poptimists | Poptimist rountable: Why don't you like what you're supposed to like?

[

koganbot has been answering this question, originally posed by

poptasticuk , in his column here, and talking about it on his journal here. I thought it might be in order to continue the conversation today. Personal anecdotes welcome! I'm off out, but I'll be back to talk after 2.]

When I was 12 I was a member of a Scout troop based on a housing estate a little way from the comfortable middle class suburb where I lived. I was just discovering music, and particularly loved the Beastie Boys. (Obviously my mum never let me steal a VW badge, but I was allowed to write and ask for the little replicas they gave out in an attempt to keep kids away from their cars.) For a while I was allowed to share this enthusiasm with other members of the group, until one day they decided that as a 'square' kid from a posh school, I wasn't supposed to like the Beastie Boys, and clearly was only doing it to 'fit in'.

Around the same time my dad was a director at a merchant bank in the city. One day he overheard a much younger colleague saying 'you know Mr T******? You'd think he was into, you know Vivaldi or something. But he likes Iron Maiden!' (And WASP, Helloween, etc. it transpires. Partly because he was lending money to a company that was involved with those acts, but hey, why spoil a good story!)

A year or so later I was in my first year at boarding school, and I had (via my dad -- not how this is supposed to happen!) got into metal. I remember one of the older boys (who subsequently ended up as a maths teacher at the school, I wonder where he is now?) walking past, noticing that I was listening to 'Kill 'em All' and saying 'Metallica: pretty hev (heavy) for a junior'. This time not liking what I was supposed to like was a good thing, and he let me have free run of his cassettes to learn up on all that other heavy stuff. (Result! Cheers Simon!)

Obviously this still goes on -- I think a large chunk of the 'poptimist' experience is about this: deliberately liking what you're supposed to dislike; finding yourself in transgression of 'supposed-to's of various sorts; and of course encoding new 'supposed-to's. (Aren't all the polling and games intended to recognise and disrupt the natural formation of 'supposed-to's?) Most of my IRL pals in Edinburgh like what they're supposed to like (although I think everyone has a couple of things they like that don't fit -- maybe this is the limit of the 'supposed-to' model), and are happy like that. [But I was playing tunes when we had people round for C's birthday and pretty much every track prompted a 'what! you can't play this' from someone -- but there was always someone else who thought it was ok to play it, so clearly all sorts of 'supposed-to's were clashing in the room.]

Anyway what annoys me most about music radio for example is how obviously it enshrines 'supposed-to's: you know, Radio 1 is for 'new music', as long as that doesn't include too much dance music etc.; 6music for 'music that matters'. But then I guess that 'supposed-to's are how the cultural industry works -- fixing and solidifying the 'supposed-to's that are already there in the social world. So the battle for autonomy is the battle against 'supposed-to's?