Music as food

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Music as food

Postby cmsellers » Tue Aug 01, 2017 6:02 pm

The Bard as Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night wrote:If music be the food of love, play on!

Some time ago I started a thread here complaining about annoying phrases I heard a lot from people I thought were music snobs.

Since then, it's been pointed out to me that these people just aren't that into music. I thought that paradoxical at first, given that A. these people listened to music much more often than me and B. they act really dismissive of my music. However in hindsight I've realized that these things make sense. I think I can divide the people who I once called music snobs into two groups, and as I was thinking about this I realized that I can draw an analogy to food, and extend it to most people in my family.

The people who enjoy the typical radio pop and nothing else are the people who enjoy a diet of fast food and soda and put ketchup and/or mayonnaise on fucking everything. The most important thing for them is that they eat something, and preferably something that's not overly weird. And for these people, Thai food and folk music both fall in the category of "overly weird." Fortunately for them, there are McDonald's/Top 40 stations everywhere, so they have no difficulty fulfilling their need to have a constant supply of shitty food and music.

The hipsters who only listen to obscure indie pop which sounds a lot like radio pop actually are music snobs, but unsophisticated ones, and often seem to be the same people who are obnoxious yet unsophisticated food snobs. The indie fan is akin to the person who likes one-note cheddars as sharp as possible and the hottest of hot sauces. So what if they can't taste their food? By going to extremes they shows how much better they are than you pussies who eat American cheese and nothing hotter than a jalapeño. Ultimately, however their diet is still pretty boring, and their attitudes make them truly insufferable. I don't know what these sorts of people do when confronted with food and music they don't like; I've only encountered them on their own turf and don't try to get to know them better because they're usually insufferable in other ways.

I'm sort of weird. Though I'm kind of a foodie (moreso than the hipsters), I'm a also picky eater. I like subtlety—I reject the simplicity of both mayonnaise and ghost peppers in favor of black peppers and olive oil—but I do like things to be relatively simple with both music and food. Even in classical music I prefer chamber music to symphonies. Likewise, I don't like either radio pop or indie music, but I do like things like blues, sea shanties, and real country, which are relatively simple, often just a voice and a stringed instrument or harmonica. On the other hand, I don't like super-sweet things unless they have a really interesting texture or a complex flavor. I like baklava and I like Lefty Frizzell, but I don't like Skittles or Chet Atkins. I don't like jazz or jambalaya because I don't like ingredients being mixed together unpredictably, plus I don't like shrimp or brass instruments. I'm happy to try new ingredients, but I generally like them in relative isolation. And I'd rather go hungry than eat something I don't like.

Then you've got people like my father, who eats anything and goes out of his way to eat tequila worms of listen to Gangstagrass, yet mostly eats fairly (but not overly) simple dishes of the sort I eat almost exclusively, and mostly listens to classic rock (classic rock radio stations are usually the only commercial radio stations I can stand). And you've got my mother, who will eat almost anything except for the truly bizarre and pepperoncinis but generally doesn't want to put any effort into it. She won't stoop to eating McDonald's but will happily eat a ham sandwich with mayonnaise. She doesn't really listen to Top 40 music, but does listen to a lot of adult album alternative stations. And you've got my brother, who is both a food and a music snob for real, and goes out of his way to find food and music that he enjoys.

Where this breaks down is that my brother rejects entire genres of music (he won't admit it, but he has conniptions when I try to play any old-style country that isn't Johnny Cash) but not entire cuisines. Yet weirdly, while I was making an analogy, food and music tastes in my family at least track fairly well. I suspect that this may be because the personality trait of openness to knew experiences is connected to both music and food tastes, though the weird thing is that this trait does not seem to be a simple linear one.
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Re: Music as food

Postby Tesseracts » Sat Sep 09, 2017 4:34 pm

I think people who are open minded and particular in one area of life are more likely to apply that attitude to other areas, although there are certainly exceptions. One of my friends knows a lot about music and has rather specific and unusual music taste. Yet he eats a diet of horrible junk food. Until I introduced him to hummus he had never even heard of hummus, which blew my mind.

I don't consider myself a food snob or a music snob, but there is a lot of food that I find terrible and a lot of music that is boring or irritating.
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