Culture . 04/21/2008 11:44 AM . Jennifer Carden

According to my Last.fm profile, I became a member on December 20, 2004, way back when the site was still known as “Audioscrobbler.”

Developed by a college kid as part of his third-year computer science program, Audioscrobbler sought to connect music aficionados with their peers via the internet. Using a system known as “collaborative filtering,” the software would track all music played on a user’s computer, and then match his profile to other Audioscrobbler members with similar taste.

It was intended, primarily, to expose users to artists they didn’t know and connect stranger with similar tastes. If Kablammy245 and I had a “high” compatibility—which meant he liked almost everything I did—I’d keep track of what he “scrobbled,” or played that week. If his “scrobbler” showed he’d played an artist whom I’d never heard of 497 times that week, I knew it was likely that I’d enjoy the same artist.

It was a good idea, and ahead of its time. This was 2002, after all. Web 2.0 was a long time coming. Friendster – the now-defunct precursor to Myspace and Facebook – had just barely breached the horizon, and the social networking siren call had yet to sound. People just weren’t sure they wanted too much of themselves passing through that complex “series of tubes.” But here was 20 year-old Richard “RJ” Jones with strange talk about connecting real people through music and the internet. By the time BBC caught up in 2003, a startling-for-the-time 3,000 users were “regularly” logging on to Audioscrobbler to check their scrobblers and post in forums.

But even then, I remembered as I recently checked my dusty, long-forsaken Last.fm message inbox, the interesting part was not that people were connecting. The interesting part was the kind of connections they were trying to make.

During the two years I’d enabled Audioscrobbler, I received 7 marriage/relationship proposals in the form of private messages. They ranged from mildly creepy—“I bet you’re really pretty.”—to seriously questionable—“Ok, Jennifer, we really need to talk, because fate has brought us together, and we need to become a couple, immediately.”

Other messages mentioned how we’d managed to find each other, “somehow, through music, and the internet,” and most of all, that we’d be great together, since “[my] scrobbler left no doubt as to our compatibility.”

These people weren’t looking for music recommendations; they were looking for friend recommendations, based on music. Since we liked the same bands, it stood to reason that our “outside” interests would also be similar—the freckles in our eyes ( mirror images, natch ) would align perfectly when we kissed, etc.

That was four years ago.

These days, I would suggest, the trend has only gained momentum. Your taste in music has become definitive in the same way your profession was definitive in the 80’s and 90’s. It oftendefines your social interactions as part of the modified “indier than thou” caste system, if that’s how you roll. If you’re part of that crowd, you likely develop theses defending the value of every album you own and why you don’t own that one. You broadcast your unironic appreciation for the innovative choices Young Jeezy’s been making lately alongside your disappointment with Vampire Weekend—after all that “pre-backlash buzz!”—and generally live like someone’s going to scroll through your iPod one day and determine a score to stamp on your forehead.

Okay, maybe you don’t. In fact, of course you don’t. That would be ridiculous. But I bet you know someone who does. Someone who judges the people around him almost entirely by their taste in music, who structures his collection with the intention that people could look at it and, you know, get him, on a deep, connective-tissue level?

Word magazine blogger Lucas Hare has no problem admitting he is that guy. “I genuinely like the idea that someone could walk into my house, study my music collection and ascertain something about me without uttering a word,” he says.

“I like the fact you can look at someone’s music collection and divine a lot about them,” concurs British IPC journalist Rob Mansfield. “It doesn’t mean you should judge them simply on the basis of their love for Céline Dion, Nazareth or Tupac, but it goes a long way to establishing a common bond between people when you’ve first met.”

And how do the bonds originate? Well,“as it happens, I’ve become good mates with someone I met via a social networking site, simply because we shared similar music tastes,” Mansfield continues.

My first response to both Hare and Mansfield didn’t correspond to their comments. No, my first reaction was, “Wait, aren’t you a little old for this?” Looking at them, you’d think they would be—no offense, guys. Both have been out of college for, um, more than a few years, and have enough gray hair to prove it. But they still care about what someone thinks of their musical collection when most of the generation preceding them sold their records long ago.

Essentially, the musical centricity isn’t limited to the university crowd, or a small subculture. It’s not rising out of make-love-not-war idealism, and it’s not limited to the kids who have time to search the internet for the latest and greatest.

THE GROWN UPS ARE INTO IT, TOO, AND THAT’S JUST WEIRD

New York Magazine writer Adam Sternbergh thinks so, anyway. In his brilliant obituary for the generation gap, “Up with the Grups” he asks, “When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party…(d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band…(f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house…?”

Even now, you’ll notice, Sternbergh’s cultural references are dated ( give him a break, the piece was written more than two years ago), and the snob within you is probably recoiling—Sufjan? So 2004!

Try to focus.

Sternbergh goes on to quote Michael Hirschorn, the 42-year-old executive vice-president of original programming and production at VH1. “All of the really good music right now has absolutely precise parallels to the best music of the eighties, from Franz Ferdinand to Interpol to Death Cab—anything you can name,” says Hirschorn. “Plus, the 20-year-olds are all listening to the Cure and New Order anyway. It’s created a kind of mass confusion. I was at the Coachella festival last year, and the groups people were most stoked about were Gang of Four and New Order.”

“No wonder Grups [ hipster-speak for “grown-ups,”] like today’s indie music, observes Sternbergh. “It sounds exactly like the indie music of their youth. Which, as it happens, is what kids today like, too, which is why today’s new music all sounds like it’s twenty years old. And thus the culture grinds to a halt, in a screech of guitar feedback.”

But what happens when the Grups have the kids? Well, a cool, musically aware and responsible Grup can’t just stand back perfecting his knowledge of Pitchfork’s highest rated while his daughter listens to Hannah Montana. Her two year-old taste is a reflection of his, after all.

“My son seems to like the Hives a lot,” Neal Pollack, author of memoir Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America, tells Sternbergh of his 3-year-old son, Elijah. “One guy was telling me his son was really into Wilco. And I was telling him that’s lame. Because Wilco is so over.”

Trust me, he’s not kidding. What’s more: he’s not alone. As the generation gap recedes and “good taste in music” becomes the must-have accessory, the cool get older, and their kids get dragged along for the ride.

Heck, Neil Pollack is 38. When my dad was 38, he was still listening to the Beach Boys and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, the same stuff he’d been listening to for the past 20 years. His focus on the music industry ended when he stopped having time for the culture – when he grew up, and grew out of it.

And that makes sense. As Word magazine commenter Matthew notes, “Once you’re out of [ the hipster ] environment and into the workplace and real life the importance of these things should recede. As Sean Hughes once said ‘everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase, except Morrissey’. Yet I always think there is a residue of those teenage instincts and insecurities. … Some of us never quite grow up, or lose that need to feel smugly superior.”

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