And conversely, what does your taste in music say about you?

According to this article at Barking Up The Wrong Tree it says quite a bit.  Practically the first sentence of the article asserts that you can predict whether someone is politically conservative or liberal by noting “markers of openess” in a person’s music collection.  For me, this is where the article goes…well…barking up the wrong tree.  Because the “markers of openess” allegedly denoting a politically liberal person exist in my library/music collection.  I am not liberal, politically anyway.  And it just goes further off the rails from there.  My advice?  Just listen to what you like and don’t worry so much about what it says about you.  Because whatever it “says about you” is likely to be a (probably wrong) conclusion jumped to by someone who doesn’t know you.

But there are still some questions related to what we listen to and why we listen to it.  For example: At what age do you form your taste in music?  Many an article has been written on this subject and they all say something different.  Some say at a certain age your brain “bonds” to the music you listen to.  Some say that you settle on music that coincides with a certain emotional climate occurring in your life at a certain time.  And so on and so on.  I understand that we want to know why.  We’re always asking WHY?  But does it matter?  I don’t think so.

And finally questions inspired by this post at Althouse: what is your “peak year” for favorite music and how old were you at that time?  Well, the answers to these questions may go some way to answering the previous questions because if you can determine your “peak year” you may have some empirical data to fill in the blanks to the previous questions and perhaps a pattern will emerge.  I did say perhaps.  I also said “if you can answer”.  I add the disclaimer because determining your “peak year” isn’t as easy as it sounds.  That may be a project for the coming week with the results posted next Music Friday.  We’ll see.

My guess is that my “peak year” falls into the mid 1960s somewhere, at least based on my recent Music Friday posts.  But I could do music posts all day everyday and still get stuck in any given genre for a good long while.  So what does my taste in music say about me?  I don’t really know.  And I don’t really care.