There are a whole range of interests that may incur social approbation. It's not just the nefarious stuff. Certain hobbies alone can be enough. Growing up a strident nerd, I understood first-hand how liking certain books and movies was enough to consign someone to castigation and torment. Bullying was a real problem, and at the time, I thought it was just related to my unfortunate taste in media.
Now I'm old, and I don't see myself as a nerd. I don't identify myself much at all with any particular groups. I like what I like (which is awesome stuff), and that is rad. And yet you will learn, even in this enlightened age, even surrounded by supposedly forward-thinking people, that there are those who will look down on you merely for liking something weird.
I'm a fan of k-pop. That's Korean pop music. I first encountered it (outside of PSY's YouTube videos, which are hardly representative of the scene) at a Korean fried chicken restaurant. The k-pop was blaring. The chicken was crispy. My soju bottle was empty. And I was transformed.
I never listened to American pop music. I never paid attention as it evolved to occupy strata of increasing weirdness and self-reference. I was insulated from the broad influences that inspired k-pop originally, and I was utterly without context for what had emerged from the nightmare dream of artistic cruft that early k-pop videos entailed. I was hit, in 2015, with the full force and fury of an international media machine aimed at extracting every ounce of precious fandom from my weak and simpering form. I was totally unprepared.
Here's the video that hooked me:
Boy, those girls can dance.
I had to know who they are. I had to know what they were about. I had to see more. And YouTube made it very easy to do those things! Above all, I had to let the world know what it was messing.
Now, some kind people have been very receptive to my ranting insistence that they endure these foreign lyrics and intensely affecting multimedia experiences. I appreciate that. It's a lot to take in at once, but I've been lucky to meet many people who could handle it.
I've also been unlucky, meeting many who could not. People who'd knit their eyebrows together, looking confused, unable to understand why someone would listen to music in another language. People who'd laugh, shrug, and say "of course," as if there was something about me that implied they should have known I'd like k-pop. People who'd shake their heads sadly, perhaps clicking their tongues. People who'd just say "no." It's a hard thing, to try to share something you care about and be rejected.
This is not a whiny complaint. Not everybody is bound to like music just because I like it, and that's fine. I just want to point out that there are plenty of otherwise good and kindly people who feel totally comfortable completely dismissing me, minimizing me as a person, because of the music I enjoy. That clearly says more about them than about me.
As a straight white male, I'm no stranger to discrimination. Wait, I mean, as a straight white male who's lived in Japan, I've experienced it first-hand. I've even experienced housing discrimination. I was banned from a dormitory simply because I was a white man, and they had heard white men threw loud parties. It meant I had to live an hour from school instead of ten minutes.
With that experience in mind, I can tell you this is much the same. When some people find out I like k-pop, they think it tells them all sorts of things about me, and they feel comfortable judging me! I'm over here trying to appreciate incredibly intricate choreography and editing, and they're over there throwing shade.
What people like says nothing about who they are. To imply so is simply dishonest. Identity is a shorthand, and let's leave it at that for people who just want to enjoy some music.
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