On the subject of music.

It is an odd truth that when people begin to talk and get to know each other, they start conversations with three basic queries. In any order, Where do you work? That is usually the most obvious one for me since people tend to ask me that very question while I am standing at the door of the pub taking their IDs, in fact I believe this question is regularly directed to people in their places of buisiness, an odd fact but it is an ice breaker that has been trained into the human mindset. It is stupid but I forgive it. The next question tends toward relationship status, IE, are you married or, do you have a girl/boyfriend, usually a part of a get to know you mating ritual, or used by people with sad lives that revolve around their significant other and believe that all people have the same, lack of interesting things in their life, affliction. The third and to me, most annoying, is of the musical persuasion. What kind of music do you listen to, or What bands are you into? The reason I hate this line so much is a varied and deep maze of reasons which I will attempt to put across to you now. What kind of music do I listen to? That should be an easy one, should it not? I listen to the kind of music with instruments in it, pretty astute comment on my part but not wht people want from me I suppose. In hoping to make some sort of connection with me, I believe persons who question me thusly are looking for me to say something like R&B, or tecno but I can not claim that I only listen to one genre or archtype of music. Many people, when faced with this question, like to say the age old phrase,"I listen to a little bit of everything", if that were true you could engage them in a lengthy confabulation, that entered many realms from jazz-fusion to the Auckland armpit Anthem. Mabye you are trying to ask this question of a god like creature who actually does listen to a litttle bit of everything because of his omnipotent eardrums, or simply, a crazy person who has so many noises in his head at the time that he is confused by the question. A definite red flag to this musical third degree is any time, anyone, anywhere uses the word eclectic, this simply put is a way for a person to try and sound intellegent, all the while also saying,"I listen to whatever is on the radio when I drive to work". The ever annoying, "What bands are you into"? An especially annoying line of questioning, is used by people who want to make a very personal connection with you, hoping against hope that you will spill out one of their favorites and you can then become bosom chums and give each other condensed milk massages in the back room of a poorly lit health spa. Musical taste is no basis for a relationship to be founded on, I have dated saveral women in my life and rarely, if ever, have seen eye to eye with them on our melodic strain. Even many of my bestest friends, hold dear, music that to me, sounds much like the caterwauling of mountain lions in heat after accidentally dining on a hippie full of magic mushrooms. I am now regularly annoyed by the fact that younger, want to be street toughs will look upon me in my bouncers garb and say one of the most ludicrous phrases in life which is," I bet you are into real hardcore music". This could be a very astute observation into my being, I infact do enjoy a form of hardcore music. I am refering to the music of the late seventies and early eighties Hardcore movement, bands such as Black Flag, Bad brains, Minor Threat (the three fathers of Hardcore) as well as many of their progeny, DRI, Circle Jerks, Agnostic front, to name a few. The youths who ask me this question never really mean such bands though and will invariably say something horrible like "Yeah, hardcore, like Godsmack or Sevendust". I find these bands to be about as hardcore as a Queen fan at a Depeche Mode concert. I did a search for the word Hardcore on Wikipedia and was horrified to see that there are now so many subclasses of music with the word hardcore in them that it is now a useless and almost dirty word. Such things as Happy Hardcore, which is terrible 4/4 beat wholey repetitious dance music, identifiable by the annoyingly shiny candy flippers who have let processed drugs obliterate any musical taste they may have once had. Then you have Hardcore Emo, a phrase that I thought was a joke, Emo being the paradox to all that is hardcore in my ideals. Were not these same Emo kids the chilldren of the Mods, that the truly Hardcore of the eighties hated so much and would regularly beat on the streets of many american cities? Of course there is the most disliked subclass by myself , which is Christian Hardcore, a conundrum of the highest order. For years I was told that the heavy, violent, thrashing of my some of my favorite bands was evil noise plucked from the devils own bowels. How can you take that same rythm and make it into goody, goody, praise the lord music? The fact that most degenerators of Thrash and Hardcore never listened to the words in the songs, which, for the most part have nothing diobolical to say than stand up against false authority figures and don't trust the government, can now say these people are rocking out for the lord is shear idiocy. In fact they are more or less telling you to obey the government and turn a blind eye to false authority figures because that is what the bible tells you, (which it is not what the bible tells you by the way but that is my next topic). christian Hardcore is just a way for churches to get more teens to go to their "cool" little meeting places "YUCK". In closing I will say I like music it is good but most of it isn't, also, I still hate the Beatles, except for the movie Help which made me laugh when I was a child and really, only Ringo made me laugh, he was the bignosed comic relief to the other, slightly less, bignosed straight men.