On Monday, I was able to attend the Table Talk centering around the Playlists of Our Lives. Music has been a major constant in my life. While my genre tastes are broad, as are my artist preferences, the significance of music has never varied. For me, music is more than just noise that makes the walk to class more bearable–which it does. Music is associated in memories. Songs, to me, signify and even help define moments in my every day life. Music acts as a soundtrack to my seemingly mundane life–songs transport me back to specific time periods or even particular days or conversations or people. This is partially why I had a challenging opinion when the discussion moved away from the significance/relevance of music in our lives to a broader conversation of the separation of art and the artists that create it. Should people stop listening to Chris Brown because of the abuse inflicts upon women? Are artists, in this case musicians, given more lenience in public reaction to criminal offenses? The issue I grapple with lies with relevance of music itself in my life. Michael Jackson, for instance, was discussed as one such case. As a kid, I absolutely adored MJ–I could quote the entire Thriller album by the age of 8 (I, of course, did not understand the majority of the lyrics). To me, I associate the music of Jackson to car rides with my parents, I associate it to learning how to moon walk on pointe shoes, I associate it with dancing to “Thriller” in the living room with my brother. The music, to me, is less about the artist and more about the memories created around it. So while the artist may be an awful person (and I, in no way condone any form of criminal offense), to me, the artist is partially separate from the art.

Regardless of the interesting and challenging subject shift, the table talk was informative and intriguing. It was reflective and overall neat to hear how others incorporate music in their lives. Also, if you are confused by the title, Kanye West was heavily discussed in the talk, as he was the catalyst to the conversation around separation between art and artists. I am still confused as to what his actual name is.