I’m one of those people that looks for patterns in everything. I may have mild obsessive-compulsive disorder (or whatever they’re calling it these days). Let’s not discuss why; I’m here to discuss a pattern I’ve been noticing for years.

People seem to be intimidated by the serious discussion of art. By art I mean the concrete arts (painting, sculpture), music, other performance arts (dance, wrapping buildings in plastic wrap), and writing. I even see the symptoms of this in myself sometimes, and I consider myself pretty well educated and also both engaged with and skeptical of the arts communities. (Full disclosure, in case I haven’t mentioned it before: I have a bachelor’s degree in music theory and history.)

I’m going to focus on music for the purposes of this post, since that’s what this blog is about. Here are the symptoms that I have seen: Vague complaints like “that song is not like his other songs” or “that song sounds like all his other songs”. A focus on the physical appearance of the artist. A focus on the personal life/emotional state/mental state of the artist (I mean other than Britney Spears, since obviously that’s wayyyyy more fascinating than her music). Vast amounts of excitement surrounding a new release, then comments like “Yeah, that’s pretty good” after the first listen. Outright refusal to discuss the music, while dissecting the meaning of the lyrics to death. Fear of instrumentals and jams.

Now, what would a serious discussion look like, in opposition to the above “symptoms”? Well, how about a discussion of keys and chords, and the way they set a mood and manipulate your emotions? Instead of “This song makes me sad because the lyrics are so sad,” you could say “This song makes me burst out in tears in the third verse because I think the chords are different from the first two verses, they’re sadder.” You don’t even have to know the difference between major and minor! And in the discussion of lyrics, I would love to hear less “Those lyrics are funny!” and more “The internal rhymes in that verse make it sound almost like a rap, but with more melody.”

So why are people afraid to engage in this sort of behavior? I think it’s because so many artists have made it a “thing” to say, “I am an artiste,” like that somehow makes them superior. Also, a lot of critics are total snobs. Of course regular, everyday, non-music-major people are going to be intimidated!

Well, here I am, music major, critic, snob extraordinaire, to tell you that you do not need to be intimidated by my kind!  At heart, I really am just a regular ol’ music listener; I have some terrible taste and some great taste, and I think everyone else does, too.  So let’s all just have a little chat about music, why don’t we?

Over the next few months, I am going to make it my personal mission to bring our readers out of their shells and convince you all to join in the conversation.  Let me know what I can do to make this a safe place for you to learn to talk about music without feeling like a dork.  Hey, I can’t tell a diminished chord from a monkey hitting a keyboard after years and years of ear-training.  So we can use words like “crunchy” and “groovy”, but I’ll also try to teach you the vocabulary of music.  If this works, I’ll go start an art blog. :)  Kidding… kinda.  To this end, I’ll be picking a song every week or so, then picking it apart.  Everyone is invited to jump in and tell me I’m wrong (actually, you’re always invited to do that).  How does that sound?

If you said “like church music”, we’re on our way already!