I Could Not Pick Taylor Swift Out of a Lineup

There is a scene in The Big Bang Theory where Raj finally confesses to his girlfriend Anu that he has a problem, specifically, that for most of his adult life he could only talk to women while under the influence of alcohol. A deep emotional issue, years in the making, rooted in anxiety and insecurity and god knows what else. Anu considers this for a moment and offers her counterpoint: “I don’t like music,” she says. “We both have our little eccentricities.” Raj stares at her. “Little eccentricities? One is a deep-seated psychological disturbance, and the other can be solved by half a glass of Chardonnay.”

I sort of get her. I like music. But I don’t really listen to it.

Of course I know the name Taylor Swift but I could not pick her out of a lineup, I would not be able to recognise her voice or name a single song she wrote. I want to be clear about this, I am not saying this as a quirky humble brag I am not like other girls shit, but as a straightforward statement of fact. She could be standing right next to me at the grocery store and I would have no clue. I Googled her just now. She is a very impressive woman. She has won Grammy Awards. She has sold out stadiums on multiple continents. She has generated an estimated billions in economic activity from a single tour. I should really listen to her music.

I would probably recognise Lady Gaga if she wore her usual outfits. I know a couple of her songs, including Bad Romance, which I know because of this remake. My high school history teacher showed us this video when we were going over the suffragette movement. Harry Styles I might recognise, but only because my husband watched his audition video on Youtube a bunch of times. You work at a bakery, we get it.

The true wake-up call came with Bad Bunny. I watched an interview with some raging crazy blonde lady and Piers Morgan. I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I didn’t watch the half-time show. But I heard the name Bad Bunny a lot during and after the event and thought it was nice of them to pick an indie Puerto Rican musician. Ahahaha. My bad. At some point, apparently, Bad Bunny became one of the most famous musicians on the planet. Cultural phenomenon. The most streamed artist on Spotify for three consecutive years. And I had absolutely nothing. No recognition, no association, not even a vague melody floating around in the back of my head. The name landed completely flat. That’s when I understood—I’m not just a person who doesn’t keep up with music. I am genuinely, perhaps impressively, outside of the cultural landscape entirely. I would even go as far as to call myself completely uncultured. And it’s strange. I am not a russian babushka with no access to the internet. I practically exist online.

There is a scene in Bridget Jones’s Baby where Ed Sheeran appears at a music festival. He’s right there, ginger, unmistakable, one of the best-selling musicians of the 21st century, and Bridget and Miranda have absolutely no idea who they are looking at. They ask him to take a photo because the cast of (I think) Good Wife is there, and get offended because he tries to do a selfie. The joke lands because the audience is supposed to find it charmingly out-of-touch. I watched that scene and felt nothing but profound recognition. Solidarity. Although I did recognise Ed Sheeran!

My husband and I watched Armageddon the other night. He kept talking about the song, the famous song by Aerosmith (no clue who they are), the one everyone knows. I was only half paying attention. “Oh,” I said, “is that Liv Tyler?” meaning the actress, who was right there on screen. He paused. “I wonder if that’s actually how they got Steven Tyler,” he said. “Who is Steven Tyler?” I asked. There was a silence.

Further evidence: about ten years ago I matched with someone on Tinder who was some sort of manager for Guns N’ Roses. He invited me on a date. I couldn’t make it. The next day, half the office was buzzing, had anyone gone, wasn’t it incredible, best concert of the year. Guns N’ Roses, it turned out, were on tour in Prague. For some reason I thought Guns N’ Roses was a tattoo parlour. Honest mistake, I was talking to a lot of people at the time, he did have tattoos, and it is a great name for a tattoo parlour. It was, in fact, not a tattoo parlour. Guns N’ Roses is, as I was gently informed, one of the most iconic rock bands in history. I think about this sometimes, with a kind of detached wonder at my own obliviousness.

This isn’t to say music and I have never had our moments. Occasionally, a song will find me, not the other way around, and when it does, I listen to it until it disintegrates. The same three minutes and forty seconds, on repeat, for days, until I have worn a groove into it and everyone around me is quietly losing their mind. It’s less like enjoying music and more like a brief, intense obsession that burns hot and then disappears completely, leaving no lasting interest in the artist, the album, or the genre. One song. Consumed entirely. Then silence again. I had, at one point, assembled this into something remarkable, an actual playlist, carefully curated from years of these random collisions, every song a small monument to a moment when music briefly got through. It was, genuinely, excellent (my best friend called it sducidal). And then I stopped paying for Apple Music. The playlist was gone. Not archived, not exportable, just gone, vanished back into the subscription it came from. I am still pissed about it.

To be fair, I know some things. I know Bohemian Rhapsody, which feels less like knowing a song and more like knowing a natural phenomenon, it exists outside of music fandom, somewhere between cultural reflex and public property. You don’t choose to know Bohemian Rhapsody. I know some Beatles songs, some ABBA, the kind of catalogue that gets absorbed through sheer atmospheric exposure over decades rather than any deliberate listening. But contemporary music, living artists, anything released after a certain point—complete darkness. You don’t want me on your team while playing Trivia.

There are a few songs I remember well, and not just because of a playlist. Once, in circumstances I’ll describe only as chemically optimised, I listened to “Underwater” by Rüfüs Du Sol, “So Close” by Ólafur Arnalds, and “Who Loved The Sun” approximately a hundred times each. I felt things. Enormous, oceanic, crushing things. Who loves the sun/ Who cares that it’s shining/Who cares what it does/ Since you broke my heart. That line hit me like a freight train. I understand what all the fuss is about when it comes to music. I really do. I don’t know why I do seek it out more.

And then there’s U2. I know some U2 songs, but only because years ago Apple deposited an entire album onto every iPhone without asking (I originally thought it was just mine). That album is now apparently the most hated free gift in history. I didn’t mind it. I actually really really liked it.

I also own one Frank Sinatra record. I love Sinatra. I put it on at Christmas. That’s the full extent of my vinyl collection and my annual engagement with it, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable relationship to have with a cultural institution. Sinatra asks nothing of me the other eleven months of the year. I appreciate that in an artist. The record brings me genuine joy every Christmas, which is a better return on investment than most things in my life. If you invite me to a jazz bar, I’d gladly come. I love jazz. Also, for the longest time I thought Sinatra was black.

I am thinking of starting to listen to music. I am still angry at Apple. My relationship with Spotify is, fittingly, transactional and resentful. I refuse to pay for a subscription on principle, a principle I cannot fully articulate but feel very strongly about. The result is that my daughter occasionally has to sit through a Garnier ad or a Tinder promotion before “Happy Song” by Imogen Heap plays. I tell myself this is building character. Mostly mine because she screams through ads.

So I am not really sure where to go (Spotify with ads?) and where to start (Taylor Swift?) but I will start. I realise now how insane I sound every time the conversation comes to music.