Category Essay

    Music has pretty much always been like air to me, so I like to think that I have a pretty good taste in music, even though that can be quite abstract since not everyone likes the same music. But I’ve found that all songs can be placed into one of three categories for everyone. There’s the Beloved, then the Liked, and lastly the Hated. Everyone places songs or artist’s into one of the categories, it human nature to put labels on things so you can find them easily later. Think of the categories as really long playlists since they have every song you’ve ever heard in your life.
     Beloved songs are songs that you can listen to on repeat for an hour and you never want to change the song. Songs that you will listen to at every free moment just so you can memorize the lyrics. If this category were a playlist for me it would have, Bye, Bye, Bye by N*SYNC, Dance, Dance by Fall Out Boy, Rolling in the Deep by Adele, and Fiction by Avenged Sevenfold, just to name a few. I could go on and on, for hours probably, but that would be mundane and boring, as well as pointless. For my sister her Beloved playlist would have tons of Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Justin Beiber, and Miley Cyrus. I’ve noticed that a Beloved song relates to the fan’s life in one of two ways, either is tells the story of an event the fan experienced, like a bad break up or a parent’s divorce. Or it can describe what the fan wished their life was like, I love Ke$ha’s song Tik Tok because I wish that I could go to cool clubs and parties with my best friends, but the getting wasted part probably wouldn’t happen. I also love Miley Cyrus’ At the Bottom of the Ocean because it describes one of my breakups perfectly.
     The second playlist is Liked, the songs that you put on shuffle and listen to for a bit then move on from. The songs that come on the radio and you listen to and kind of hum along with. You can’t listen to them for hours, but you can listen to them a few times and then you get sick of them and have to change the song. These songs normally have beats that the fan is attracted to, the lyrics may not be ground breaking and relatable or a dream the person has, but they’re something you can move to and hum. I like the song Mine by Taylor Swift, but if I hear it more than twice in a row, I want to jump out a window. I’ll listen to it if it comes on the radio, or on shuffle, but I’ll never really purposefully listen to it unless my friends and I are talking about it.
     The last playlist is Hated; these are the songs that you could not even be paid to listen to! The songs that make you turn the radio off when they come on, like Justin Beiber to who are over the age of 15. My hated playlist has Never Say Never by Beiber, Don’t Stop Believing from the Glee soundtrack, and pretty much anything from Nickelback. This list is normally the longest, well for me at least, since generally speaking, you really don’t love or like most of the songs you hear.
     For me the Beloved playlist is made up of artists and a few individual songs. I can’t seem to hate or even just like any Fall Out Boy, Avenged Sevenfold, or Paramore song I hear. The liked list is pretty long because I tend to find random songs catchy, like Dynamite by Taio Cruz, I really don’t like anything else he has, but I love that song. The hated list is made up of artists, with a few songs, as well. I like Adam Lambert, but I hate two of the songs on his album so much that I can’t even remember their names. I can’t say what causes people to hate songs, except for annoyance, but I doubt anyone could tell you why a song annoys them. Just like some people might not be able to tell you why the like one song by an artist, but hate another song by that same artist. Music is hard to decipher because it’s linked to our emotions, and emotions are not an easy thing to understand.