My friend Nick remarked on my 15 Albums meme that I “adamantly refuse to give in to indierock hype.”

Hype is large-scale unqualified word of mouth, the same as when a friend whose taste you don’t trust tells you how much you’ll love something. My taste is too erratic to trust anyone else’s. Don’t confuse this with snobbiness or hipsterdom, because I don’t have any delusions that I’m too cool or have better taste — I just know that it doesn’t mesh well with other people’s, because it’s too personal and anecdotal. If I hadn’t heard some song in the car driving home late one night, would I like that band as much? If someone I cared about hadn’t burned me a copy? These are unanswerable questions.

Maybe the real culprit is that people have misperceptions now about whether their own taste should be broadcast. I very rarely recommend anything, mostly because it feels terrible to listen to something, dislike it, and know you’ll have talk about it with a friend later. For me, the most satisfying way to find new music is by, really, finding it inadvertently, though not through any hip avenue — hearing a song on the radio (admittedly a different game in a major radio market like Chicago), asking a friend what music they’re playing at a party or whatever, coming across random things on Seeqpod or YouTube.

Is there inherent value in newness? I don’t value newness in itself, which is why I usually end up listening to my favorite old stuff. And, admittedly, I have bad feelings toward new music a lot of the time, so it’s always a great, unexpected thing when I hear a great song from a new band. The first brand new album I remember getting really excited about is White Blood Cells by the White Stripes. But looking back, there are decades of popular music to hear, and looking forward at the same time is overwhelming.

Some people follow music the same way they read the newspaper, so they can stay abreast of everything that happens. I see the value in that but it isn’t for me. Hype may help me learn of an artist, but it also sets the expectations much higher, sometimes unreachably so.

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