Examine the intersections of race and disability in listening to music

Because of Asperger's, I'm literal--I don't know how else to put it. I have trouble understanding figures of speech and sometimes detecting sarcasm and reading social cues generally. So when I listen to a piece of music that I love, it takes a while to understand what it "means"--I have written about how I used to not pay attention to lyrics, which could prove problematic when enjoying some music with heavily violent and sexist language (like some gangsta rap, for example).

Still, to this day when I first hear a piece of music, I listen to it passively, taking in the overall "sound": the arrangement, the way a singer or instrumentalist phrases words, sometimes words that I don't "get." A great example of how I listen to music is seen in my favorite record, Otis Redding's 1966 soul classic, "Try a Little Tenderness." It's not exactly the subtlest or most nuanced rendering of a song ever made, but certainly an incredible arrangement that augments Otis's intensity (think of the "Got-ta, got-ta" phrases) and underscores what I remember a guest years ago on VH1 calling the "orgasmic" tendencies of Otis's phrasing.

So perhaps my idea of greatness in music has little to do with subtlety, though Otis could affect me with minor breaks in his voice (in "These Arms of Mine," for example). I must confess, it took me a while to connect my reaction to Otis's music with Asperger's--I recently read a small part of music historian Brian Ward's book Just My Soul Responding, which points out that Otis was not the most nuanced of singers or interpreters, which fed into 1960s-era whites' love of his music--they sometimes romanticized what they viewed as black musicians' hyper-sexuality, glorifying particularly Otis's music for perhaps fitting the stereotypical images they projected onto blacks in general.

Now, I think the way I listen to music has more to do with having Asperger's than being white, but perhaps they overlap here: I wonder how blacks, for example, with Asperger's hear the music they love, if they also have trouble with subtlety. I sometimes need the analysis of critics or historians to help me understand what a song is "about." Hopefully, over time I'll be able to figure out on my own to not respond to a figurative lyric like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" with a literal interpretation like, "Beat what?"

Change his views about the importance of context and lyrics in music

Back before college, I called a lot of music "overrated," often without listening to lyrics. This proved really problematic when trying to articulate why I didn't like the music I'd heard, given that I'd often listened to albums with lots of amazing lyrics... as background music. No wonder I didn't like Nas's hip hop masterpiece Illmatic until years later when I paid attention to the words.

I used to also dismiss the importance of context--that is, the social, historical, personal, cultural experiences from which music emerges, as well as the lenses and perspectives I took for granted in how I viewed music. In my dismissal of albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, I really believed that because I didn't hear as many "great songs" as on other soul albums, that album's socially conscious lyrical (as well as instrumental) content was seriously overrated without a particular idea of what I thought was "catchy," which often had a lot to do with what I found familiar in music. I even went so far as to call in to the show Sound Opinions (when it was a local Chicago radio show) and ask whether the album's significance to blacks mattered compared to if the music was good (in my view, of course).

In retrospect, that was messed up.

I've been reading Ronald Radano's book Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music again, which argues, among other insights, that music never exists as "the music itself," without attached contexts or series of meanings that music producers and consumers make within and outside of "just the sound." Radano also points to how even the idea of "music" is primarily a Western cultural construction, and how ideas of the "essence" of black music have been formed often within white colonial contexts. (Despite the book's heavily jargonistic, academic language, it is worth reading for serious students of music and race.)

Readings like this have seriously made me question the importance of the conditions of how and why I listen to music at all. To put it lightly, today I learn a lot about the context from which music emerges. I can now name a recording from every year from 1922 to 2011. I hope I can do more than name the song recorded or released that year; hopefully I can say what the significance of some of the recordings are, historically, commercially, and otherwise. Seriously, name a year, and we'll see what I can do.