Other Ears

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Does anyone else get that thing where they play a record they like to someone, actually physically with someone there in the room, and there's a silence while it plays, maybe a look of mild scepticism on the other person's face, and during the silence you find yourself listening with their ears and suddenly everything that MIGHT be lame or weak or crappy about the music is REALLY OBVIOUS to you?

Comments

[koganbot]

A third type would be Accidental Opinion Leaders, meaning people who get their opinion-leader status by accident (as opposed to meaning people who are Leaders In Accidental Opinions, owing perhaps to their typing and word usage being so poor that they keep writing things they hadn't intended, these accidental opinions subsequently catching on).

This is something I intend to write for the column that, erm, I should be working on right now. But if you recall over in my own livejournal, where Martin and I were discussing how heavy metal kids can find each other, in one of my posts I speculated that three kids happened to be assigned alphabetically to sit next to each other (let's say this is in the mid '70s), and one of 'em likes metal and prog and funk, all about equally; the guy sitting to his right likes metal, country-rock, and oldies; and the guy to his left likes metal, singer-songwriter music, and glam. What they have in common is metal, so those tastes reinforce each other, each fellow becoming sources of info for the other two, so metal becomes an identity the three share. And what I wrote was "Let's suppose that once our three youngsters discover their common liking for metal, and under each other's influence expand and deepen their knowledge and love of the music, they come to the attention of other kids, some of whom also like metal and so gravitate towards these three. So in effect these three have become the opinion leaders. But this isn't necessarily owing to any leadership quality in the three, but just to there being three of them and their constituting a noticeable clump." And this opinion-leader status isn't due to any previous social status the three had had. And though they undoubtedly weren't the only ones to initially like metal, they were the three to like with metal with a noticeable impact on their fellows. So in effect they gain social status among the other metalheads as the ones who led the way. And this status may therefore give weight to their further opinions on metal and other musical matters.

(By the way, Mark, I think that the process I've described can and should be called "influence" and that you wouldn't object to the usage, since it's only owing to the three being in proximity to each other and then being noticeable to their classmates that the "metal movement" happens among these particular youngsters. So this is "influence" in the same why that, e.g., deviations from the expected orbit of Uranus were due to the influence of as yet undiscovered planets (such as Neptune), and the change in the language of the Military Aid Act was due to the influence of the Israeli lobby, etc.)