Knowledge

One of the most vivid memories in my life is being about 14 and riding in the backseat of an older kid's car. They were listening to Op Ivy and everyone was singing along...except me; I didn't know the lyrics. I didn’t even know the band. The girl (and I say "girl" because, yeah, we were kids) up front started laughing and making fun of me that I didn't know the lyrics. The whole car laughed. I had never felt smaller.

Next week I walked about an hour to my local store (Phil's Records, RIP) and I ordered Energy from the big book of music behind the counter. It took like a month to get delivered and then I spent another day walking there and back to pick it up. It was probably like $18.99—buying CD's (”compact discs”, for you young folk) was stupid expensive those days and having a physical artifact was really the only way to listen to and collect music. At 14, this was probably all the money I had for a month saved from mowing lawns.

I probably spent the next year listening to that album on repeat. I can still sing every single song on that EP from start to finish. I memorized the shit out of that knowledge.

At 43, I'm probably now the most avid music collector/listener I know. I routinely listen to ~80,000 hours of music on Spotify (not to mention the vinyl I purchase) and discover 1,000s of new artists every year. I sometimes think my obsession with discovering new music is directly related to that day in that car.

And now if there's one thing I love the most it's sharing the things I've discovered with others. Getting someone into a new artist is the best feeling. And if you can introduce me to a new artist, we're gonna be friends.

I think about this journey for me a lot, because now when I listen to music, I do it because I love listening; I love curation; and I love sharing what I’ve discovered. I took that shameful feeling of being excluded and inversed it. I no longer fear not having the knowledge of something before someone else because I’ve turned it into curiosity about what I don’t know. I’ve introduced people to 1,000s of new artists over the years through this curiosity and always felt like “Oh, I’m so excited that I get to share this new thing with you” because I knew deeply how it felt to feel included by virtue of being intentionally excluded.

It’s easy to be jaded about our knowledge. I still of course get occasionally wrinkle-faced when someone is learning something that seems obvious to me, but I do my best to lean into curiosity when someone expresses statements like:

“I don’t get it”
“Why do people like…?!”
“Why don’t people like…?!”
“You’ve never heard of…?!”

It’s always good to recall that at some point you didn’t know much of anything and you still don’t in most contexts.

And that’s fine.