Students Branch Out From Musical Mainstream Currents Campus Music Poll Shows Popular Music Shunned With Increasing Frequency

Author: Abbie Beane

Only in a setting so accepting of such a vast spread of musical genres and in a time when tastes in music are so diversified, could you find your listening preferences so threatened - often by bands and singers who fall outside the celebrity bracket. Such an overwhelming academic environment can be like a pressure cooker for "mainstream" tastes and artists who shamelessly sell themselves to the commercial music industry. In a random survey last weekend of 100 students' music preferences, the questions raised were more plentiful than those asked. The main issue is not only, "What are we listening to these days?" but more importantly "Who are we listening to on low volume? And why?" When did it become a near "taboo" to listen to popular music and artists - something one now feels he or she must either completely deny or tout proudly in an effort to fend off any forthcoming criticism.

One theory could be that in the close confines of the small, New England, liberal arts "almighty intelligence arena" where everyone's watching your style as well as your scores, simple lyrics (even if against the catchy back drop of a smashing dance beat) are seen as cheap and vapid - devoid of the necessary ingenuity that comes from artists who write their own, often more abstract lyrics and music. Somewhere along the way the synthesizer lost its "umf" and its popular appeal, which isn't to say it won't or shouldn't make a comeback in the future.

As one sophomore told The Middlebury Campus, "I think it's very much taboo here to like non-obscure, popular music like 80s cheese, for example Def Leppard. There is nothing wrong with liking music that is or has been popular. Long live good, old fashioned rock and roll."

Yet in some cases students feel that it's not just the general Middlebury College public heckling the media hogs - it's everyone, though we're naturally fascinated by them as a culture. Maybe their unpopularity simply seems more pronounced here.

Furthermore, this is not to discount those who simply don't give a "flying Figaro" about what other students think regarding their musical favorites. Several of the 100 students surveyed in a music poll last weekend claimed that they simply "don't care" what people think about their music tastes.

The pie charts below pin-point more specifically what we're talking about, showing where student music preferences stand in the here and now. The five student voices featured to the right delve into why exactly students feel certain artists and genres are strictly forbidden from the bragging rights section of that old "case logic."