Why Your Music Taste is Trash
hi
my name is gal bezek and i’m the 17 year
old kid who’s going to try to convince
you to listen to new music
now i know saying this doesn’t really
sound so hard i mean it’s just like
everything else in life
sometimes you need to step out of your
comfort zone right but
why out of all the things that people
experience and do did i choose music
well the answer is pretty easy to
understand but pretty hard to explain
so i’ll try to the best of my ability oh
wait next slide yes okay so
how music shaped me music changed my
life
it gave me confidence and opened my mind
up to so many different new experiences
from idols and parque courts giving me
all the tools i need to become a
rebellious teen and one step closer to
becoming a narco communist
with lines like the best way to scare a
tory is to read and get rich
to collectivism and autonomy are not
mutually exclusive
to also death grips and clipping giving
me an out to be cathartic
yet genuine in times when all you need
to do is scream
tack you oh i’m feeling it tachyon
at the top of my lungs
to forget whatever the heck i was
worrying about to
dorian elektra and jpeg mafia teaching
me how to be myself
and not let anybody tell me that i can’t
be flamboyant or choosing the perfect
song before going to a party
even after all these examples you still
might be thinking to yourself
why music well simply answered
music is the best thank you no i’m just
kidding
but music is the best because
of these three a these three main
attributes of it
accessibility diversity and personality
i’ll start with accessibility
accessibility in music is amazing
because today each and every one of you
can open your phones up
and look up a song doesn’t matter if it
came out in the 60s or yesterday
if you told someone in the 80s that you
had a device that could play
box orchestral suite number three and
right after you could play
a song about a guy with rainbow hair
screaming over poorly mixed 808s
are you dumb stupid or dumb they’re
probably going to call you crazy
and then probably call the cops because
of your obsession with guys with rainbow
hair
if you want to find music other ways
there’s so many passionate music
reviewers online
such as the needlelog better known as
anthony fantano on youtube
who would love to tell you that that
very niche album is a 10 out of 10
and little uzi vert’s eternal take is
trash
want to just press a button and find
your music that way perfect
most music streaming services whether
free or paid offer a radio type of
experience
in which you can just choose a genre
sound
song whatever and the algorithm will
just find songs related to it
that you would probably like want to
tell people that your music taste is way
better than theirs because it’s
underground and they just wouldn’t get
it perfect
instagram twitter and reddit are full of
those people ready to die on a hill for
their favorite artist
don’t believe me just say something bad
about kanye west or taylor swift on
twitter and prefer your men
prepare for your mentions to be filled
of kanye stands
telling you that your artist sucks and
the kanye is the goat
what is a stan well basically it’s just
a super intense fan
that will stop at nothing to defend
their artist and will cancel yours just
because they wanted to
but even even after all that
all i wanted to say is basically you can
find whatever music you like
there is no limit but what kind of music
do you like
well that leads me on to my next point
diversity
diversity music is amazing because you
can go from drake’s hotline bling
a mellow feel-good song about loss of
feeling and heartbreak
to death grips is you might think he
loves you for your money but i know what
he really loves you for it’s your brand
new leopard skin pillbox
hat an industrial electro punk song
about
loss of feeling and heartbreak you might
be wondering why i chose these two songs
well it’s the correlation between them
not only are the topics that they’re
talking about kind of similar
but also they resign the same genre this
is amazing
two completely different songs different
sound structure different
instrumentation
different basically everything resign
the same genre hip-hop
now you might be thinking to yourself
wait doesn’t this go against the whole
diversity thing well no because
actually this just shows the range music
can have i mean if two songs so
different can resign the same genre
what limit are there in music
makes it so awesome because people
have people experiences and then those
people
probably make music and probably the
people that make music
don’t make the same type of music so you
get many examples of similar topics
all over music such as a country love
song and a punk rock love song
and one of those you’re going to connect
to way deeper than the other
not just because it slaps or it hits you
right in the fields
but because you connect to it on a
personal level this leads me
to the next point personality
to me music is the most personal of the
arts
you yes it’s where bands artists
and all types of musicians can express
exactly what they’re feeling through
lyrics instrumentation soundscape and
atmosphere
this is why personality is so important
because
everyone can find a song in which they
personally relate to
if you’ve ever been at a party and
listened to billy joel’s piano man and
not sung it at the top of your lungs
with your friends
were you really at that party if you’ve
ever been broken hearted and listened to
tyler the creator is igor
and not cried during the 40 minutes of
the album
were you really brokenhearted
look this is all to say that music has a
personal connection to each person
and uh this leads me to my next to
finally start my talk i know quite a
long introduction
but i want to start this with a
rhetorical question
why didn’t you want to listen to you
might think he loves you for your money
but i know what he really loves you for
it’s your brand new leopard skin pillbox
hat
is it because the title is intimidating
or because death grips just sounds like
an edgy band name created by some kid to
sound cool
or is it just because industrial
electropunk sounds weird to you
well it might just be a combo of the
three
because i like to call these three
judgments you make
musical stigma musical stigmas basically
when somebody
has a prejudice or a judgment against an
artist song or album
without even listening to it this was
exceptionally visible in the 80s
the peak of heavy metal and rock music
you couldn’t go anywhere without
listening to
hearing the names ac dc or guns and
roses
and these bands well they did crazy
stunts
they had crazy outfits and they had a
lot and i mean
a lot of groupies the christian part of
america hated this
and they made movies and sermons saying
that
rock music is from the devil and that it
corrupts your mind
this eventually led to a congressional
hearing in which
basically the pmrc said that rock music
is bad
uh they had a lot of artists and a lot
of people on both sides debating it and
some politicians even called rock music
outrageous filth
and that is they could do with if they
could do away with it uh
constitutionally
they would do it asap luckily that
didn’t happen
but we did receive this sticker the
parental advisory
sticker probably most of you have seen
the sticker
now this doesn’t seem like such a harsh
punishment but
having this sticker on your album meant
it would sell less it wouldn’t be on the
radio
and basically people would have a stigma
against that certain album
judging a book by its cover at the exact
same level
so a lot of artists protested this my
favorite
is frank zappa who’s frank zappa um
basically just imagine like your funny
uncle who you’ve always thought deep
down was a hippie
and then he never stopped being a hippie
and he started to make amazing music
yeah that guy okay so frank zappa’s
personal friend zappos protist was
creating this album called frank zappa
meets the mothers of prevention
i know title is amazing already but my
favorite part of this
is the sticker that he put in the album
this is a direct parody to the parental
advisory sticker
in which the first line reads this album
contains material which a truly free
society would neither fear nor suppress
but what does this all have to do with
musical stigma
well basically the pmrc the parents
association that started all this
trouble
didn’t really hate the music itself or
the way that it sounded
they just hated everything around it
they judged it on the acts
the concerts the everything else except
on the music
now this stigma comes from somewhere
that somewhere is different for everyone
but i’m willing to bet my bottom dollar
that
some of it just comes from not knowing
what the music is about
i’m going to assume that most of you
haven’t heard
of industrial electropunk yet you still
refuse to give it a chance
why well
it’s probably because you think you know
what you like
and chances are you think that nothing
close to industrial electropunk is
something that you would like
now it goes also both ways i mean if you
tell a
indie boy you know a tyler the creator
stan oh
wait not that guy hit this guy yes that
um
you like cardi b they’ll probably scoff
at you the same way you did at
industrial electropunk
but that doesn’t mean it’s bad that just
means
that you could just expand your music
taste i mean
if you start listening to different
types of music you’ll just expand your
way of
your view of uh your world view
i’m not saying to that i have to be a
gatekeeper or that you have to
understand the intricacies of
radiohead’s okay computer
to say that you even like indie music
but i’m saying that it’d be cool if you
tried
expanding your music tastes expands your
world view it expands your way of
thinking
and it expands you personally because as
i said before music is the most personal
of the arts
i mean it’s way easier to judge someone
by their favorite kanye song
by their favorite picasso painting thus
leading us to the end of this very
very long rant what i want everyone to
take away from this
is why music is so cool
i want people to think about the way
that they listen to music and why they
listen to music
i want them to think about what albums
they like what albums they don’t like
and if they even like music at all
so what i want everybody to do is go on
their favorite search engine
put best blank album fill that blank
with whatever you like
click on the first link open it listen
to it and dive in
head first because you never know if you
don’t try thank you