My Music, or Everyone Else’s Music?

Music and I have always had a shifting relationship. I can imagine that in just a year or so, the songs that I sing my heart out to now will seem boring or embarrassing. “How could I have ever liked this?” I’ll think to myself from time to time, scrolling through old playlists. The genres that I enjoy have barely changed, don’t get me wrong: but the songs, those have had surprisingly brief places in my heart. You would think that there’d be limited room within a genre to be constantly moving through songs, but somehow I manage to keep rolling past plenty of them. 

Sometimes I think I move past songs I like because I truly find no interest in them anymore, but I think I sometimes also force myself to move past songs that I do like because I feel embarrassed to like songs that those around me have bad-mouthed. Once in a while, I’ll hear someone say something like “Oh, that song? I hate it so much, it’s just so embarrassing.” You can probably guess who has that song on her playlist. I’ll convince myself for some time that everyone’s tastes are different, that it’s perfectly okay that I like some songs while others don’t. But inevitably I’ll somewhat intentionally lose interest in that song, just so I can be one of the people who does the bad-mouthing. Does it make me feel better about myself? I won’t lie: sometimes it really does.

A lot of this seems to stem from a similar worry of mine: despite the incredibly subjective nature of music taste, I still feel some worry about receiving judgement about what I listen to. It’s easy to feel a little bad when someone tells you a song you really enjoy is bad or embarrassing; though I feel no shame listening to my music in private and I do very much enjoy it, I would be quite hesitant to play my music out loud for others.

Music is a sort of safe space for me though, in some sense. When I’m alone and listening to music, I feel free to sing along passionately and lose my worries in the music–maybe even dance (that’s when I really am making a fool of myself). I would never, ever do some of these things in the presence of anyone else: which is probably a reason why I dislike my music and my music taste being known to others. It feels a little like giving up something that’s private and special to me and putting it on display.

I’ve come into myself a little more though, however. I sing along loudly to songs with my friends and they know which music, embarrassing or not, I love and know the lyrics to. Some songs I remember setting aside because the artist was quite embarrassing have even made their way back onto my playlist. I never really stopped liking them, it turns out! I find it amusing sometimes to hear my music laughed at, as opposed to shameful or childish.

Some music will have to go, though. There are songs that are embarrassing to others and special to me whose place I have restored in my music, but there are certainly also songs that just, really, what was I doing listening to such lousy music? Those songs, to this day, I will be a little ashamed about: and no amount of self-embracement will change that.

(Let me know if I'm going off on too much of a tangent even for a personal essay: is there a sort of clunkiness when I try to come back from my self-reflection to my conclusion?)