Monday, March 28, 2011

Techno and Enya

When I was dating one guy in college, he presented a shelf of CDs to me and said that I should pick out what I wanted to listen to.  I listlessly looked at the selection because none of it caught my attention.  It was a lot of heavy metal and techno.  So I picked what I thought was the most innocuous of the whole pile: Enya. 

First of all, who likes the techno genre?  Sure, you may like a few songs, but who really has the endurance to listen to techno for long stretches of time unless you're at a club?  I didn't know anyone who lists techno as one of their top two music genres until I met him.  The fast, persistent beat that gives me heart palpitations, the increase in blood pressure, the 12 Advil you have to swallow to make the migraine go away.  I dislike techno with a passion. 

He and I had many fundamental disagreements.  One such disagreement was that he claimed that I didn't dislike techno, and I was pretending to hate it when I really liked it.  No matter how many times I told him that I really, really disliked techno, he was adamant that I was making it up just to spite him.  After all, he claimed that I liked rap, rap had a beat, therefore I also should like techno.  It was weird logic that I never grasped.  Rap does have a beat, but it's slower.  The voices are melodic.  Rap is soothing if you don't have it on too loud.  Rap/hip hop is fundamentally different from techno despite having a beat.  And doesn't pretty much ALL music have a beat? 

I feel like a complete traitor when I admit that I do like one techno song.  It came out in the late 90s/early 00s, well after he was out of my life.  It's cheesy, awful, gives me heart palpitations...but I still like it in small doses.



And then there's Enya.  At the time I selected Enya out of his pile of CDs, I thought that it would be the best choice.  He had quite a bit of techno and heavy metal.  I don't like heavy metal for almost the same reasons I don't like techno.  My friends seemed to all be Metallica fans, so I had absorbed a little bit by association.   Still, didn't really want to listen to heavy metal.  Enya's peaceful-ish, melodic, an obvious superior choice when you're trying to get to sleep. 

He very much overplayed the Enya.  Enya All. Day. Long. All. Night. Long.  I could not escape Enya.  And whenever any song by her, but particularly ones from the CD he had, play on the radio I change the station as fast as possible.  If I'm in a store and hear it over the intercom, I hum anything else to drown out poor Enya.  I'm sure she's a nice girl, and she evidently has a nice voice.  It's not personal.  It was just a huge overdose of her. 

I'm sure this is a pretty song, but I cannot stand it. Visceral reaction that tells me to shut it off as soon as possible:

2 comments:

Jesse said...

"First of all, who likes the techno genre?"

Depending on your definition, I might be one of those people. I mostly listen to electronic music which isn't really techno. But a few of the Japanese bands I listen to probably qualify as techno, and I've been known to listen to them for an hour straight.

B said...

It depends on what the sound is like. I'm not sure if my definition of techno is narrow or not. I was listening to music at lunch today, and there was definitely club dance music but not sure if I'd call it techno. It's a weird genre to classify.