Hop On The Aux, Bro

Words by Janhavi Gosavi | She/Her

I have what many may call ‘basic white girl’ music taste. I’m a slut for ABBA, show tunes, and the Top 40 chart.

When I get asked what kind of music I listen to, I succinctly reply with ‘trash pop’ and pat myself on the back. An answer like that usually guarantees no follow-up questions. Me admitting I listen to trash uses the same logic as Rebel Wilson claiming her name is ‘Fat Amy’ in Pitch Perfect— so “bitches like you don’t say it behind my back”. 

Our favourite songs are supposed to say things about us. In theory, you should be able to tell my star sign by analysing my ‘folding laundry’ playlist. But the music you listen to won’t always line up with how people perceive you. 

Which is all well and good, except I’ve just been asked to hop on the aux. 

I’m at a party full of people I vaguely know but desperately want to impress, and I’m realizing my go-to bops won’t satiate this crowd of intellectual wankers. 

I pull up my playlist, and pray for mercy. 

Racial stereotyping

I’m deciding between “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance On Me”, but something stops me. Is being ‘basic’ how I want to define myself? To be basic is to be predictable, unoriginal, and low-brow. It's a neon sign floating above your head that reads “I am exactly who you thought I would be”. 

As a European woman, my mate Amanda takes the basic white girl trope as an advantage. “People hate on Ed Sheeran and One Direction but expect a white girl to like them [...] because my taste is more than that, they’re pleasantly surprised.” 

I can’t say the same. 

At university, I’m seen as a brown woman; a first generation immigrant; a student fighting for political causes—and then people find out Taylor Swift is my life force. They can’t compute. I’ve watched my peers malfunction before my eyes at the sheer juxtaposition of it all. Acquaintances try to logically explain it away. Maybe she said that to be controversial. Or she’s not a real feminist. She might just hate Kanye? 

Last year, someone saw the Taylor Swift calendar hanging in my dorm room and sighed. “Isn’t she too childish and bubblegum for you?” They looked me up and down and said they’d always been fascinated with how girls come of age and “become women”. They felt that as I grew in maturity, I should look up to icons who exemplify female independence and sexuality. 

They suggested Beyoncé and Alicia Keys. “Then again, those women are black, so maybe you’re not interested.” Apparently, my love for a white artist made me less of a brown woman.

Comments like these cut deep, as they usually come from other POC. The last thing I need is for someone to tell me that my source of happiness should line up with my ‘values’: for them to marginalise me by deciding what those values are, as if POC are not marginalised enough. I shouldn’t have to constantly project my identity to validate my citizenship as a POC. Sure, music is political. But shit, sometimes it’s just music. 

Dimitris understands racial stereotyping within music all too well. A 6ft, stocky, bearded Pasifika man, he doesn’t look like your typical K-Pop girl group fan. But that doesn’t stop him from stanning his queens. He explains how the internet’s proliferation allows us to immerse ourselves in different cultures, regardless of our geographic locations.

“So I support the white kid who says ‘seki’ and my Chinese friend who loves Kolohe Kai,” he says. Dimitris doesn’t care that his taste is completely incongruous with his appearance, but assures me he still listens to what he’s ‘supposed’ to listen to—Spawnbreezie and Tongan hymns. 

Cultural sensitivity

I continue sifting through my playlist. My finger hovers over “Backseat Freestyle” for a second, but I adamantly scroll past it. 

Music doesn’t belong to anyone, but culture does. Love of music transcends cultural lines. Much like food, music is a language that connects us all and helps us better understand one another. This love comes with terms and conditions, an expectation that you stay in your jurisdiction and respect boundaries. 

Safe spaces are maintained with cultural sensitivity. A safe space looks like a flat party where a non-black person blasts Kendrick Lamar’s discography and appreciates it without appropriating it. But boldness invites judgement. 

For Emily, publicising her love for hip hop isn’t an easy move. A woman of Chinese-European descent, she either feels like a “wannabe” or “an art hoe trying to impress an e-boy she met on Tinder”. She’s afraid of taking up space that isn’t hers. And I get it. No one wants to be the white woman Kendrick called out at a 2018 concert, for saying the N-word out loud when singing along to “M.A.A.D. City”.

Fear forces Emily to backtrack and question her motives. Does she truly appreciate the genre’s depth and lyricism, or is she “another privileged girl pretending to know about having a cousin shot down in Compton”. Neither of us have the answers. 

Sexuality

I see “Girls Like Girls” pop up on my recently played tab. A female anthem always goes down well at parties. However, this particular one might not go down well with the cute boy across the room.

The relationship between sexuality and music is an intricate one. Music is one medium through which to reclaim sexual orientations and reinvent sexuality as a whole. However, using music to pinpoint someone’s sexuality is tricky business. 

I remember being slumped on a couch at my hall of residence, watching Hayley Kiyoko’s music videos with several women who identified as *not straight*. We ooo-ed and ahh-ed as she pursued her love interest, squealing when clothes were ripped off and boobies were smushed together. 

“Of course a room full of gay women would scream at the sight of a boob,” giggled my friend. 

I sat up a bit straighter (pun intended). That wasn’t the first time I had my sexuality incorrectly assumed due to my music taste. I laughed it off and the jam sesh continued, but my internal monologue was reeling. 

Was it because I was the one to suggest playing her music in the first place? If I corrected my friend, would that make me sound homophobic? Should I be changing the pronouns I use when singing along to Hayley’s songs? I reminded myself that being straight in a queer crowd meant my doubts came from a place of privilege. Regardless of how I identified, the women I was sat with would never have used my sexuality to contest my worth as a person. 

For Lauren, her bisexuality becomes contested through her music taste. When sharing music with her gay friends, she feels “insecure about the lack of contemporary gay artists on my Spotify”. She senses the perception that her music is “too straight” and that others think “I don’t rep my sexuality well enough”. 

Bi invisibility has been a long standing issue within the LGBTQ+ community, with biphobic claims that bisexuality is a ‘phase’ and that bisexual people have the privelege of ‘straight-passing’. 

Adversely, Lauren admits if she was figuring out if the girl she liked was into women, she’d immediately consult her playlists for clues. These internalised assumptions fuel the notion that music is a reliable identifier of sexuality.

Like I said, tricky business. 

Supporting ‘cancelled’ artists

Aux cord in hand, I conduct a routine vibe check. Results: 2000s R&B. Let me take this moment to assure you that no matter the situation, 2000s R&B is always the answer. But, I digress... because I’ve almost pressed play on a Chris Brown chart-topper. 

If I decide to go out on a limb and play Chris Brown, I’d have a couple of choices. I could run from the Rihanna stan who's about to throw hands. Or I could ignore the side-eyes from everyone pitying me for thinking abuse is Brown’s only crime.

Proudly supporting a cancelled artist puts you at the mercy of the people, who themselves are at the mercy of mob mentality. To be visibly woke is to maintain social relevance.

A New York Times article titled “Everyone is Canceled” said it best: “People talk about the attention economy—when you deprive someone of your attention, you’re depriving them
of a livelihood.” Your peers are less likely to give you attention if you support cancelled artists; doing so would risk their own cancellation, a price not worth paying for your questionable taste. 

Cancel culture has proven itself to be less of a spectrum and more of a binary. An artist is truly cancelled when their actions impact how much we listen to them, not just how we feel about them. So far, Ariana Grande’s ambiguous use of blackface to achieve an equally ambiguous ethnicity has not impacted whether I can add “God is a Woman” to the Spotify queue. Artists like Ari become the butt of many jokes without being problematic enough to officially cancel. 

We didn’t know any better when we danced along to “Kiss Kiss” at our Year 6 discos. But nostalgia’s attempt at seducing us into social regression remains futile. There are greater ideals at stake now.

Defying expectations

I’ve been frozen with the aux cord for what feels like a lifetime, when I finally stumble across “Old Town Road”, and laugh. Lil Nas X and I come from very different worlds, but we both refuse to be pigeonholed.

While white artists have swerved into historically black genres with little repercussion, the opposite has always faced backlash. Country music is widely thought of as white, conservative, and heterosexual. Lil Nas X didn’t fit into a mould you could logically market. Country music wasn’t ready for a then-closeted, now-out, gay, black teenager who made country-trap. 

He didn’t make sense. 

Originally released with just Nas on the track, country radio initially refused to play the song “Old Town Road”. This conjecture is what sparked the idea for a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus. The re-vamped song’s viral Tik Tok status made “Old Town Road” break the record for the longest run at No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. At the 2020 Grammys, Nas collaborated with Billy Ray, BTS, Diplo, and Mason Ramsey to prove “Old Town Road” was the Disney crossover we never knew we needed. 

It made sense. 

This mish mosh of country, hiphop, K-pop, and EDM supported the simple notion that music was universal and could connect people from all backgrounds. 

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Music is meant to make you feel safe. It's supposed to light a fire in your heart and get you dancing around naked in your bedroom. 

There comes a point where evaluating someone based off of their music taste stops being productive and starts being judgemental. You can be made to feel guilty for all manner of mundane things. It's the Vic Uni disease.

But I’m not at a party to regurgitate the pretentious bullshit shoved down my throat by the University. Nor am I here to prescribe to someone else’s perception of me. 

I’m here to Shake It Off™.

I promptly shove the aux into my phone. I know just what to play.