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:
"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.
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.
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