Yesterday I listened to an internet personality (who has also written three very worthwhile Minecraft fanfiction novels that I have read and reviewed) comment on his least favorite songs of 1975.  When he got to his dishonorable mentions, one of them was “Laughter In The Rain” by Neil Sedaka.  Now, I happen to love the song, on its own merits, as something to listen to, but it is one of those songs that sounds like it was sung by Carole King or one of the other altos of the 1970’s, a good decade for lower voiced female singers as well as higher voiced male singers.  Neil Sedaka is one of those singers that has an unfortunate gap between a fairly high pitched tenor voice and a somewhat scruffy appearance–a gap I understand well because I happen to have it as well–but one that is especially unfortunate when it comes to the culture of contemporary music and music videos in particular.  In an age where image mattered a lot less it was not difficult for someone like Sedaka to release a song and have it be popular even if the voice was high enough and smooth enough to be thought of as a female voice.  When one’s success is based on the sound of the song, it does not matter as much what you look like.

This is not a problem that Neil Sedaka has alone, though.  I remember as a child listening to adult contemporary radio that I thought for many years that the song “All Out Of Love” by Air Supply was a male-female duet about a late and lamented relationship gone wrong.  It was not until I went to college and read a rather savage review of their Definitive Hits collection from a magazine that I realized that Air Supply was a group made up of two Australian men that the magazine unkindly called geldings.  It had not ever crossed my mind that it was important to look up information about the people who made music until the internet age, when it became a frequent pastime of mine.  As a child I read plenty of books, but few of them dealt with popular music, and there was (and remains) a wide gap between songs I know and appreciate and my knowledge about the songs and who made them and when and why.  Every time I look closely at a year-end chart, for example, I find songs that I liked that I did not even know the name of, and when I write about acts that belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame I frequently find out that I like a lot of songs of theirs that I knew but did not know that they were from that person, be it the music of Little River Band or Todd Rundgren or many, many others.

What is the issue here?  It is one of putting together knowledge in different areas.  For example, as a fond listener of music I have long listened to songs and enjoyed them but not known the formal knowledge of who performed those songs or sometimes even what the name of the song was.  On the other hand, I have also long had a deep and abiding interest in music charts, and in listening to shows (or nowadays, watching online videos) that deal with the charts.  Sometimes listening to a chart program or a retrospective best of or worst of list will prompt me to listen to such music myself and then become familiar with songs that have either been forgotten to time or are songs that I did not know I liked that I have heard but not really known.  When one’s knowledge is too compartmentalized it can be a problem because one can know information about something and know something without knowing much metadata or information about it, but not put together one’s formal and experiential knowledge together into a coherent whole, where one finds it puzzling that Neil Sedaka’s voice does not match his looks and that one can like a song like “Laughter In The Rain” while having misunderstood who it was that sang the song in the first place.

And this is not only a problem with music.  There are a great many occasions where implicit knowledge can present a difficulty when it comes to one’s understanding.  For example, we can have a great deal of experience when it comes to the troubles and evils and suffering of the world, but lack the formal knowledge to frame that experience in some sort of ideas about the philosophy of evil and suffering and how God is to be defended and justified for having permitted so much evil.  Frequently in spiritual and intellectual matters we may have a great deal of trouble in integrating what we have experienced with what we can explain or what we know or even what we can recognize.  There are cases where we have the raw material in our memory and experience for coming to an understanding of patterns but lack the formal knowledge to be able to make use of that experience and that insight.  And that is a great shame, and a longtime problem, in that our ability to conceptualize something and our experiences are often separated and we have such a hard time putting them together.