In his recent appearance on the podcast, Broken Record, Ben Gibbard spoke with Justin Richmond about a variety of subjects: writing the Postal Service’s Give Up and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, the best iteration of a song not necessarily being the recorded version, and breaking down other people’s music to learn the guitar.
My favorite part of the interview was how Gibbard described how we all use music and personal taste to craft a senes of identity, especially when we’re growing up:
I think when you’re young, you’re finding out who you are. You’re creating your identity. We haven’t really done a lot of stuff yet. So how we define ourselves tends to be through the things that we like. So, if you like something super obscure, that telegraphs to somebody that you are a very interesting person, because “I am the the only one who likes this really obscure thing that not a lot of people know about.”
But then, when the captain of the football team is singing Nirvana songs, suddenly, the definition of your individuality through being a Nirvana fan doesn’t seem that unique anymore.
This last part rings especially true in my own life and concisely explains my troubled relationship with a band called Twenty One Pilots.
Gibbard concludes his point by saying:
So much of our identity, certainly when we’re into the arts or music, tends to revolve around the things we like. And the more obscure those things are, the more interesting we are as people.
While I’d make the case this is all perception (liking obscure things only makes us believe we’re more interesting and is not inherently a guarantee that we’re a fascinating human), I find myself guilty of doing exactly what Gibbard describes in my personal life and interactions.
For much of my adolescence and young adulthood, I strived to be the punk/hipster dreamboat, the soft-hearted, wounded romantic who would impress friends and woo women with a mixed CD containing obscure songs from unknown artists. Each disc contained a trove of B-sides, rough demos, and live tracks you couldn’t find anywhere else. This proved to be a not-so-subtle attempt to prove how rare and interesting I was.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of identity and the various tools we use to define ourselves. The older I get and the deeper I dig into my own personhood, the more I come to understand how much of this is performative–the clothes we wear, the books we read, the music we listen to, the movies we watch.
While these things can reveal quite a bit about us, they’re also chosen, selected for what we believe they say about us. And at the end of the day, how much of these things come to matter? It takes becoming an adult to understand that we aren’t the things we consume.
joshua chamberlain 