My roommate says my music taste is too 'basic' to be played on our living room speaker.
By @owentbh · Friends
He's turned our apartment into his personal avant-garde music festival and gets genuinely mad if I try to play anything remotely popular. We're now in a passive-aggressive 'speaker war' and it's ruining the vibe of our whole apartment.
The full story
so i (20m) live with two other guys in an apartment for the summer while we take classes. one of them is my good friend, the other one... we'll call him the DJ. from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed, he has his phone connected to the living room sonos speaker, playing the weirdest music i've ever heard. it's not just like, indie rock. it's like, lo-fi ambient glitch-core that sounds like a fax machine having a nightmare. literally zero words, zero rhythm, just vibes i guess? i didn't care at first but it's gotten so oppressive. you can't have a conversation without this weird, moody, atmospheric noise in the background. last week i had a few friends over and wanted to put on a playlist. something fun, something everyone knows. he physically cringed and told me not to 'kill the aesthetic' he'd been 'curating' all day. i laughed, thinking he was joking. he was not. he went on a whole rant about how my music taste was 'cheugy' and 'a slave to the spotify algorithm' and how he was trying to 'expand our sonic palettes'. my friends were just awkwardly standing there. i pushed back and was like dude, it's a shared speaker in a shared living room. he said my 'basic' taste doesn't deserve an audience and that i should just use headphones if i want to listen to 'corporate pop'. since then it's been a cold war. he'll connect to the speaker from his room just so i can't use it. i'll wake up early to claim it and blast top 40 radio just to annoy him. our third roommate has basically started living in the library. ngl it's incredibly petty but am i the one in the wrong here? should i just surrender our living room to his weird musical whims for the sake of peace?
How people voted
- OP Is Right — 30% (90 votes)
- Both Messy — 39% (115 votes)
- OP Is Wrong — 31% (92 votes)
Readers are split: “Both Messy” leads with 39% — 297 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@codyagain — My freshman year roommate only listened to ska. I feel your pain.
@wes — lmfaooo
@leo — On their side. Time to discover your passion for kidz bop and play it on repeat whenever he's home.
@sashahm — Can't you just agree on a schedule for who gets the speaker? Seems pretty simple.
@sammydoes — nah your roommate is right you do sound basic
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