[For this year’s
Valentine’s
Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite
songs, leading up to this special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter
on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear
about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]
On respecting,
but not remaining too stagnantly settled on, personal tastes.
To say I don’t
speak much Latin would be to significantly understate the case, but nonetheless
one of the most recurring phrases in my conversations with my sons for many
years now has been the Latin phrase “de
gustibus, non est disputandum (there’s no arguing taste).” For one thing,
it’s fun to say, and/or to refer to as the “windy bus” phrase. But for another,
it’s a very effective shorthand for stopping many potential sibling or family
arguments before they start. You like this particular food but your brother
really doesn’t? Windy bus. You two think this song is incredibly annoying but
your Dad kinda digs it? Windy bus. Of course we all can and do still argue for
our own tastes and preferences and why they’re correct, but it’s also important
to take a step back sometimes and remember that others’ tastes are no less (and
no more, but that’s less immediately relevant to our own internal perspective I’d
say) valid than our own.
Yet we can
recognize the personal and indisputable nature of tastes without seeing them as
either absolute or unchangeable, and I’ve recently encountered a striking
illustration of the need to remain open about our own such preferences. Up
until pretty recently, I would have said that I was quite sure that I wasn’t a
Mariah Carey fan; it’s not that I had any particular problem with her music,
but I didn’t believe it was of much interest to or did much of anything for me.
Moreover, my perspective on Carey as both an artist and an individual was more
or less in line with many of the popular narratives, which have for many years
portrayed her as a diva, as self-centered to the extreme, as an unquestionably
talented singer but one whose lifestyle and luxuries (and public failures at
marriage, and so on) have overtaken those talents as the focus of the story.
Well those
prominent narratives are wrong, and so was I. Over the last few months I’ve
come to learn a great deal about Carey that I didn’t know (and had never before
sought to learn), and much of what I’ve learned has both countered my
misconceptions and added important layers to my sense of her life, career, and
art. For one thing, I’ve learned a lot about Carey’s heritage and childhood,
including her mixed-race identity and some of the many significant challenges
that she and her family faced; while noen of those factors mean we can’t be
critical of choices she makes in her life in 2018, they provide key contexts
for understanding where she’s come from and who she is. And for another, I’ve
had the chance to hear many more Carey songs, most of them album tracks that
are not only not the most prominent pop singles, but that also reveal very
different sides to both her content and style, the uses to which she puts her
impressive voice and songwriting talents. For example there’s “Languishing” (2009), a
moving and sad reflection on her relationship to her estranged sister. Or for
another there’s “Close My
Eyes” (1997; check out this
powerhouse performance of it on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show), a powerful set
of images that link Carey’s childhood memories to her evolving sense of self in
the present. Written and produced by Carey herself, as all her music has been,
these songs embody an artist whose voice, art, career, and life go way beyond
what I thought I knew just a short time ago. Maybe we can’t dispute tastes, but
neither can we be too confident in them!
The annual
anti-favorites series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?
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