Effecting a study of someone’s personal evolution through his album collection is like researching an historical event through its primary sources. Although there is something chillingly Facebook-like about it, which is a nice way of saying that there is a small stalker-ish quality to obsessing over someone else’s albums in order to dig deeper into that person’s true being, actually talking to the person is never a bad idea.
That person is my future father-in-law. Last night, I had dinner with my fiancé and future father-in-law. The three of us enjoyed some good food and good conversation while I did some incognito research. I tried to find out things like: why he wouldn’t want to hold onto mainstream musical gems from the ’70s, how his long-standing affinity towards everything Tibetan figures into his past listening habits, and what exactly those turntable experiences have amounted to in his current situation.
Any fruit that was born from my pursuit wasn’t so ripe for the picking. It wasn’t until I read Sheila Weller’s July 2012 Vanity Fair article today about San Francisco’s growing hippie culture in the 1960s that I was able to connect some of the dots. Of that culture, one of the decade’s scenesters said, “‘Everything was spiritual. Everyone read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.'”
There! My future father-in-law, although he grew up in a small town in Alsace, which is nowhere near San Francisco, and for whom correlating his experience to a bunch of American kids on the West Coast might not be without fault, gave up a good part of his record collection because he became more interested in encountering consciousness than subscribing to the pop music of the era.
Weller’s article also put a large “X” through my question mark about Tibetan Buddhism’s rise in the West and in my future father-in-law’s life. As for his current situation, I can’t say that his musical tastes have really organically evolved from the French pop music of his youth. He seems to really be into Tibetan music. I guess he’s just the kind of person who listens to stuff that he doesn’t have to think about. But before that becomes my definitive conclusion to the greater search, I suppose I have more snooping around to do.
(Photo via VF)