A Musical Discovery

This summer I was supposed to delve deep into my music collection and figure out what it is I truly like, for myself and myself alone. To delete all the music I haven't listened to in years, (or have never listened to...), to keep the music that I was previously ashamed to have but now I proudly add to my fantastic middle-school mixes, and to attempt to pin down at least a vague understanding of my general taste in music in order to facilitate more efficient new music searches.

Then my computer broke.

Without access to my own iTunes library I wasn't able to edit my music collection like I had planned. I also wasn't able to listen to the music I already had as often a I would have liked (mostly because I got frustrated not being able to edit my music library, and...I forget.)

But also as a result I discovered something unexpected about my musical taste:

i LOVE top40. I am truly a top40 girl. It is what I grew up on, it is what I listened to during the quite formulative years of middle and high school, and it is what I continue to listen to on the radio during the summer. Never mind that I bought an iTrip so I would never have to listen to "radio music" anymore (let's not mention how the iTrip i bought falls out every five seconds, probably because it was $20 on ebay...). I love the radio. I truly do. My fascination with top40 music is furthered by my summer addiction to Vh1 and MTV, where they cycle through the same 10 videos whose audio partners are repeated every hour on the radio.

I love top40 (mostly hip/hop r&b...I do come from the hood, people...) for its one-hit nature. It is extremely difficult for me to buy an entire album because I rarely ever listen to one album in its entirety. I usually like one or two songs on the album, and only want to listen to those. In recent years I have felt pressure to own an entire album, to fill out my collection, but now I feel pressure to listen to those albums in entirety when I would rather just listen to all my other singles. Radio hits function in one single moment - for one single memory, and an entire album can never function in that way. My summer soundtrack is based off radio hits, not my iTunes. That's probably because I listen to the radio in the car, and have chosen not to listen to my iTunes. Whatever the relationship, it does not change that my soundtrack for the summer is comprised of "I Kissed a Girl", "Take a Bow", and "Forever." And I like it that way.

Most importantly, I love top40 because you can sing and dance along. What is the purpose of a fantastic road-trip or summer party song if you cannot be involved in your own right? I love nothing more than singing along at the top of my lungs, with the windows down, (usually) by myself in the car, to the Chris Brown song of the moment. All of this usually accompanied by a few upper-body dance moves (I do have to keep driving...) and my mom saying "Do you always dance and drive?"

So, while I will continue on my iTunes editing when my computer arrives and I have access to my confused compilation of music, this summer was not wasted in terms of my musical quest. If anything, I learned where my roots lie: in top40.

And you know what? i am okay with that.