Week 2 Theme 4

Compose a shopping list, a list of found objects, or use a found list of some kind.

2004: Debussy

2005: Mendelssohn

2006: Rachmaninoff

2007: Markovich A.M.P.

2008: Muse

2009: Bloc Party

2010: Lady Gaga

Friends often ask me how I seem to have a black hole where my knowledge of music should be. Where one usually keeps lyrics to 90s hit songs, I have nothing. Where one usually remembers tunes by mainstream artists since the 2000s, again, I have nothing. When a friend finally asked me to write a list of artists I liked since high school, I came up with this.

This list speaks of a child raised by immigrant parents, whose music comprised Chinese pop, bad Motown, and any piano music he played. Sheltered from popular culture by uninterested parents, classical music became the only music I heard. Hit songs by Nelly or Brittney Spears occasionally floated into my perspective, but classical music was most of what I heard, and was therefore the only music I cared for. College changed that slowly. At first, I resisted by finding unusual music—to this day, I have yet to meet anyone else who has heard of Markovich. Then I was introduced to Pandora, and thus to the music that people had been listening to for the past decade.

Ultimately, this is the musical history of a late adopter. My musical tastes now lag by only a few years instead of a few centuries, but my musical tastes are not unique. I adopt books late. I am still reading classics I was supposed to have read in high school. I adopt electronics late. I had no MP3 player until this year, nine years after the iPod launched. As much as I try to stay current in any subject, I am always reminded that I only found out about Lady Gaga four years after her debut.