“She was a quiet woman…didn’t say much and kept to herself. Never once thought she was capable of such things. Let my kids play in her backyard.”
Ah yes. We’ve all read such tidbits. Details splashed across a page or the television screen. Musings from the mouth of a wannabe media whore to a fledgling reporter about local crimes committed…always divulging surprising secrets of someone who appeared to have, at best, a mundane existence. One can be 99.2% sure the witness/neighbor recounting the incident was perfectly clueless about the life and times of said criminal: someone they had never really spoken to or got to know. Usually the story twists along in a grotesque direction. Choose your own adventure: knife wielding, running amok in nothing but undergarments, severed fingers and toes uncovered in a deep freeze, listening to The Bloody Beetroots…
Wait. The Bloody Beetroots?
Right. Perhaps I am being a little melodramatic. In this particular case I wasn’t doing anything illegal and the witness wasn’t a nosy neighbor. He was my boyfriend who knows me better than anyone, though he spoke for everyone else on the planet. I was outside on the sidewalk, headphones snugly strapped to my head, waiting for him to give me a lift to my office.
“What are you listening to?” he asked.
“The Bloody Beetroots.” (At that time I had just purchased the Rombo EP.)
“Standing there like that? Nobody would ever guess that you were listening to them.”
Standing there like “that” in my sensible trousers, wool coat and messenger bag. Work Attire, if you will. By gum, he was right. Who expects a vanilla-looking, bespectacled lady of thirty-something years on her way to work to be listening to Italian discopunk? Hearing such words spoken by a person who genuinely embraces most everyone around him, despite their opinions; a person who never judges haphazardly, made this incident of more than a year ago an important one – one that stuck in my noggin and revisited me every so often – usually when listening to the aforementioned band/group/brigade. If HE thinks like this, what does this say about everyone else around me? At any rate, it made me look at myself and my own assumptions about who listens to what a little more critically. Actually, not just what they listen to, but what their interests are in general. Though I can’t speak for everyone else, it made me realize that I am a creature of habit, abiding by and absorbing certain patterns as truths, no matter what I say about being open-minded. It happens.
In a nutshell: not every girl wearing a cotton dress while riding a fixie with their Pembroke Corgi in the basket heading to an afternoon picnic is listening to Belle and Sebastian. Is it probable? But of course, though they just might fancy DragonForce as well. Awesome.
Your description of yourself sounds very much like me. Even people who’ve known me for years are either unaware of or shocked by my music taste – whether it’s The Dresden Dolls & Muse, Rev Peyton’s Big Damn Band & Old Crow Med Show, Jimi Hendrix & Janis Joplin, Mavis Staples & Bill Withers, Nirvana & Pearl Jam, Beyonce & Eve, Xavier Rudd & K’naan, Nina Simone & Billie Holiday, or Chopin & Bach. I don’t know what they think I look like I listen to, but apparently it’s nothing I actually do.
When I would visit someone’s house I would always take a peek at their CD/tape/album collection. It could tell you quite a bit about people that way. Let’s take on my college roomate (early/mid 1990s) as an example. I was absolutely horrified to find that his music collection was limited to the entire collection of one artist… Debbie Gibson. I kid you not. I never looked at him the same way again.
With the age of MP3s this ability to do a quick check of someone’s music collection is mostly lost. I guess I could always grab their ipod and do a quick scroll of the cover flow. Too bad you probably won’t find their ipod on display in their family room.