Being The Target Demographic
I was in Home Depot a lot this spring. Stepping inside often felt like coming back to an old friend’s house. For the sole reason that they were playing the music I grew up listening to. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, even The Breeders. Alt-rock from the 90s. This is, of course, because their demographic research showed that most of their clients are men of around my age, and this is the sort of music that most sparks joy in that demographic.
This is disorienting. Most of my life was spent hearing my parent’s music everywhere, and then they jumped to music for the millenials, leapfrogging right over The Smallest Generation. Suddenly feeling singled out to be welcomed into a place is startling. I’ve never in my life felt like an place was designed to appeal to me specifically. It is really nice.
It’s kinda worrisome just how easy it is to hack my welcoming-feelings and trigger warmth in me.1 I do feel pretty great when walking around a Home Depot though, so I’m not going to complain about it. Except, of course, due to the constant shadow of Depression, there has to be a dark lining.
An older gentleman (probably 60s) was checking me out at the contractor desk when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on. The absolute epitome of 90s alt-rock, it defined a generation, no song of that era is more well-known. The poor guy cringed a little bit.
“Oh man, I can’t stand that,” he confided, looking to me for support. I had already been smiling, so didn’t have the visible reaction of smiling more when the song came on. My instinctive people-pleasing made me happy I hadn’t been readable at that moment, and I very nearly said “Yeah, I know!” But I’ve been getting better at not maximally pleasing everyone. I’ve been working at sticking with honesty instead. It turns out that when you make someone fall in love with a person that isn’t you, you eventually burn out on pretending to be the person they fell in love with. That one took more decades to learn than I’m willing to say aloud.
So I instead I played for time. “What do you mean?”
“It just sounds like noise to me.” He shakes his head, and he actually looks… saddened. “I know it sounds like music to a lot of the guys here. They like it. But all I can hear is… noise.”
My heart cracked then. I no longer wanted to smile. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” really is a fantastic song. It did things which at the time were unexpected in just the right “Oh, I could have predicted that but I didn’t!” way. If you listen to a lot of electric guitar with distortion it makes sounds you are familiar with, only taken one step further. But he only heard noise, and he’s only twenty years older than me.
About five years ago I lost interest in new music. My musical novelty-seeking had certainly slowed down over the years, but I always had some desire to seek out new, interesting things. But the drive to find a new thing and listen to it over and over as it seeped into my bones just kinda dried up in 2020. Now when I do find new music (CASTLE RAT!!!) it’s new permutations on things I already enjoy, not entirely novel compositions.
And I do hear music sometimes which I do not recognize as music. It’s sounds that are trying to be music, but there’s nothing there of musical value. It’s just a collection of sounds. I can imagine it going one step further and just being noise.
Right now, I’m happy because Home Depot is catering to me. But the world is changing, and I’m no longer keeping up as fast as I used to. They will cycle out my music. In ten years I won’t feel instinctively welcomed anywhere. In twenty years I may be confused by what’s being played. In thirty years, I may be walking through a world that is just making noise all the time. A strange, hostile landscape, without room for me.
I’m not looking forward to it.
In my first draft the previous line read “hack someone’s welcoming-feelings and trigger warmth in them,” because I Typical Mind like a MoFo, and just assume this generalize to everyone. I’m trying to do that less. Doesn’t it, though? Isn’t that exactly why they pay the demographics researchers, and play this music rather than Todays Top 40s? That Capitalism optimized like this is Bayesian Evidence that I’m Typical in this way.) I’m ridiculously easy to win over with some basic kindness and consideration. Remember the Scientologists? I still think the rank-and-file are pretty decent folks stuck in a bad church, and I feel very warmly towards them!
I like to identify "layers of nostalgia", so how much of your appreciation of Smells Like Teen Spirit is because it's 90s alt-rock/grunge, how much is because it's Nirvana, and how much is because it's Smells Like Teen Spirit?
The ways to test this: How do you appreciate a previously undiscovered track from your favourite band? Or slightly more niche music from your generation and taste that you "missed at the time"?
I've recently been getting the experience of discovering a new band/artist on Spotify and going "wow, this is amazing", and I look for their album release dates. They were inevitably founded in the mid 2000s and broke up in the late 2010s - it's uncanny. This last year I got more obsessed with a "new" album than I had for many years previous (Levi the Poet - A Correspondance), but, of course it was from 2014.
When I was young, I noted that my father didn't like popular music made after about 1970, when he was in his late 20s. I resolved never to let that happen to me, to remain open to new sounds. And it worked! Sometimes I find new music boring because it's formulaic, but I don't perceive it as "just noise."