The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In

[koganbot]

Hurrah, I've been given a column (first one here: The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In) at the Las Vegas Weekly website, where I can actually get paid to write stuff I've always wanted to write - to ask questions, basically, and to intellectualize to my heart's content. The column runs every Thursday* with a brief minicolumn update on Mondays. I welcome your commentary: in fact, will need it, since my hope for the Monday minicolumns is that at least some of them will have me addressing people's comments about the previous Thursday's column.

*The especially sharp-eyed among you will notice that today is Friday, not Thursday. The Las Vegas Weekly is revamping its website and going through something of a shakedown cruise, so things don't always go up in a timely fashion. Some future Thursdays may also end up as Fridays, and some Mondays will be Tuesdays.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

3 Wise Metalheads

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The extent to which the metalheads will springboard the shared love of metal into an exploration of each others' *other* tastes is dependent on the kind of relationship they have to one another (well duh): I've had friendships where the shared interest acted as a prompt and friendships where it acted as a limit (and the friendships where we did all explore each other's other tastes turned out to be weaker as friendships).

Something that was a big driver though was the relative scarcity of music - when I first got into music, age 10-11, I didn't have the pocket money to buy it myself so my tastes were very dependent on the tastes of my friend Chris, who did buy 7" singles. Similarly, at school age 13 or 14 the way it worked was you would make whatever you bought available to friends to tape, so there was an economic/social pressure to align your tastes quite closely. I'd guess that pressure receded for me by 16 or so when my friends and I could get holiday jobs (I remember translating the first wage packet I got into real terms by thinking I could now buy an album every week) but by that time the clustering process was well advanced.

Anyway that scarcity issue has completely vanished now, I'd guess.

(I wrote some other comments on the LA Weekly site - generally I think you might be underestimating the strength of "I want to differentiate myself"/"I want to NOT differentiate myself" as a motivation, and I think it works in tandem with the 'visceral' reactions, not separately from them.)

Re: 3 Wise Metalheads

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm extremely interested in these visceral reactions, even though it has me thinking about a somewhat narrow aspect of the questions asked this week. I'm interested personally because I've been confronted recently with arguments based in the "I don't believe you really like this" camp. Which is a stupid camp, but it got me thinking, anyway.

I messed up a bit in my comments by confusing like/dislike as visceral reaction with like/dislike as analysis (why we say we like/dislike something), but one point that I really am coming around to these days is that it's much more difficult to justify or explain disliking something than it to justify or explain liking it (this was a huge problem with regular-grind music reviewing for me -- so much stuff that passed by that I could say I disliked precisely for passing me by, but in truth was..OK. "Good." Likeable, but not worth the thought required to type 600 coherent words in a sequence).

So when I think of social differentiation working "in tandem" with visceral response, I think that it's the uncontrollable, ambiguous nature of the visceral response that leads people, in the act of conscious or semi-conscious social differentiation, simply to avoid the music that they're not sure how to categorize based on these visceral responses. If dancing to disco music makes me uncomfortable (maybe visceral "dislike," or maybe, more simply, visceral unfamiliarity, something that threatens or challenges or conufses me) for whatever reason -- I can't dance, I think of it as a "gay" activity and find this to be a problem -- it's more likely that I'll simply avoid dance music than listen to it and try to analyze why I dislike it.

The way I phrased it on my blog was: "I think there might be a more balanced dichotomy in 'like/ignore' than 'like/dislike.'" So one way that we differentiate ourselves through music is to minimize the extent to which we'll ever have to DEAL with the visceral responses at all, thus putting us in the position of (possibly) having to figure them out.

Re: 3 Wise Metalheads

[koganbot]

Yeah, I think a lot of people do a good job of ensuring that visceral responses cause them no dissonance. I think I said this better about 19 years ago in my fanzine, which I'll have to dig out.

I replied to one of your previous posts but it got eaten by one of the ongoing denial of service attacks on livejournal. Anyway, the basic point was that once you arrive at what people say about why they like or dislike something, you've got a whole new ball of wax, or you've opened a new can or worms, or got a wormy ball of canned wax, or something.

Re: 3 Wise Metalheads

[(Anonymous)]

You mean to say it will light a candle of worms.

Re: 3 Wise Metalheads

[koganbot]

"LA Weekly" is actually LV Weekly.

I think that "I want to differentiate myself"/"I want to not differentiate myself" is a motivation, but it's indirect and subterranean, or anyway it doesn't work as "I am liking this because it differentiates me from my near neighbors." I think - to me, at any rate - it feels the other way around, "My liking for this differentiates me from my neighbors." But I'm hypothesizing that the differentiation can help produce the feeling. It's just not felt as producing the feeling.