The Wily Filipino

Modern Girls and Modern Rock & Roll.

It's Lack of Circumspection time at The Wily Filipino again! A few years ago I decided to give online dating a try -- which I had never done before -- and so one night put some thought into writing a description for myself (what I was like, my interests, who I was looking for, and so on). And I thought I'd toss in, as a tidbit (but probably also as an unnecessary "test" of sorts), the fact that I was still in shock that my favorite band, Guided by Voices, was breaking up.

So I wrote this all up -- these things take forever to write, by the way* -- and decided to send a copy to my good friend Jane so she could vet it -- and the following frustrating (paraphrased) IM conversation ensued:

me: what did you think?

jane: i think it looks good. except...

me: what?

jane: i think you should remove the guided by voices reference

me [genuinely shocked]: what? why?

jane: they're a real guy band

me: of course they're not

jane: no really

me: they happen to be all guys, but still

jane: you need to find someone more neutral, something women would like

me: but i already namedrop bjork!

jane: see, i'm having second thoughts about including her as well

me: why?

jane: you have no idea how many women hate bjork

me: but it's meant as a general reference to the kind of music i like. besides i really love gbv

jane: potential dates might think you broke up with your wife because you were more into male-bonding**

me: are you serious???

jane: think of someone more neutral

me: i already namedrop "In the Mood for Love!" who should i include, avril lavigne??

jane: not if you don't really like her

me [desperately thinking of my other favorite band]: how about yo la tengo?

jane: that's better. at least they have georgia hubley

me: but what's so wrong about gbv?

jane: potential dates don't like bands that throw beer bottles at the audience

me: they *hand* beer bottles to audience members. that's different!

jane: it's like telling someone on the first date that you're into heavy metal

me: but gbv isn't even close to heavy metal!

jane: but you see what i mean

me: no i don't

jane: you don't want to turn them off before they even meet you

me [getting really irate now]: gbv won't do that!

Suffice it to say that I quickly abandoned that entire avenue of possibility before it even began -- not because I refused to back down on the universal appeal of Guided by Voices, but because the whole online dating thing seemed kind of futile anyway. But not before accidentally coming across a couple of Filipino American academics' profiles whose names I will not divulge. (They were several pages deep anyway, and therefore far beyond any spheres of compatibility.)

However, this made me wonder about all this inordinate interest in music on my part. I mean, it's not as if a date's horrible musical tastes were going to be a dealbreaker... or were they? Is musical compatibility really all that important in general? Would I turn down a hot date just because she was, say, a huge Celine Dion fan? (Very likely, but I'm an idiot that way.***)

Last week a woman I'd never met or spoken to wrote me to say that my "cool taste in music alone would want me to date you." If that wasn't confirmation of, well, something, I don't know what is. (She was married though.)

But... maybe music in and of itself is important, period. About a couple of months ago my friends were regretting not bringing music to the Lake Tahoe cabin where we were on holiday -- not that there were any uncomfortable silences that needed to be filled or anything -- but, as one person put it, "One day we'll hear a song on the radio and it will remind us of this weekend. But unfortunately we don't have any songs to remember it by."

In this example the song seems more powerful a symbol than the referent, i.e., the experience of being in Tahoe, itself! None of us will be likely to forget the Tahoe experience any time soon -- I am still constantly harassed by my friends about my numerous half-drownings while kayaking and wearing a life vest in five feet of water -- but here, music is seen as crucial in creating memory itself.

Music not only serves as a memory-trigger, though. It's an illustration of the way in which music is imbued with the ability to structure and frame experience. (Clothing stores know this, therefore the pianist at Nordstrom's, the bouncy catwalk music at the Gap.) Music charges and changes a room; it creates atmosphere; it generates moods; it summons up memories; it elicits emotions -- all in ways perhaps more efficient, immediate, and sometimes even more indelible than our other senses do. It functions as an aesthetic overlay mapped onto our collective experience. Life in general may simply go better with a soundtrack. Maybe other people do too.

Still, this recognition of the aesthetic importance of music in the everyday didn't explain my unreasonable intertwining of the romantic and the aural. (As if She would walk into a room accompanied by, say, Luna's "I Want Everything." Or Built To Spill's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.") In any case, an answer came to me, in the way that all good answers arrive, i.e., serendipitously.

A few weeks ago I was holding Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" in one hand and weighing whether I should get rid of it or not. (In this case it was literal weighing; the book is the size of a small metropolitan area's White Pages, and takes up almost as much space.) And suddenly, there it was -- who would have known that a dead French sociologist would know exactly what I was talking about, and write about it in such cruelly hilarious detail?

Taste is a match-maker; it marries colours and also people, who make 'well-matched couples', initially in regard to taste... Hence the astonishing harmony of ordinary couples who, often matched initially, progressively match each other by a sort of mutual acculturation. This spontaneous decoding of one habitus by another is the basis of the immediate affinities which orient social encounters, discouraging socially discordant relationships, encouraging well-matched relationships, without these operations ever having to be formulated other than in the socially innocent language of likes and dislikes. The extreme improbability of the particular encounter between particular people, which masks the probability of interchangeable chance events, induces couples to experience their mutual election as a happy accident, a coincidence which mimics transcendent design ('made for each other') and intensifies the sense of the miraculous.

Those whom we find to our taste put into their practices a taste which does not differ from the taste we put into operation in perceiving their practices. Two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the taste they have for each other.

But still I wasn't convinced. Understanding the social mechanics didn't answer my most pressing questions.

I mean, what if she prefers late R.E.M. to early R.E.M.? What if she drags me to a Josh Groban concert? Or, god forbid, what if she doesn't like the mix CDs I make for her? And, if I were somehow extremely blessed, would she have Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand on her shelf?

*My "About Me" entry on Facebook, just to give you an example, ended up reading: "Must see! Charming, spacious and immaculate. Newly remodeled, granite counter top, utilities included, walk-in closet, views of the Bay. Great location, close to restaurants, MUNI, Safeway, 280 and 101, etc."

**Absolutely not true. But I did check her out and her music collection, and upon seeing Everything But The Girl and Rickie Lee Jones, I knew we'd be cool together. (Needless to say there were more things that attracted me to her than just the CDs, but you know what I mean.)

***Read: obviously *I'm* the one who's being difficult here, and I'm probably shooting myself in the foot because mendicancy doesn't leave people with many options, after all. Yeah, like I have to shoo women away with a stick. And as if all this music-geekery on display wasn't already Danger Signal #1.

Posted by the wily filipino at October 12, 2007 04:19 PM