Amy Tan reading.
This may sound sexist, and I guess it is, but I am going to make a blanket statement (and please tell me I am wrong) that men feel more passionately about music than women. At least adult men do. Adult women seem to find new passions--at least from what I see around me.
Looking at Scott Parker's Forgotten Music-or the pieces Jed Ayres is running. It's the men who write rhapsodically about music.
It's the men who seem to find a personal meaning in a song. Or in the music itself-the actual notes on the score. I have heard men in person, not just online, talk about concerts, CDs, and groups with as much passion as women speak of Jane Austen or The September Issue of Vogue. Do you think this is true? Or am I living in my own little vacuum?
Growing up when I did the most important things about music were the words-or whether you could dance to it. Somehow I missed loving guitar riffs and such.
35 comments:
... men feel more passionately about music than women.
Certainly true when it comes to my wife and I. She enjoys music, but she certainly isn't as obsessive about it as I am.
I am passionate about the music I like, but for me it is the lyrics that captivate me. Don't get me a wrong I enjoy a solid melody but without words that reach me I cannot truly feel a song.
I think I would agree. Certain songd resonate with me, not in any romantic sense mind you, but of me in a certain time and place. Maybe it's the fact that I'm completely clueless about playing or singing that makes me appreciate any piece of music I enjoy.
I'm one of those people that sing great in the shower, but wouldn't want to inflict myself on the public. Before our Local Waldenbooks closed years back, one of the women invited me to come to the mall's karaoke(?) night. I declined, commenting, "If I started singing, you would have people running, screaming from the mall!"
Oddly enough I can barely make out lyrics but there are certain classical works I can put on replay for hours and catch a different nuance every time it plays.
Modern culture is not something I get all excited about in any form be it print or music or especially commentary by the talking heads.
Hm. I've never had a wife or girlfriend who cared much about it, but some of the women in my critique groups do. Maybe women writers are more musical than the general population.
All the songs from my sixties' girlhood remain in my head-tune and lyrics. Maybe I ran out of room for what followed.
Men are at least overtly more passionate about the music they love - or hate. But occasionally women get just as passionate. I once wrote a negative review about a CD, the artist was a woman, and I took a real bashing by her female fans. There was name-calling and all kinds of abuse, but very little in the way of critical rebuttal.
Maybe men are more obsessive-compulsive than women, Patti. Most of the rabid book collectors, record collectors, DVD collectors I know are all men. Plus, music seems to become part of a guy's life soundtrack.
I think people have a visceral reaction to music than the written word-or at least find it harder to defend their tastes. My husband cannot tell me why he liked Philip Glass. Although I can tell him why I don't. Too many single notes repeated!!Too little variation in tempo. Argh.
I think in general men are more passionate about music than women, but there are certainly many exceptions. As far as lyrics are concerned, they're the last thing I notice about a song. It's the total sound that gets me or doesn't, and if it doesn't I never even get to the lyrics. If I do, I may or may not appreciate them, but they're virtually never the most important thing. Sometimes the lyrics are just indecipherable (think early REM), but it doesn't matter. The song can get me on the total sound alone.
As usual, the range within genders is greater than the range between them. But I vaguely remember reading somewhere about an interesting study wherein music allowed the more tightly-wound adolescent boys to express emotion, in a way that adolescent girls were allowed to quotidianly, and that this trope probably continues throughout life for many.
Yes, there are Lots of women I've known who have been very passionate about music.
Good point about lyrics.
Quite often while riding in the car, my wife will make a comment about a song's lyrics. It might be one I've heard a hundred times, but never paid attention to what it's about. In most cases, the sound is the thing.
I like that explanation, Todd. Interestingly, I don't remember boys in my youth as being as obsessed with music as boys who came a bit later-when music began to get more complicated-less written to appeal to adolescent girls.
I do notice the tune first, MP. But I find it completely frustrating when I can't discern the lyrics.
Evan-and yet all the men on here are very word-oriented. Imagine the lack of interest in the general population.
Oh, pop music got complicated (again), but passionate male geeks had already been flourishing in the more arty folk and certainly jazz fandom before that in the latter '50s and early '60s...and even among some of the fringes of early rock (I suspect Duane Eddy's or Link Wray's audience was at least as male-skewing as, say, Fabian's might be female-skewing).
My father used to say he ignored lyrics, but he revels in the wordplay of certain songs. I suspect that there was a certain shame, in those shame-ridden decades at mid-century, in taking lyrics (many of them banal or trivial by intention, though many of them not) in being seen as taking lyrics seriously. Certainly Steve Allen, whose own lyrics were only marginally better than his usually bland melodies, certainly rode that pony (the man composed 600 or so songs, but how many of us can hum three of them? The closest to a hit might as well've been titled "The Start and Finish of Something Acceptable."
Todd-someday I am going to find a subject you couldn't write a book about. Steve Allen. Wow. I don't remember him well enough to know he sang. But you do.
I blame it all on Children's Digest in my response to the ten books meme on my blog last night.
Certainly a friend of mine, at the height of her inner conflit over her religious life, had put her love of music on hold, becasue music so obviously touched some of the same parts of her brain/psyche that the worship services (and their music) did. (She didn't introduce me to Palestrina, but years earlier she had given me my first Palestrina alubm.)
Patti, I can't answer your question, but you can include me as a guinea pig of sorts. When my head isn't in a book or in front of a TV, I'm usually playing bass or guitar or listening to a cd (or playing along to a cd).
Bass lines, drum fills, guitar licks, orchestration, the mixing and production on albums (Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, or Steve Albini's fuzzed-out overdrive)-- I love it all. Lyrics actually come last to me. I'm more interested in the voice of the singer, and the sound of the words, than what they mean. I'm probably in the minority when it comes to that opinion, however.
Todd-Maybe there is a link between music and religion in the brain. Maybe they touch on the same innate need.
Cullen- I think you are in the majority with these sentiments-with males at least.
I like Todd's view that it's an expression of emotion for some (younger) males. Certainly in my home, I'm the passionate one when it comes to music, and what I'll blog about from time-to-time, compared with my wife. Personally, some songs imprint themselves onto memories and I'll internalize the emotions of that notable moment with a specific track. Perhaps Patti, this is what you spot in the "bit later" phase of the some you've noted. It's a great question. Thanks for this.
It's certainly true in this household. If I say "what would you like to hear?" I get an answer like "I don't care" or "Anything is fine". Those aren't answers you'd get from me. Wife doesn't notice the music in films (so you're not alone, Patti) and rarely listens to music unless I put something on. She says she doesn't really "get" classical music, it's pretty much all background music to her. There are things she doesn't like, - same here - but beyond that, it doesn't matter.
She does hear the lyrics, though. I agree with MP and Evan, it's the over-all sound that matters to me. Wife will say "why are you listening to that sad song?" and my answer is "Sad song?" I hadn't listened to the lyrics, about heartbreak and loss, I just liked the sound of the thing. That wasn't true when I was in high school, and the lyrics were like messages, ones I wanted to share.
I don't accept your hypothesis linking music and religion. No connection I can imagine, in this or the last century. If you meant in 1400, sure, I could see that.
This is all kind of eerie. We're about to make a scientific breakthrough here.
I don't mean there is a link that makes people who like music religious. I mean that perhaps the same part of the brain responds to both thing. Music has spiritual component to it, I think. For those who really dig it.
I'd like to know if there are any males who don't really like music. I can't think of any. Even my grandson at three is really into music.
My friend found herself swept up by even secular music (and to some extent religious music from other traditions) in a way that felt very similar to what she felt during worship services...an involuntary response, or at least one beyond conscious control, while she was in the presence of music she liked.
Certainly, Rick, any amount of music today as much as in Bach's time much less the 1400s CE is either liturgical or at least inspired or informed by religious practice or liturgical music.
There is a reason, to turn it around, that nearly all liturgical service involves music...and even those practices that have silent or quiet worship services, such as the Society of Friends, have musical traditions (and the more actively meditative tradtions have mantras and similar).
I have known some men who are relatively indifferent to music...one of my colleagues, whose taste in culture leans toward to the cute, seems to look a songs as mostly a delivery system for lyrics, in distinction from most of the men cited here (I'm verbal enough to put them on par where songs are concerned)--big fan of the Muppets, for example. I gather that little girls are often pretty happy about music, too (and one hopes not too many toddlers aren't being chased away from music by too-early instrumental training).
My colleague is the big Muppets fan, I should clarify.
I like the Hensons' work, but not like he does, very much including their musical work (again, more as a means of narrative/lyric delivery).
wv: cringe (no less)
Yes, I feel there is some linkage because of the deep response to both. I get that deep in the gut response to certain movies--the altar I worship at.
Certainly, good art of all kinds usually has an immersive quality, and the appreciation for performing arts (as an auditor or as a participant) seems like it would trigger rather similar synapses to the performance and participation in ritual...I suspect there's already a fair amount of research going on in this direction.
Oh for Pete's sake. Here's the 400 pound gorilla in the corner of the room no one seems to be acknowledging. Men dig music more than women because of a primordial hard wiring rooted in men's inability at personal expression. Plus there's the whole drumbeat thing, not to get all Robert Bly on you and shit. We want to think of our lives as heroic sagas (albeit pathetic) and music is the soundtrack and release…affirming hopes, desires, and fears. Now then, I’m going back underneath my rock.
Do men use music to bond with other men then? Is it the most passionate thing they can talk about with each other?
Women most often talk about other people. Men have sports but that comes from another place, I think.
Maybe music is the closest thing to a spiritual bonding.
And maybe I am going where only music can go.
Well, Kieran, how "hardwired" we are is, as usual, debatable.
In my experience and obseration, the thing we as men most often talk about most passionately is the potential for sex. Politics and other sweeping issues follow, including gossip of the less sexual sort (where sports kicks in, but not just with men), with discussion of music Way down the list in frequency, though it can be passionate.
Music might bond men, but usually it's the music first, not so much the company of other men, which drives the affinity. Since both women and men like those drumbeats, or else people wouldn't wonder so often on AMERICAN BANDSTAND back when and elsewhere if they could dance to it, the potential of meeting folks at concerts isn't always secondary, but it often is. Some sub-subcultures, such as skinhead punks, seem to be more socially-driven than musically-inclinded, but they aren't usually a majority of any musical form's following...
Sorry, Kieran, but jungle drums and oogley-boogley has nothing to do with it. There are two kinds of listening to music. By far the most common is as background, and that's what guys very often do: put on some music, open a beer and talk, hang out. Or it's on the radio in the car, or it's something on the iPod to listening to while walking or working out, or... you get the idea. If it's dancing, then a good beat is great, it's hard to dance to a piano sonata.
The other kind of listen to music involves actual paying attention. What is the melody, the themes? This isn't what you do with top 40 or hip-hop or country/. I can only speak fro my own love of music, and that for classical and jazz little of which has lyrics, and original soundtracks. For me, almost all other music is background music, just like the junk in the background of nearly every television show and commercial these days...
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