This combination of growth over time and overcoming an uphill battle of negative associations is one of the reasons that The Wonder Years’ second album The Upsides is one of my favorite records of all time.īefore I get into weird personal history: some quick background info on the band. Art that’s so strong it’s able to break through our negative associations and emerge from the other side, still enjoyable. Most of my favorite albums were records that I didn’t think much of (or simply didn’t like) upon first listen, but gradually kept burrowing their way further into my brain.Īnd while memories often retroactively color our impressions of art, sometimes there are also individual works that are able to overcome our own mental hang-ups. Music with depth and complexity that reveals itself with each subsequent spin. I’m of the school of thought that traditionally “great” music starts as something you don’t necessarily love on the first listen, but becomes better over time. Whether it’s well-founded or not, there’s probably a negative association and personal bias at play skewing your opinion. Hell, think about a restaurant that once gave you food poisoning. Think about any album, movie, or TV show that you used to recover from a breakup. While a positive experience, association, or context can improve our perception of an album, the inverse can also ruin something that’s otherwise objectively good. This is how our tastes, perspectives, and very personalities are formed: through interaction with both art and the world around us. In experiencing art we inject a bit of our own story in the listening process and add on to the creation in whatever way we can. Memory is where it all comes into play, and it’s what we add to art as humans. It’s the reason you enjoy A while I prefer B. It’s the reason that two nearly-identical albums can feel so different. Art is tainted by our own memories and experiences. As listeners, we judge music based on how much life and “realness” bleed through it, but we also don’t experience anything in a vacuum. A sad consolation prize for the inflicted, the result of life experience and raw suffering.
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