Music Appreciation…or Not

Last weekend I went over to Heidi’s house to help her with a fun project. She has an iPod and I offered to bring over my CD’s to see if there was anything she might want. I only brought half of my stuff over for this first trip. We settled in for the night with pizza and drinks and got started. Or at least we tried to get started. It always seems like anytime I have to get near her computer, there is always something going on that slows it way down. This time it seemed to be updating some of her virus software. Then it was a new update to iTunes, and then it was God only knows what.

I went through her programs and started interrogating her on what she used some of them for and if she wanted to keep them. Sounds like a lot of fun, right? I think we finally got started on the CD’s right before 11. It was going to be a long night. Still, we were both excited for different reasons for sticking to the plan. Heidi wanted more music for her library and I love sharing music. So there you go. We started with “A” and kept going.

We had a lot of fun. We also discovered how much we don’t have in common in terms of music. She likes Hip Hop and Rap (among lots of other things, of course) and I seem to have a rather extensive collection of Folk artists. I realize there is an age gap between us, but sometimes I think it is less about what is popular on the radio and more about what you are exposed to by your parents and friends. For example, I grew up listening to the Beatles, the Mamas and Papas, the Seekers, and so forth. I was surprised when Heidi went for Sam Cooke, Al Green and Marvin Gaye. Not because they are older artists, but more because I found out more about her and what she was exposed to growing up. My biggest surprise is that she is an Air Supply fan. AIR SUPPLY. Wow. (Of course I had one of their CD's which is how I found out.)

Then again, there were moments when I really just had to shake my head at the whole thing. She isn’t a Beatles fan. Fine, no problem. I know plenty of people who respect the accomplishments without being a fan of the music itself. I have a number of Beatles CD’s and she got to Sgt. Pepper and was surprised that it was the Beatles. Huh? Who did she think it was? Anyway, she decided to take some songs from that CD. When she put the CD in and looked at the song list, she asked me which songs I thought were good. I’m sure I had that same puzzled look on my face.

One running joke we seemed to latch on to was regarding my Folk artist CDs. We got to Jim Croce and she had no idea who he was. Okay…..from that point I decided to spare both of us the agony. So each time we came to an artist she didn’t recognize I just told her it was a folk artist and we kept going. The night wore on and we finally wrapped up around 4:30 am. Once we got to a George Harrison CD and she asked me if he was some “folk guy”, I knew I was done for the night. She just stared in amazement at the pages of Indigo Girls CDs.

To be fair, she took the opportunity to play me some of her music. She played some old R&B artists for me. Other than Bobby Brown, a couple of the songs sounded vaguely familiar, but I knew that it wasn’t anything I had ever really paid that much attention to growing up. I’m sure I showed as much appreciation as she did for Folk. Luckily there are enough artists out there for both us. We decided to wait a couple of weeks before starting the second half. She is really looking forward to getting to all my 80’s CD’s.