Isolated & Destroyed: ‘I don’t immediately assume they only wear skinny jeans…’

Someone said to me recently that when describing people I meet I almost never start with what I think of them but what I think they think of me. And by someone I mean my mate Matt, not some fictional person I made up just to construct an intro for this. You don’t know Matt though, so putting his name as the very first word of this article would be weird. So I didn’t. You can thank me for that later.

Anyway this statement about me is quite sad. It’s partly because I’m a raging egomaniac, you have to be to fool yourself into thinking people actually want to read what you have to say twice a month (ask comment editor Cian Ginty). I am also a bit funny in the head, one of the consequences of this being raging paranoia. Honestly that’s where most of the egomaniacal affectations come from; when you are putting people down and talking about how great you are it’s more difficult for them to notice that you constantly fidget and can’t look them in the eye. Whatever like, everyone has problems. It just happens that these are mine. I bring them up because it comes to bear on what I have to say next. Man, remember when all I used to do was try to be funny? Christ, now it’s like a Channel 4 documentary in here. All someone with a terrible disease talking about how it’s “one day at a time” while their mother weeps softly in the background.

Anyway the thing is that a lot of people think, and I know this cause I’ve asked, is that I make permanent judgements on people based on what music they like. I have even had people not tell me what music they like for fear, presumably, I will roll out my flag with “You’re rubbish, mate!” on it and cement it into their front garden. Aside from the bewildering fact these people would be bothered with what I think (my biggest achievement is having seen every episode of Myster Science Theatre 3000) this also just isn’t the case. What I do, in as pius and direct a way as possible, is judge people for the way they like music.

For instance if someone says, “Oh I just like indie music like Superchunk” or whatever, that’s grand. I don’t immediately assume they only wear skinny jeans and if I cut them they’ll bleed scarves. However if someone goes “Oh I listen to everything apart from country and rap, that’s all rubbish.” Well done mate, in your attempt to appear superior you’ve said everything you need to say about what a moron you are. Rap music is still suffering from this kind of stigma from white rock fans. It’s pretty funny that guitar rock, a genre that to this day thrives on its “rebel attitude”, should have created such a conservative group of boring arseholes as fans. And it’s not only genre discrimination. If you casually dismiss entire genres, from electronic to rap to metal, just because cause they don’t fit into your narrow definition of what a “song” or “music” is then, in my opinion, you’re just being incredibly arrogant. Everyone likes music for different reasons; to slag someone because they care a lot about lyrics, or for that matter if they don’t care about lyrics at all, is a great insult to the power of music.

I’m not saying this is right, judging people in any way is wrong to be honest. Music is special for everyone. Unless, of course, they’re really really into Metallica.

Then they can fuck off.