Our Sonic Youth

It’s a classic love story: Girl walks up to boy wearing headphones and says “Hey, what’s on your playlist?” As he recites the amazing number of artists stored on his tiny digital media player (this classic love story is also a commercial), time revs forward through their courtship, wedding, children’s birthdays, and finally settles on the two of them with silver hair and bifocals.

On the most superficial level, the spot simply advertises the tremendous storage capacity of Verizon’s latest phone. But what it’s really appealing to is one of our deepest, darkest, most neurotic obsessions: the playlist. “What’s on your playlist?” is the “What’s your sign?” of the new millennium. We’re too indie for astrology anymore.

The playlist-check is the ultimate Information Age interaction. There, in glowing black and white, is a complete set of personal information. Conversation? Unnecessary. Just scan the iPod. Within it lies infinite personality indicators. What are his 25 most played? Is she a rater? How long did it take him to get the new TV on the Radio album? It’s like a fingerprint with nuance.

There is no denying the link between music preference and personality. In a series of studies conducted in 2003, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin scientifically demonstrated the correlation not only between musical taste and personality, but also between artistic preferences and cognitive ability. According to the study, Joni Mitchell listeners are actually more likely to be wimpy liberals (music that was reflective and complex correlated positively with political liberalism and negatively with athleticism), while Shania Twain listeners are usually redneck conservatives (upbeat and conventional music correlated negatively with both liberalism and verbal ability).

We might still have to talk to each other to find out all of this information if not for the iPod. It’s like a dream: All the music you own (or, if you have the iPod Touch with wireless Internet, all the music you could ever want and then some) is in the palm of your hand. Constantly. Since its launch in October of 2001, Apple has sold over 140 million iPods, with sales quadrupling from 2003 to 2004, and again from 2004 to 2005. The iPod isn’t the only digital media player walking the streets, nor was it the first, but no one has been able to match its ubiquity.

But as Apple’s control of the music player industry got more and more totalitarian, our musical taste got more and more democratic. Nirvana took indie mainstream in the 90s, and once the Internet made it cheap for smaller labels and amateur acts to get their music to consumers, it was a sonic free-for-all. MP3 players, MySpace, and Facebook all made it easier to display your taste, as well, and suddenly the hipster was a public figure. Question: How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: You don’t know?

This obsession is insidious. Science has proven that musical taste is a perfectly valid personality indicator, but the hipster persona has boiled it down to a dark, bitter, cynical syrup. Speaking as someone who is more confident in her personality than in her playlist, this cannot be healthy.

Perhaps you think I’m overstating the level of the obsession. If commercials and studies haven’t convinced you that the playlist has grown too large in the cultural mind, I’ll draw your attention to the recent film “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” Two misunderstood teens fall in love over a series of break-up mixes and a passion for the indie-est of fictional indie bands, Where’s Fluffy? At one point, while scrolling through Nick’s iPod, Norah proclaims, “We are musical soulmates.”

In a streak of wild coincidence, they are also regular soulmates. They are shy, defensive, insecure soulmates who never would have met had a screenwriter not thrown them together. Why? It was easier for her to listen to his mix CDs than to get his number and give him a call. She could know him without actually getting to know him.

In the information age—or the iPod age—or the indie age, or whatever, music is self-defense. In his New York Times review, film critic A. O. Scott observed, “The tunes that play alongside their nocturnal adventure express longing, sadness, anxiety and joy with more intensity than they can muster themselves.” Sounds pretty good to me. Maybe I’ll put those tunes on my playlist.



Jillian J. Goodman ’09, a Crimson arts writer, is an English concentrator in Quincy House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.