{ oh land / white lands (twin shadow remix)}

When I’m not bringing myself closer to premature deafness by listening to bass-heavy hip-hop and dubstep, I listen to polyphonic forest fairy rock.

Basically, I only listen to the Hype Machine anymore. (NO TIME TO DO ANYTHING ELSE) It kills me a little to realize that my exposure to music these days is dictated by a single crowdsourced tastemaker, which filters out songs based on preferences roughly similar to my own but obviously not identical. Will my preferences, in time, gravitate more closely toward this “mean”, until I, too, listen to ungodly amounts of Skrillex?

Perhaps the bigger root of my unease (and love-hate relationship with Hypem) lies within the following question: is it even possible nowadays to cultivate tastes that are purely your own? Was it ever? Before the proliferation—and heightened convenience—of applications that boasted individual attention yet were governed by complex, data-mining algorithms (i.e. Pandora, Amazon’s Recommendations feature), how did you discover new books/music/movies/etc you might like, aside from your friends? Read Pitchfork? Tea leaves? Scour a full list of bookmarks, download fifty MP3s in one night instead of writing your paper and keep everything that you liked? (Not that I speak from personal experience.)

I remember how proud I was in elementary and middle school of using Boston Globe (and Boston Herald…) movie reviews to inform my movie-watching decisions, an admission I’m a little embarrassed about. Never mind that it wasn’t even a national publication, or that my parents didn’t let me watch rated-R movies until I was 18 (I didn’t bother asking if Velvet Goldmine would be acceptable). At the age of 10, deferring to a cultural authority, however perfunctory, and learning to judge and analyze movies through his lens every Sunday morning was a form of education I couldn’t acquire from school, and certainly not my parents.

Even now, I still enjoy reading reviews written by those whose tastes and opinions jive with my own, especially since it’s a good way to gauge whether or not I ought to waste my time watching a movie that I might hate or, hopefully, love. That’s not really the issue here. There is plenty of value in cultural criticism, and consumer-oriented reviewing (i.e. Yelp) has value as well, albeit of a different variety. (And it comes with its own can of worms—COUGH conflict of interest.) My primary question here is: how did I arrive at these tastes? Are they a culmination of years of discovery (and of course terrible, terrible mistakes), or were they molded heavily by the invisible hand whose writing still influences me today?

Our generation (Y) is, of course, also known as the “Me Generation”, and plenty of commentators have written about it with eloquence and depth—enough so that I’m not even going to bother linking to all the seminal discourse on our obsession with individualism and am instead linking to a Google Search results page. (Also, it’s 1:30 AM and I have other shit to do than inflict more solipsistic twattle on you.) I could go on for several more hours and paragraphs, but I am tired, and I’m sure you’ve heard all this somewhere else before.

EDIT- Whelp: Facebook as Tastemaker.