Music People vs. Non-Music People

My family members are music people.

What I mean is this: We enjoy music and really feel that it makes our lives on this big blue marble a little bit better. Sure, we have different things that get us going. Like Black Flag or Motorhead for dad, something about "apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur" or indie rock that gets the girls going or old school Prince or John Mellancamp that the Mrs. likes. But we all have music going a lot.

In fact, as I was doing what everybody now has to do with the new updated version of iTunes last night (re: get all the album art you didn't get the first time around and load it into the library so that little music note will go away) there was this obscure single I had converted from cassette tape a few years back from this obscure band a lot of my friends liked when we were in college. Sure enough, I was able to find the art that came with the 45 (look it up) I recorded it from.

This reminded me of the guy in my fraternity who was a SERIOUS music guy. So SERIOUS that he was the music director at the campus radio station when so many great bands were only being played on college radio...like REM, B-52's, the Pretenders, the Talking Heads, Sigue Sigue Sputnik...right.

Anyway, because my friend Dave and I keep up on Facebook, I sent him a note saying I'd found the artwork, he then mentioned that he had several bootleg live CD's of Mr. Resistor and the Incapacitators and he could e-mail me some songs he remembered I liked.

Yeah.

He was THAT music guy. The guy that you helped put together those album crates because he'd just purchased four more and didn't think that was enough. The guy that could tell you when he saw that band at the 688 Club in Atlanta in '83 and they were AWESOME that night. The guy that had every single album you could possibly want to record a song or two off of and then he'd recommend a couple of other songs off a couple of other albums you'd never heard of and pull them out of his library, knowing precisely where they were. He was the Amazon recommendation feature in human form. He should've been the music director at WEGL (short for War Eagle, get it?) and his current career is in the music industry.

Flip that over and I had friends that only listened to music if there was a funnel and/or beer involved and some party involved. Even then, their entire repertoire involved songs about "cheeseburgers in paradise" and/or "blowing out a flip flop and stepping on a pop top." They put their arms around each other a lot and sang these songs. The kind of guys that would borrow a record and leave it laying out on their desk. The kind of guys that would pick the needle up at the end of one of those songs and move it back to the groove of the first tune.

I've been in rooms where you mentioned Maralyn Manson and all the parents nodded. I've been in room and made a reference to Jimi Hendrix and had someone in their '60's ask "Who is that?"

So, I'm wondering if you're the kind of person that is close to filling up in iPod with music or has the extra hard drive to store it all, or if you're the kind of person who doesn't even own an iPod because they can't figure out why anyone would want one...