I think I can explain this.
First of all it might be slightly more aspies percentage-wise than NT's who like deep, dark, or pensive stuff but you have to remember - plenty of NT's do as well, just that they're under everyone else's thumb also and they clearly can't put a tune on at the party that'll clear everyone out.
I think the majority of people tend to see everything through a social lense. They see clothing for instance as group identifier, they may even go as far as to be over-literal about it and judge people almost completely on labels they're wearing because they think "a certain type of person wears x" and to them that's the way it all works. Similarly keeping up with what's 'current' is just as important for the same reason.
Somehow that same translation happens to music. Does it have words? If no then its a fail - it can't be a social thing. Is the music something most people can agree on? If no then it fails at its task as a social instrument. Similarly it has to be new, has to have that particular right angle that everyone who's like this can agree on that its the next big thing (I remember a recent A&R and musician saying that there are three go-to superproducers out there - literally, three, and that to make a 'megahit' there are certain chords you're limited to and that's it, the rules are the rules).
The idea of treating music purely as clothing or social-relation stuff is alien to people who really explore music. To people like this the idea of sinking into a tune, exploring it, seeing entire galaxies and nebula between the kick and snare, finding an entire world in a piece of music (even enlightenment to a point) is something far more foreign to them - even to the point where some of them think that these other people (us) are just making it all up in a failed effort to be emo/contrarian. Goes to show just how different everyone's tautologies can be.
That reminds me also that there's a whole other group out there - and I've noticed there are enough aspies out there in this group; people who put musical athleticism ahead of the music itself. A rock tune could be great or a band could have a great album emotionally and tonally but if it doesn't have blazing guitar solos, a Godsmack type drummer, or a singer doing backflips its not good. Similarly a group could have great musical athleticism, be more than a little kitsch on everything else, and the same people will often enough think they're the best thing since sliced bread.
In my previous example (ie. the OP question) the 'Top 40 nazis' as I like to call them (because they turn into despots if anything other than current month Top 40 is played anywhere) take a hard line that music is clothing. The music athleticism purists are people who've taken a hard line that music is a sport. Neither view to that extreme allows music to be music for its own sake. Sometimes a band or musician will both create really mind-blowingly wonderful or deep/multilayer stuff and either be great in the music athletics department or somehow sneak past the radar and gain a fan base in the music is clothing department but that only happens incidentally and all too often it seems like very few musicians can (neurologically speaking) be all of it at once.
06 Dec 2012, 9:01 pm
