Tikkabik

I love music. I have hundreds of CDs that I've been amassing over about half my life at this point. My tastes tend to run pretty eclectic: I have everything from Patsy Cline to Miles Davis, DJ Keoki to Mozart. There's some stuff in my collection that tends to dominate. I really like music with a beat to it, like electronica and dance, and I love bebop era jazz. I also have a weakness for eighties pop. Partly because my budget is limited and partly because I have a life outside of listening to music for pleasure, I'm strictly a dilettante, but I know what I like.

There are a few gaps -- I'm not big into country and western, especially the heavy-rotation stuff that's available now. If a Toby Keith CD ever makes it into my collection, I'd be awfully surprised. But one of these days I'm gonna pick up some Johnny Cash and some Willie Nelson, when I can get around to it. And opera is another area that I don't really have any interest in, unless it's Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the wabbit" in a viking helmet. But suffice to say that musical tastes run wide and deep.

Because I'm an avid Mac user and I write news for a living, I stay on top of the latest releases from Logic and Mark of the Unicorn and Native Instruments and Steinberg and all the other companies that develop music production, editing and composition software for the Macintosh. I even bought a keyboard years ago.

Despite all this, I'm not a musician. I'm functionally tone-deaf, can't sing on-key to save my life, and am disabled in the usual suburban white-man way when it comes to actually keeping a beat. I can't dance worth for shit, even for those Japanese dancing games slowed down to "just had a stroke" pace.

I don't get it. Why am I wired to like music as much as I do, without having an ounce of talent to play it? Why do I like dance music in particular, when I can't dance? There's a cosmic irony here.

At least I'm self-aware enough to know that I completely lack musical talent, not like this guy.