My parlour game for incipient friendships and dating

Why do people never talk about pop music song lyrics? I’m now giving it a start, mainly to learn from them; there’s a ton of excellent poetry that has been tossed out melodiously for decades now, and between Spotify and sites like AZ Lyrics, I can sample stuff that in my own youth would have been expensive for a middle-class brat with time to waste but not money for tons of records. (I had time to waste because I had no interest in joining 7 or 13 social clubs in high school just so that I could show “leadership” and noble ambition in order to get into to a good school in the Ivy League, instead of dropping out, taking a silly aptitude test, and going to the state university that didn’t require parental sponsorship but only mortgaging your future to pay for your classes and grades, and opportunities to learn to write by writing things nobody reads, so that I could - not - get a great job in a great career learning to type other men’s badly written business letters in a job marked with “potential,” and riding the elevator to the executive washroom like Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment” — only without the young Shirley Maclaine, in that film or “Some Came Running,” two of American film’s greatest love stories…)

But I still don’t understand how so many people in my generation and the successors are so knowing in getting all these often complex poetic forms, without ever needing or wanting to say much about them. Think about it, don’t we know: thinking and knowing are not the same things. But the friends who play together stay together, and few fight right. It's pretty much a given in Anglo-American culture that pop music (and in recent generations at least also film and television) form our sensibility and young people use it to situate themselves together with their friends in terms of how they think about who they are, about life, and everything, — (English kids do this with cult-like devotion to their favorite bands; we Americans are more casual about it, but have kept many of them afloat by letting them so generously share our language, so that we can buy their music, as well as the political traditions we took from them, even while both countries have let their populations become mirrors of the globe’s, while their government often joins ours in expeditionary forces that help keep the world safe for our respective financial institutions)… Music matters to us, but people don't talk about it, they just press a like button, and this isn't because of Facebook but preceded it by decades. Hi, my name's Jack, what's yours; I'm Jill; do you like this song, I so love The Stranglers; Oh yes I love The Strangler’s (songs) too. Bing, goes the sound, you're a match, or at least you're cool enough mutually to be friends in at least the American way (talking, hanging out, sharing experiences), or Zap, you're not a match, you lose, or she does, and that's the game. One of you is out and you’re out together if you can’t find a shared topic of conversation. The name of the game will be Include Me Out/Exclude Me In.

For indeed, I'm inventing a new parlour game. (Please note this idea is copyrighted and patented by the date of this posting by the author of this site. Contact the author for the latest royalty fees. The game is also under review by a contingent in the marriage counseling business. Do a mitzvah, save a marriage or a teenager (or aging one) at risk (of what, you wonder; of everything, of course, or what you will); as every good therapist knows (in a seemingly open secret among them), boredom kills. Four out of five dope or meth addicts who play my game live to see another day. Many have died dropping out from a little world they got so tuned in on, they were killed for a song, lost in their space, rather than doing a turn in their place. My solution enables you to have your song and think about it too. In part, the problem may be people treat music like sex; afterwards, dumbly pondering the experience, they just have a cigarette.).

Here are the rules: Name a song or film, or musician or filmmaker you like. Careful, you should have a good reason. The other person agrees or not but for a reason. Each person in their turn must say something about the artwork that they like or don't like. If you don't like it, that's a vote to not continue, but you still can't say no without a reason. (Unlike the date itself, of course; no one has to hold your hand or kiss you or do anything else on the basis of an explanation; that's fine, but we're not playing marry the songwriter, but choose your other friends, your neighbors in the imaginary neighborhood that you totally choose, the people who would be invited to your party, or rather than artworks that you want to entertain you at it.). An acceptable move in the game is any (plausible, meaning defensible) statement about the artwork that may be a reason to find it interesting, and that could itself be defended with reasons. Players in their turns can optionally ask you why or what you mean, which can be a challenge if you doubt it or a curious inquiry if you tend to agree (or both). Note that this is a game that is based on the idea that instead of one party winning and the other losing, the players actually win or lose together. It is a win-win contest.

Now I admit I'm a failed academic and studied philosophy (still do), so I have a reason to believe in "the game of giving and asking for reasons," which exactly what the proponent of this notion of reason, a famous 20th century American philosopher (Wilfrid Sellars), called it. But that's a detail). I’m also an ex-literature major, which is also a detail. It’s why I write the game.

You lose the point in the round if you have nothing to say about the artwork. Then your penalty is to name one you do like and give a reason. No one’s turn should pass without a statement. The desire that sustains the game is the will to maintain interest in lieu of boredom.

Any statement goes but it must be something you think is interestingly true (or let's just say interesting to say) about it. But actually the point is not to win and not lose. Of course, the perfect ending of the game is you marry each other because even if you don't like exactly all the same things (that could get boring), you both have good reasons for liking what you like, and these reasons are not essentially private in the idiotic sense of unsharable.

The real way this game fails, if it really played well and rightly, is that sometimes horrifying differences are revealed in actual moral values. (Better late than never; and better saved from a bad marriage that only had great fucking or a nice house or kids to recommend it.) For example, if you preferred Truffaut to Godard, Matisse to Picasso, Hockney to Francis Bacon, Elton to Bowie, or, say, Genesis, to Patti Smith, or even U2 to the Boomtown Rats, would you long date or hang with someone (such as myself) who has precisely the opposite tastes? - And will give you a fucking argument about it! After all, these are if not life and death matters, they would break or make any real friendship. It would be like a Marxist and a liberal. No, I won't go there now. Some of my casual readers know my views on that. (And by the way, I do like Matisse, Truffaut, and Elton, sometimes and in a way. But then I am also a critic in my own right, and we are a notoriously promiscuous lot. I can maybe show you why that filmmaker you don’t like is “interesting,” and of course we, the snobbish who would not be nebbish, mean that as an objective thinking. That’s the mystique of critique; it’s been the law with us since Kant’s (it’s ‘the third’)).

I've been planning this game since was a wee brat. Some other kids were at my grandparents' and we were playing and talking somehow and someone said let's play a game. So I thought one up. But that's not a real game, someone said. Real games are made of cardboard. Yes, and played by future wannabe bankers, like Monopoly. So I went for broke.