I am an extremely weird person when it comes to music tastes, because I find basically all music overstimulating to the point of sensory overwhelm.

Like, I’ve realized that’s my main feeling about pretty much any piece of music. It’s the first response, before I even start to consider anything specific to the piece itself. This goes for any kind of music. Classical orchestra or medieval folk ballads or sea shanties or heavy metal or electronica or those cover bands that reimagine popular modern songs as medieval folk ballads and sea shanties, or country or rap or 1950’s Christmas songs or Gregorian monk chants or hiphop or five-hour meditation mixes engineered to be the most relaxing thing imaginable, or jazz or trance or techno or those simple repetitive children’s songs that parents get homicidally deranged about, or dubstep or ska or Irish drinking songs or pop or rock or whatever the hell genre the Beatles were. All of it.

I mean I definitely can get some thoughts and feelings going about a song– which can definitely include appreciation of the skill and creative ideas that went into it. And the feelings are much more likely to be positive or neutral than negative. I very rarely ever hate a song. (What I hate, if anything, is just the fact that a song has been played repeatedly, in a place I can’t escape, for a number of times comparable to the same tactic used as a torture method in Guantanamo. This happens often. It’s nothing against the song itself.)

But before I can get to the point of any feelings about the music, I have to get past the point where a very large portion of my mind is just urgently saying: “THERE IS NOISE. THERE SHOULD BE SILENCE. PLEASE TURN OFF THE NOISE SO I CAN HAVE SILENCE.”

And it’s not even that I need silence, exactly! Because I don’t really care much if there’s, like…. a machine loudly running, or a lot of ambient neighborhood/traffic noise around– I can still sleep and work and whatever else I gotta do and my brain mostly tunes it out!

I can tune out music too, if it’s someone else’s music and I can’t turn it off. The only way noise actively makes it hard for me to do stuff is if 1. it contains a lot of words and 2. I’m trying to do something that also contains a lot of words. The words can’t coexist. They get mixed up. But otherwise, my brain can tune out almost anything.

And I can even get interested in playing around creatively with music– for instance, making music videos, or song parodies– this can be very appealing to my Pattern Recognizer, my love for connecting things and seeking similarities and parallels. If I’m focused on doing something with the music, this is not hard for me at all.

It’s just… if I have the option to choose to play music for fun, as recreational background sound? I usually just…. don’t. If I try, it irritates me, and the irritation just grows. I can tune it out and keep going. But if I have the option to turn it off, that’s much better. Turning it off is nothing but relief.

So, the familiarity I have with a lot of popular music is just because someone I know was interested in it. Or because it’s popular enough to be on the radio a lot, or on loudspeaker music in stores, and gets played where I have no choice but to hear it, because I’m there to work or to run errands.

And my brain often deals with this by analyzing and overanalyzing the songs.

That can be where the ideas for song parodies and music videos start. Or sometimes just some silly wordplay on something in the song.

But the fact that I only get exposed to music in this kind of circumstances… can be a bit problematic in its own way.

Because I very often end up knowing a song lyric without knowing anything about who wrote or performed it. And popular musicians are among the public figures most likely to get into very controversial, very public conflicts that the general population has strong opinions on.

And these opinions are often so strong that a mention of lyrics from a musician can’t stand alone as a mention of art separate from the artist. It will be taken as an attempt to say something about the artist as a person. And if it’s not outright negative, it will be interpreted as support of the artist.

Meaning that the end result of “knowing nothing about musicians” is that “silly throwaway puns have to be rigorously researched ahead of time, to make sure I’m not promoting whoever’s the current supervillain.”

That’s like, probably the biggest effect of music on my life. At the moment.

Which, again, makes my fascination with Tron incredibly weird. Because like. “Music that is severely awesome” and “cutting edge special effects” are two of the biggest definers of what Tron is about. And while I can absolutely appreciate the effort and skill that went into all that– I still end up hyperfixated primarily on the plot and characters. The least critically acclaimed part of it all.

<3