, if not impossible, to bang my head.
Why do I bring this up? Because being true to myself is about more than bad-ass guitar solos and another midlife crisis. Liking what we like keeps us aligned with the people we were created to be. In C.S. Lewis's novel The Screwtape Letters, a mid-level demon bureaucrat advises his young nephew Wormwood during his first temptation assignment:
The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings...The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books.
For years, I abandoned the music I really liked in favor of more "important" music. In doing so, II parted company with the person I was made to be, and tried instead to be the person I had made up in my head. If catching up with what I missed during my pretentious youth means inflicting "weird old people music" on my children, that seems a small price to pay.
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