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My new hobby: downloading random mixtapes off of Myspace as my exclusive source of music. When I was listening to one of these the other day (from German-Iranian DJ Maral Salmassi), my roommate came over and told me, “Your room, it sounds like…Europe.”

At one point in the history of my musical tastes, he could have been referring to a Mozart quartet or one of my Mahler marathons. But at this particular moment, my weakness isn’t for German Romanticism, but for French Hedonism. Ear candy. Whatever you call the unexpected, hypnotic pleasure that results from the rearranging, repeating, distorting, and pulverizing of dark, rhythmical rumbles and squeaks. Add in some funky slap bass and disco string orchestra figures, and I promise you my mind will shut down instantaneously. I pounce on the latest Hot Chip more rabidly than Rolling Stone writers devour Radiohead albums.

And when my mind shuts down, matters of taste become moral quandaries — for instance a recent obsession with a certain Justin Timberlake song. Yeah, it’s remixed by Justice, but how many hipster points do I lose for indirectly listening to a (gasp) POP song? What if I’m being ironic and postmodern while I enjoy it? Does liking Justice still earn me positive points because they’re from France, or negative points because everyone likes them now? What if I found the song on a music blog and downloaded it illegally? Am I still a good person? More importantly, am I still a COOL person?

These are unanswerable questions. That’s why listening to music is a full-time, all-consuming spiritual experience.