{"id":24049,"date":"2013-01-07T22:41:05","date_gmt":"2013-01-08T03:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=24049"},"modified":"2013-01-07T22:41:05","modified_gmt":"2013-01-08T03:41:05","slug":"why-i-listen-to-screamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2013\/01\/why-i-listen-to-screamo\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Listen to Screamo"},"content":{"rendered":"

So here’s a piece about multidimensional optimization algorithms, a genre of music named after and including a lot of primal screaming, and my mission. Several examples of said musical genre, screamo<\/a>, are included so I hope you have a broad audial palette.\u00a0I’ll start with a short story from my Mormon youth.<\/p>\n

On one particular day I remember being in the backseat of a minivan full of my fellow teenage Mormons as we drove to or from some weekday church activity. We were listening to the radio when Bullet with Buttefly Wings<\/a> by The Smashing Pumpkins<\/a> came on and I started to sing along. \u00a0This song is sonically tame compared to what we’ll be sampling shortly, but my enthusiasm was met by unanimous horror from the rest of the van. This, it seemed, was\u00a0not<\/em> what good Mormons listened to. While someone gave me a mini-lecture on musical standards, the radio dial was hastily changed from alternative rock \u00a0to top-40. My own misgivings–was I bringing the devil into this vehicle?–were laid to rest as Christina Aguilera<\/a> instructed us all on how to rub her the right way<\/a> in order to convince her to “give it away”. I was pretty sure that, next to that, Billy Corgan<\/a> singing \u00a0“And I still believe that I cannot be saved,” wasn’t any worse.<\/p>\n

As my mission approached, I partook of a great deal of the kind of folklore we have built around them. First there was the idea that I shouldn’t be afraid to get started in my major before I left for my mission because I’d be blessed to not forget what I learned. This turned out to be a dirty, dirty lie. (Then again perhaps it was my fault for not attending the Lord’s University.) There were also plenty of stories about how the missions would sober me up. I assumed that was meant metaphorically, but then I was disconcerted by my Stake President’s apparently dissatisfaction when I told him–repeatedly–that I had never broken the Word of Wisdom. Either there were some strange rumors about me going around or I didn’t know my fellow young men as well as I thought I did.<\/p>\n

The thing is, I was a relatively timid guy. Following the standards of the Church was no great feat of righteous living in my case. It just fit my quiet, risk-averse disposition. So no, I really hadn’t tried alcohol or tobacco, and when return missionaries told me about how I would clean up my entertainment selection after my mission I was slightly alarmed. If it got any tamer, there wouldn’t be much left. Prog rock and some mainstream alternative were the last line of defense before we got to easy listening, classical, and of course MoTab. I had nothing against that music, but it seemed sort of… .limited.<\/p>\n

But truth be told, I bought into that narrow mythos all on my own. I remember a conversation I had with my father about the kind of music we’d listen to in heaven. Pachelbel’s Canon in D<\/a> was, and still is, just about the most celestial music I can imagine, but I was a little worried that it would get boring listening to that song on repeat for, you know, ever<\/em>. The hidden assumption I had embraced was that all moral decisions could be broken down into a single, commensurate value of “goodness” . My father tried to gently dissuade me from this myopic vision, but I was having none of it. Optimization was the name of the game, and the response variable was univariate.<\/p>\n

It was only on my mission, when I got into a gentle debate with my first companion about how there was always a\u00a0right answer<\/em> to every question, that someone was able to talk me out of it. \u00a0My argument was that even in a relatively trivial\u00a0instance\u00a0like beverage selection for the sacrament there was an unambiguously superior choice and–assuming we had cognitive resources to perform the analysis–we were responsible to do so. Water, in this case, was not merely a convenience but a necessary adoption of the symbolism of purity and life. My wise companion responded with this: What if I was trapped on a desert island with only pineapple juice and coconut milk to drink? I honestly started to conduct the analysis (coconut milk was the initial front runner because I had a vague idea that it might be white) before I realized how absurd the exercise was.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, there just isn’t one right answer.<\/p>\n

Years after my mission I sat in a lecture about optimization algorithms and realized how ubiquitous the problem is. It’s a matter of routine for us to trade off dollars vs. human lives in engineering projects, but of course we shy away from the fact. If you run the analysis you can easily back into the decision we make–trading dollars for lives when it comes to building a highway divider or setting asbestos removal policy–and the values don’t make any sense. In some cases we won’t trade ten \u00a0or twenty-thousand dollars per life, and in other cases we spend millions. We’re uncomfortable with this kind of thinking, and the numbers will never really make sense, because fundamentally our ethical obligations are not commensurate with dollars. We don’t merely lack the ability to find the answer, it well and truly is not there.<\/p>\n

This, in the end, is a lesson my dad had been trying to teach me all along. If there isn’t always a right answer, then we should understand that possessing<\/em> the right answers isn’t the point. Struggling to find it in the weightier decisions of our lives (e.g.\u00a0not<\/em> in the case of pineapple juice vs. coconut milk), is what truly matters. How can we, as Christians and with an awareness of our absolute dependence on grace, not realize that process trumps outcome?<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to music. If there are non-commensurate goods, then there’s no reason to have to just pick one Platonic form of music. And if having the answer isn’t as important as striving to find it, then a process laden with struggle and tension and discord becomes imbued with nobility rather than some kind of\u00a0harbinger\u00a0of spiritual ruin. Now, this isn’t to say that beauty and harmony don’t have a place (I love The Tallis Scholars<\/a> ferociously), nor is it to say that classical music is bereft of tumultuous struggle. I’m no expert, but I have a human heart and I’ve heard Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor<\/a>. So my new insights didn’t\u00a0replace<\/em> my musical tastes, but they\u00a0augmented<\/em> them into a kind of ecclectic overdrive that has continued unabated since my return from my mission. I listen to a lot of music these days that I can’t get anyone else to listen to (my family finds The Shanghai Restoration Project<\/a> all but unlistenable and no one seems to like the Yoshida Brothers<\/a> as much as I do), but irrespective of the tastes of others, the music that has come to be the most precious to me is screamo, and “Walls” by Emery was one of the first songs I fell in love with.<\/p>\n