Via The Daily Telegraph, a pen held inside a woman’s stomach for 25 years still writes. There are about five things from this story that are amazing. Just check out Rachel Maddow’s three minute summary:
I don’t suppose it matters because I’ve already told you I wouldn’t vote for you in 2012 because of the debt ceiling debacle, but you’ve annoyed me even more with your move about not vetoing the defense authorization.
The Republican Party only believes in power. The Democratic Party is much better in this regard. But it is hard to make that argument with decisions like this.
Don’t you believe in anything? It sure isn’t clear.
Suzanne Vega’s Marlene on the Wall was one of the great pop songs of my youth, but its meaning was always murky to me. Over the weekend, I happened to hear the song again. For the first time, its meaning became clear.
It is well known that the Marlene on the Wall in this song is a picture (poster, painting) of Marlene Dietrich. Below is Susanne Vega in 1996 doing Marlene on the Wall with an introduction about how it came to be written. The story is a little confusing, because Vega merges how she came to admire Dietrich with how she happened to write the song. [The video is no longer available. Thanks to commenter RichardP, here is a different recording with the introduction.]
Here is the quotation from the concert. It shows that she is not talking about the start of the song, but rather the start of her adoration of Dietrich:
So I turned on the knob and you get the little tiny dot in the middle of the screen. And I hear this man’s voice saying, “You have lead many men to death with your body.” I was like “All right!” because I didn’t see anything, you know, I didn’t know who the guy was, who he was talking to. And for a split second I had this fantasy, what if someone came to my door and said that to me? What would I say? And I thought that I would probably apologize. I would probably be like “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, are you sure it was me? It might have been so-and-so down the hall.” So, I was curious to know what who ever he was talking to would say.
Of course right then the picture came on and there’s Marlene Dietrich’s beautiful face in close-up. And her answer, of course, which is the only proper and logical one “Give me a kiss.” So right from that moment I was just hooked. I watched the rest of the movie. I became a huge Marlene Dietrich fan. The photograph on the wall I’m singing about in the song, is one that someone had given me, back in the days when I was hanging out at Folk City. They gave it to me because they knew that I was a fan of hers. I had it framed and had it on my wall. The song is written from the point of view of the photograph of Marlene Dietrich looking down into my bedroom at that point when I was in my early twenties.[1]
It is usually a mistake for artists to talk about their work. I wish that Vega had not made the title character concrete, because I think it would be even more interesting to consider that it was a Marlene Dumas painting. But Marlene Dietrich is interesting, and the whole idea of adding the perspective of a painting hanging on a wall is very clever.
“Marlene on the Wall” starts out with its two fundamental themes: apathy and violence. The first verse:
She is saying that she’s unsure of why she is in this relationship, but whatever it might be, it can’t be outweighed by the violence that she suffers at the hands of her partner. However, she is vague about this violence. The bruising—”rose tattoo”—does not come from fists or other tools of torture. In fact, fingerprints imply someone trying to hold on. I imagine a large male hand grasping a thin female wrist.
Regardless of the kind of violence, this opening verse clearly says that the singer is unclear about whether she wants to be in this relationship, even apart from the violence she is subjected to.
The plot thickens in the second verse:
Here she continues her clinical appraisal of the relationship in “Marlene on the Wall.” The main problem seems to be that the partners are alone despite their physical proximity. It is easy to conclude that the “danger zone” that she is talking about refers to the violence of the first verse. I think this is wrong. When she talks about the danger zone, she is talking about the area where people are close to being truthful to one another. I’m sure we’ve all had relationships where we could never quite get past the play acting, which is the foundation of most human interactions, into being truthful with the vulnerability that requires.
Then she comes to the refrain:
But the only soldier now is me
I’m fighting things I cannot see
I think it’s called my destiny
That I am changing.
Marlene on the wall.
Vega does something very strange. She’s been singing in the second person to her lovers, but here she switches suddenly to an introspective third person through the vale of Marlene Dietrich.[2] The implication is that her encounters with men are at their places. At home, she is alone. Also, it would seem, she only really exists when she is alone. Hence the third person narrative when she is away with her lovers.
The use of the soldier as a metaphor serves two purposes. First, it reinforces the violent subtext of the song. Second, and even more important, it puts forth the idea of a line of men—serial monogamy. At this point—during the first refrain—this seems to be the extent of her changing: from one abusive man to another.
Vega complicates matters in the third verse:
Here she continues the effective but confusing second person point of view. The first two lines make clear that the singer is not forced into this relationship—she goes of her own free will, if indeed any of us have such a thing. Mostly, however, she is speculating about the advice that Marlene Dietrich would give her, but which she (as we see shortly) doesn’t follow: don’t give yourself away to these awful men.
In the last verse, she resolves the plot and shows growth of the singer:
Here she comes back to the original violent image of “Marlene on the Wall.” But it is contrasted with her memory of their first meeting, which we can assume was much more gentle—no fists were used that night. This contrast tells her that she should not be in this relationship. I choose to believe that this insight is enough to change her behavior, but of course, a darker reading is possible.
When she repeats the refrain, Vega changes the word “soldier” to “men,” to make it concrete. She is, shall we say, past speaking about her relationships in terms of metaphor. As such, her claim that “I am changing” sounds far more credible; now she may be changing in a more fundamental way, away from her dysfunctional relationships to something better, if only to being alone with Marlene Dietrich. It is due to this that “Marlene on the Wall” is hopeful despite its dark themes.
[1] She is likely referring to the 1931 film Dishonored, but she misquotes it.
[2] Note that Vega is incorrect in the video above when she talks about the POV of her song.
Today is the beginning of the end for Up with Chris Hayes. I had wondered recently how long the new show would manage to continue to be unapologetically liberal. This morning, for the first time in its young history (as far as I know), it had two conservative panelists—who just happened to get far more talking time than their liberal peers. Yes, the conservatives (Elise Jordan and Reihan Salam) are not of the wacky persuasion. But I fear that is just a matter of time. Up with Chris Hayes in 2014 might well have a panel of Charles Krauthammer, George Will, David Brooks, and Leslie Sanchez. Sanchez is the liberal.
I was watching some news program online and there was an ad for Hyundai:
I had seen it many time before and I had come to the conclusion that the voice on it couldn’t be Jeff Bridges; it had to be some anonymous voice actor doing Jeff Bridges. How wrong I was.
I found a list of more than ten stars who were hocking for different car companies. It included people who I tend to think of as serious artists: Richard Dreyfus and Robert Downey Jr. What were they doing? Was this just about money? That’s the only conclusion I can come up with, even though these people are already very wealthy.
This act calls all their work into question. I understand that fans always hate it when artists do commercials. Oingo Boingo fans hated it when the band did a Bud commercial:
But they weren’t rich guys piling extra cash into their already bulging bank accounts. Many band members were worse than broke. They were selling themselves so they could continue to be artists.[1] The same can be said about Orson Welles’ infamous Paul Masson commercials, which are still wonderful despite themselves (That voice!):
These commercial “sell outs” can be forgiven or even applauded. But Jeff Bridges?[2]
To my mind, no one stands out as the paragon of an artist like Jane Siberry. At this point in her career, she could live well giving expensive concerts and selling her music catalog. Instead, she travels the world giving micro-concerts and giving away her catalog; she provides all of her albums, except the last two, in MP3 format for free on her website [See no longer does. -FM]. Here she is doing the charming “Marry Me”:[3]
I don’t know Siberry, but I assume that she has made enough money to support the kind of life she has always wanted: an artist’s life. But what are we to make of Richard Dreyfus and Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges? If they ever were artists, they have gotten extremely off course.[4]
[1] It doesn’t hurt that the commercial is rather good and very Oingo Boingo.
[2] I don’t have any data for Jeff Bridges, but Robert Downey Jr. was paid $12.5 million for the dreadful Iron Man 2.
[3] I can’t help it. Jane Siberry created a song that more than any other piece of art captures what it is like to be dumped. The video, although not worse than other videos of that time, is no better. But the song! The song!
[4] What does it take to become a star? If we are to believe William Goldman, it requires a singular focus on becoming a star. It may involve creating art, but that is not the point. So I probably should not be surprised.
For years, I’ve noticed these special classics published and sold by Barnes & Noble. I’ve never bought one, probably because the bindings seemed to be poor. But yesterday, over at Treehorn Books, I found a used copy of their Don Quixote for $5—only half its already low cover price of $9.95. I can rarely pass up a used copy of anything by Cervantes, so I snatched it up. The book is in pretty good shape. It looks like it has been read only once. But despite this the spine is badly bowed. This is always a problem with long books, but here it seems somewhat extreme.
This edition is based upon Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation[1], but it is so much more. I already have The Modern Library Classics edition of Don Quixote that is also based upon the Smollett translation. Other than an introduction by Carlos Fuentes and rather meager notes by Stephanie Kirk, this edition does not offer a great deal. The Barnes & Noble edition, however, is a real gem. According to the back cover:
As grand as this sounds, it actually understates how good this book is. To begin with, the editor, Carole Slade, did not simply modernize the spelling of Smollett’s translation. She re-translated parts of it that she found unclear or too archaic—a common problem with all the Don Quixote translations, at least up to Putnam’s 1949 translation.
As impressed as I am that Slade retranslated parts of Smollett’s Don Quixote, the truth is that I don’t know this translation well enough to say what she did. I picked over The Modern Library version and was unable to locate any differences. What does stand out is the collection of abundant notes that Slade added to the text. What’s more, these are provided as footnotes rather than endnotes, which makes them far more useful.[2] One of these notes I found particularly interesting:
Putnam mentioned that the traditional name for Sancho’s donkey is rucio, which means “gray.” He is discussing why he chose not to use the name “Dapple”—he found it too quaint. But I didn’t know (though I should have) that rucio was just the traditional name and not one that Cervantes applied. Also, I didn’t know that we have Smollett to thank (or blame) for “Dapple.” This is but one of many interesting notes that Slade provides in this edition.
The Barnes & Noble Classics edition also includes almost a hundred illustrations by Gustave Doré—I believe originally created for a later edition of Louis Viardot’s French translation of Don Quixote (but I’m not sure, so don’t quote me). They are not just beautiful, but historically, they are important; as much as the text itself, Doré’s illustrations define our modern conception of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The only thing that is really bad about this edition of Don Quixote is that it is based on the Tobias Smollett translation. It simply isn’t nearly as good as Putnam (or even Charles Jervas). More than anything, Putnam provides a very modern read. For example, the first two paragraphs of Chapter 6 are not only turned into one paragraph by Smollett, they are turned into one sentence:
Wow! Although Cervantes too provides a whopper of a sentence for most of his first paragraph (before the dialog), he isn’t nearly as verbose. I will spare you a quote. However, I think I would be doing a disservice to you if I did not provide the same text as translated by Putnam:
“Here, Senor Licentiate,” she said, “take this and sprinkle well, that no enchanter of the many these books contain may remain here to cast a spell on us for wishing to banish them from the world.”
I doubt much need be said here. If you prefer the Smollett, then by all means, read him. I don’t understand you, but I’m happy for you. For most people, the Putnam translation is clearly superior. But then, Putnam had many advantages: 200 years and our modern voice. Nonetheless, the Bares & Noble Classics edition should be owned by any Don Quixote lover for Carole Slade’s notes: very informative and lots of fun.
[1] Smollett first published his translation in 1755, but he greatly revised it six years later. This edition is based upon the 1755 version.
[2] As much as I like the Putnam translation, I get annoyed having to flip to the back of the book for every note—especially given that his notes are so often really interesting.
Many years ago, a friend told me that Bill Gates makes so much money that if he saw a $100 bill, it would not be worth his time to pick it up. Most of us are not in this category, but still struggle with whether we should pick up smaller value currency, like the penny. My mother always picked up pennies. She had a fondness for both superstition and poetry, and so could often be heard quoting the following poem:
So I understood whenever my mother would pick up a penny, she did it because she thought it was lucky. But other people have told me that they pick up pennies because they represent free money. But they aren’t. Pennies on the ground don’t just magically transport themselves into your pocket. It takes effort to cash in on this apparent free money.
In order to determine just what these pennies are worth, I poured a bunch of them at my feet and timed how long it took to pick up ten pennies, one at a time. It took 25 seconds. This means that I could—in theory—pick up 24 pennies in a minute. This comes to $14.40 per hour, or $13.80 per hour when you take into account the California State requirement that workers take a ten minute break every four hours. Overall, that sounds pretty good—substantially above minimum wage, but hardly “1% here I come!” territory.
There is an important aspect of this test that would bring this number way down: I could not keep up this pace for an hour, much less eight hours. But I’m not going to do an experiment. For extended periods of time, I doubt that I could do better than half this rate: 12 pennies per minute. That would bring the hourly pay down to $7.90 per hour—just below minimum wage in California, unless you work in San Francisco, in which case it is far below the $10.24 rate as of the beginning of 2012.
How it was determined that Bill Gates is wasting his time to pick up a $100 bill is easy to determine with a little thought: figured out how much money he makes and divided it by the time it takes to pick up a $100 bill. Who knows if anyone has actually done this calculation. This is typical folklore: the point is what’s important, not the detail.[1] Clearly, picking up $100 bills would result in a pretty good salary if the bills were just sitting around waiting to be picked up (an invalid assumption even for pennies). Just one bill an hour would result in a yearly salary of $200,000—four times the median salary of a worker in the US. But a penny?
Even picking up pennies at a back and knee breaking pace would result, at best, in something like a minimum wage job. A similar job with nickles probably wouldn’t be too bad, but in general, I can’t see that a nickle is really worth the time to pick up, either. Dimes seem like a safe bet and quarters most certainly are. Obviously, any paper money is worth picking up. Regardless of the denomination, however, such money is most definitely not free.
[1] Like most people, I think this is a stupid example. Gates makes his money indirectly by what he owns. So if he managed to pick up an extra $100, it doesn’t lower his productivity.
I was cleaning out spam earlier today and I noticed another bout of random acts of spamness: “If you’re not acceptable at this ratio, afresh either you are traveling afterwards the amiss projects or you’re angle and presentation abilities charge a tune-up…” I now see them in a different light, however. I know that their purpose is to seem kind of like English without actually saying anything. This is very similar to Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot: it is one academic cliche after another that has the style of serious argument without any content.
There is meaning to be found in this fragment, but it takes digging. Lucky is hypothesizing the traditional Judeo-Christian God, who lives in a realm that transcends time. He (which we must assume given that he has a white beard) loves us, even though he has no emotion. This is a hypothesis, of course, because God is incapable of communicating his feelings in a way that we can understand. What’s more, why God’s love is given to certain people and not to others is unfathomable. God suffers just like we do, but he is able to push through this and live in peace—but not for long. This is a vision of the universe that Schopenhauer would have considered gloomy. For the normal person, it treads very close to a reasonable argument for suicide. But this hardly matters, because one only gets this much meaning out of the speech after great effort. For those sitting in a theater, the speech is nothing more than logorrhoea. However, the fact that a speech about the unfathomability of the universe is itself unfathomable was certainly Beckett’s intention.
In Lucky’s speech, Beckett lampoons the language constructs that hinder communication. Today’s spam creates this same kind of language. The purpose of Beckett and the spammers are different, however. Beckett’s purpose is to show how word combinations that sound meaningful can be entirely without meaning; the spammers’ purpose is to create meaningless word combinations that sound meaningful. Thus, it is not surprising that they would sound similar.
The text created by the spammers is not their actual product. Their products are links—viruses that live on a host site; the text is a kind of defense system that hinders their removal. To accomplish this, the spammers wish to create text that is not repeated from infection to infection. There are two reasons for this, I believe: to avoid possible legal problems with posting identical comments for very different articles[5] and to make the work of those checking comments more difficult and error prone (that is, make it more likely that the spam will survive).
In his day, Beckett was not confronted with intentional meaninglessness. People certainly tried to obfuscate, but this was not the main issue. He wasn’t attacking advertising. The much more fundamental problem was people trying to communicate truthfully and succeeding only in obfuscating. Thus, he would not have been attacking spammers, if they had even existed. But his solution to the problem of showing the effects of literary cliche on meaning deterioration is the same as the spammer’s solution to the problem of creating original text that sounds meaningful but is not. The solution: combine phrases in a random way. The difference between Beckett and the spammers is primarily in the phrases chosen. Beckett’s phrases are substantially more complex; the spammers rarely use phrases longer than two words. Also, Beckett takes great care in how he matches these phrases, to make them sound even more compelling. He is subtle and clever in how he combines them. Thus, it is only on a cursory reading that one would mistake one for the other. But the similarity of them in terms of their sound and rhythm is unmistakable.
Intentions matter. Even if the spammers could somehow create great Lucky-like (or Not I-like) speech, their output would still be unwelcome. It would still be evil. I am waiting for the day when Yesterday is used to sell an SUV.
Here is the brilliant, if flawed, scene from the Beckett on Film Waiting for Godot with Stephen Brennan as Lucky:
[1] What exactly is meant by “quaquaquaqua” is a point of some debate. Beckett is in no way a careless writer and so we can’t assume that it is a meaningless statement or an error. There are only two occurrences of it in the whole play and they are placed just as shown here: within four words of each other. It could be a pun on the word quaquaversal, which means “sloping downward from the center in all directions.” This is an appealing interpretation because this certainly sums up the traditional view of monotheistic religions. It could also be a pun on the Latin phrase quaque die (Q.D.), which means “every day.” This too has a certain appeal as it relates to the omnitemporal nature of monotheistic gods, or as Beckett writes, God that is “outside time without extension.” However, having studied the speech in some depth, I conclude that it is a kind of onomatopoeia indicating that Lucky’s mind is having difficulty getting started—like a cold car forced to accelerate too quickly.
[2] These three words (apathia, athembia, aphasia) are quite challenging. By apathia, Beckett is probably referring to the Latin word, which means “freedom from emotion.” Who knows what athambia means. It may mean the state of calmness. Aphasia is an actual English word (in the traditional latinized Greek sense). It means “the loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words usually resulting from brain damage.”
[3] Although it sounds like it, there is no mythology related to Miranda. In Latin, “miranda” means “to be admired.” Does that help? Of course not.
[4] Lucky’s six to seven minute speech is a single sentence without any stops like semicolons. I have inserted some punctuation to make it easier to read. These reflect just my interpretation, although they are in keeping with all performances I’ve seen.
[5] Related to this is the ability to automatically detect such spam. If the link text was always “Happy Happy Joy Joy!” then it would be easy to spot this text and remove the spam infection. If the text is always different, it would not be possible to do this. Although it is easy for a human to read the text that protects these spam links, computers still have great difficulty distinguishing between Beckett and noise.
I just watched D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour in the United Kingdom, Don’t Look Back. This was the second time I’ve seen it; the first time was about 30 years ago. What struck me most both times was the conversation between Dylan and the “science student.” During this conversation, Dylan seems to be teasing the young man who is surprisingly open about his feelings. For example, the student mentions that when he interviews musicians (he writes about music for his college newspaper), they don’t want to know him. Dylan responds with something like, “Have you ever asked yourself why?” It sounds worse on paper than it does in the movie, because I certainly get the impression that Dylan kind of likes of kid. Anyway, the student is not easily taken down. He responds that he knows it has nothing to do with him because these people don’t want to know him even before he appears.
What most strikes me about this scene is how the young student is so open about his feelings and about who he is. Dylan comes off looking the cool hipster he is, but the kid comes off looking real in a way that few of us ever attain. Even at this late stage in my life, I’m not sure I am capable of being this honest to my closest friends. I don’t think that speaks so poorly of me so much as it speaks really well of the kid.
It turns out that this science student—he graduated from the University of Newcastle with degrees (?) in math and metallurgy—is Terry Ellis, a man whose name is not associated with science except in relation to Don’t Look Back. After college he started booking concerts and eventually started managing groups. With Chris Wright, he founded Chrysalis Records. He stayed with the company until the mid-1980s, after which he founded another highly successful (but short-lived) label Imago Records. He is most associated with the band Jethro Tull. In addition to discovering and signing the band, Ellis co-produced five of their albums. It may be just a coincidence, but they are the best Jethro Tull albums—the only ones really worth listening to. When Ian Anderson was left to produce alone—early on, but especially later—his natural, but limited, intellectualism was generally fatal.
Ellis has had a great ear for new talent. He was the first to sign Pat Benatar. He signed Aimee Mann, when she was considered poison after the break-up of ‘Til Tuesday. And there are many others: Huey Lewis and the News (when they were still Huey Lewis and the American Express), Blondie, Baby Animals, and many more.[1]
What I think has been most important about Terry Ellis the musical genius is not the ear and eye he has for talent; it is his personal commitment to the artists he’s believed in. He was most definitely an old-fashioned manager who worked closely with his artists. In this regard, he wasn’t always successful. The band Clouds clearly suffered due to Ellis’ preoccupation with Jethro Tull.[2] So in the surprisingly open science student in Don’t Look Back we see all we need to about the remarkable and successful career path that Terry Ellis would go on to follow.
[1] I could name lots more: Ten Years After (little), Procol Harum (little), Robin Trower (little), David Bowie (almost none), Leo Sayer (little), Spandau Ballet (much), Steeleye Span (much). However, the extent of Ellis’ involvement with these acts is unclear. There isn’t a lot of historical information about him.
[2] If you doubt me that the world would be a better place had Ellis spent more time with Clouds, have a listen to the first single Clouds ever produced. Even if you don’t doubt: listen.
Andrea’s recent post, which was just a reprint of a Dilbert Cartoon, got a bizarre comment that had a link for Stag Weekends in Newquay (a seaside community on the southwest tip of the United Kingdom).
Racist spam? No. Political satire. It was inappropriate for the post, so I deleted it, but not before Andrea was responding to it.
It must be hard to focus on reading when you are surrounded by all the stag pleasures of Newquay.
After Friday’s police spraying of non-violent protesters at U.C. Davis, I—like any reasonable person—am very angry and sad. Right now, I’d like to talk about part of my anger: the firestorm of apologia for the police. Only the most evil of people are defending the specific police and their actions. You know, people like Bill O’Reilly. (Even Megyn Kelly seems to be reticent to go that far, even if, you know, pepper spray is “a food product, essentially.”) But even people I normally agree with—for example, Ed Schultz—are going out of their way to protect police, even though they deserve no such thing. Have not the police all along done exactly what the installed powers have asked of them? Have they ever, with the one exception discussed below, broken with the Nuremberg defense of just following orders regardless of how heinous the orders they are following?
Below are four police myths that I am getting tired of hearing. These are evil people, doing evil work, for even more evil people. And if there are police out there who don’t like my characterization, I suggest they start refusing some of these orders. The reckoning is coming. And if they think the 1% will hesitate to throw them under the bus at the first sign of trouble, then they are even stupider than the IQ tests they must fail to join the force would indicate.
Police are trained very well. They don’t beat up protesters and pepper spray them because they aren’t well trained. They do it because they are extremely well trained.
Police are paid the same as the 99%, but they are part of the protective services of the 1%. You wouldn’t say that the Praetorian Guard were normal Roman citizens. They were what allowed the generally abusive Roman Empire to continue on for so long. The police allow the existing unjust system to continue on. They are leaches of the 1%. They are not the 99%.
Again: the ones performing the vile acts are just the ones performing the vile acts. Modern management philosophy holds that you make all workers as interchangeable as possible. The reason the police at the protests in Wisconsin didn’t turn violent was that they saw their fellow off-duty police friends there. If they hadn’t, those protesters would have been victims of the same kind of violence that all the other protesters are receiving.
Perhaps the funniest line I have ever heard (and I have heard it many times from many different people), is the answer to the question, “Why did you go into law enforcement?” The answer: “Because I want to help people.” I used to hear this same line from pre-med students; they too just wanted to help people; the fact that their chosen profession was very lucrative had nothing to do with it. People become police—in all its varied forms—because they are naturally rule-oriented thinkers. They are the kind of people who really do need the idea of a god to behave properly. People who just want to help others become ministers and social workers and even nurses. They don’t become cops or soldiers. And those who do what may be necessary work (I don’t think so, but most people do) are not just like the rest of us.
I would be happy to take back all that I have said, just as soon as I start seeing active duty police pushing back against their orders to brutalize peaceful protesters. I have no expectation of seeing this, however. In the almost five decades of my life, I have rarely seen police act like anything but the evil automatons we are daily witnessing.
Most people I talk to tell me that they like all styles of music. Sometimes they will admit to a particular style they dislike, especially Country or Heavy Metal. Such statements have always amused me, because I know these people are fooling themselves—not that I shatter their illusions. My experience with people’s actions rather than their words is that they listen almost exclusively to one kind of music and they put up with a lot of other things.
The music you like is the stuff you put on when you are at home when no one else is around to please or impress. If you really will put on Madama Butterfly today, Judas Priest tomorrow, Russian Balalaika quartets the next, and traditional Biwa accompanied Japanese folk tales the last, then you really do like all styles of music. But if you don’t, then you don’t.
I have always thought—opposed to the pretenders around me—that I really did like all styles of music. That, however, is just as much a delusion as that of others who are desperately hooked on a single style of music. In general, I do have eclectic taste. I will listen to Gregorian Chants, followed by Black Flag, followed by Merle Haggard, followed by John Coltrane. I even like good Hip Hop, but given the overwhelming quantity of dreck, I am most likely to settle for very old stuff like Gil Scott-Heron, rather than bother to learn the modern artists, 95% of whom are simply not interesting. But that’s the thing: I like all styles of western music. I have little patience for most non-western music. If it uses the western twelve tone octave, I’m fine. Anything else, I don’t get. I can tell it is music; I can appreciate the rhythms; but the melodies and harmonies are maddening.
So no, I don’t like all styles of music. And I’m fine with that.