Tuesday, February 20, 2007

An unfortunate study in bad taste

I may have mentioned the guy who lives on our second floor before. He's your typical loud, self-entitled yuppie, the kind of guy who stops to look at the trashcan his roommate brought to the curb that morning, but would never actually bring it back up.

There are a number of things I don't really get about this guy, but my big one is about his musical taste. I know he considers himself a music fan: he reads Rolling Stone, he sings along loudly and badly to frat-boy crap rock, and I'd say four nights out of seven I can clearly hear what he's listening to from across my apartment, over my headphones, etc. Now bear in mind that I don't actually want to know any of these things about him, but by virtue of simple proximity, this knowledge is forced into my eardrums on a regular basis. It's like he saw the 'this amp goes to 11' scene in Spinal Tap, and instead of taking it as an ironic warning about compensating for shallowness with volume, decided to live his life by that principle.

So here is my question: why does he always play the same two songs? In the year and a half that I've unwillingly had to collect data on his listening habits, I'd say at least 80% of his music selections are one of two songs. I don't know what songs they are, but from what I can hear (oh God, I can hear too much), they're typical assembly-line dance-pop by pretty boys singing in falsetto about how sexy they are, with Funky Club Beats. He has other music to listen to -- I've heard him yodeling along to Bob Marley, the White Stripes, and a couple other entirely unsurprising choices, but he almost never listens to it.

Is this monosongomania normal for frat boys? I mean, the Marley and White Stripes, sure, they're not intrinsically awful music, they've just been co-opted by an intrinsically obnoxious category of music listeners. But how is it he's never felt the need for new music in all the time he's lived here?

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