You might not be a music person if going to a show makes you more nervous than almost anything. Your roommate is Midwestern and white, but he’s in this “progressive reggae/hip-hop” band, and he’s performing tonight at The Local 269, and you felt obligated to come, so you’re here. While you’re waiting for the first band to wrap things up you order a vodka-something and then realize you’re the only male in the room that didn’t order either whiskey or beer. But it’s a reason to really gulp it down, so whatever.

The first band finishes up, hops down from the stage, and makes their way through the crowd of fans. Everyone’s shaking their hands and patting their backs, smiling and cheerfully feeling a part of something great, which seems just wonderful, in the way that photographs of vacation spots you’ll never go to seem just wonderful. You’re glad for them, you really are, so you can’t say exactly why you don’t get up to congratulate them.

You notice everyone’s clothes and you kind of start to feel weird about your own, because they say I Don’t Care in the way they precisely shouldn’t, which is: literally.

You have a few friends here and one of them asks you to go outside for a cigarette. You know for a fact that this friend is much more of a music person than you are, but he’s been off in a corner wearing an Interesting T-Shirt and drinking whiskey the whole time. He’s not exactly feeling the vibe, either. He’s not in the jivey sweat of it, not out there on the floor really feeling it. But he pulls it off: it makes him look respectable and very cool. This has a whole lot to do with the Interesting T-Shirt and the whiskey, you think.

Outside, you make a comment about how music people seem so in tune with themselves, like they’re really living in their bodies, really owning their skin, really super-present. You laugh out of the side of your mouth and shake your head and confess that you’re too cerebral, too in your head, too mental, that you don’t get it. He nods and takes the last drag of his cigarette. Some cute girls distract him for a moment but then he looks back at you and says, “Definitely.”

You ask him what he thinks of the new Radiohead because one thing you know for sure is that music people are keen on Radiohead. He says, “Oh, I don’t care much for Radiohead.” So that leaves you empty-handed.

You might not be a music person if you have lowest iTunes song count out of anyone you know (932), except your mother (32). You might not be a music person if you decline to play your music at social gatherings, telling your friends, on a weekly basis, that your iTunes is kind of messed up right now. Sometimes when no one is home you hook your computer up to your progressive reggae/hip-hop roommate’s speakers and play your weird, lame, outdated-and-not-in-a-good-way music (we’re talking Brand New, MGMT, Red Hot Chili Peppers, it’s that bad) all you want, you even dance to it, but when you hear keys in the door, you shut it off, hurry into your room, throw in your headphones, and start where you left off, because you don’t want anyone to hear your music except for you. If you do this, you might not be a music person.

You might not be a music person if, when you hear a good song, you download it and then listen to it obsessively for literally a month without ever thinking to download other songs by that artist. You might not be a music person if you can count on one hand the number of concerts you’ve been to in your life. You might not be a music person if you have a playlist on your iPod created specifically for when other people are riding in your car. It has the kind of music that other people listen to, you think.

You might not be a music person if you still haven’t gotten over Ratatat.

Your boyfriend is also, regrettably, very into music. When he found you, when he landed on your shore, he saw that you had a savagely low iTunes song count and then, in true imperial fashion, he tried to better your predicament. You acted snide and slightly offended but the truth is that this meant the world to you. He showed you Fleet Foxes and Beirut and Sunset Rubdown: still some of your favorites. He made you a CD that you still listen to almost two years later, because you’re not a music person and you don’t think you’ll ever get over it.

Your roommate has also given you great music, although of the decidedly less Caucasian sort. You wish you could give a shortlist of examples but names of rappers are hard for you to remember. Anyway, you totally dig it.

And now you’re at the show, and he’s doing his thing, and you have to admit: he’s pretty fucking amazing up there. His confidence, his self-presence, and his ability to Just Let Go seem, to you, absolutely miraculous. You sort of want to canonize him for sainthood.

What you’d like to tell your roommate, and your boyfriend, and all your friends, who are all music people, is that you’re pretty sure you love and understand music just as deeply as they do. As much as having almost no music and listening to the same music over and over again seem like signs that you’re not a music person, you know that being a music person is ultimately not really about this.

Everyone who’s done the charitable deed of giving you music thinks your iTunes poverty means you don’t have an avid hunger for music. This is probably true. They also think you’ll love whatever they give you. This is also probably true. The problem comes when they think your “love” of that music is really only a like, a mild appreciation, a registering of pleasant sounds. This is just dead wrong.

You’d like to tell them about the warm, embryonic sky of consciousness that really good music rockets you into. You’d like to tell them about how music makes you feel like a child, or like some bodiless spasm of energy. You’d like to tell them how 30 seconds of a melody can wrap its fist around the whole sin and justice of a 600-page novel, or a three-hour movie, and make it twice as spectacular. You’d like to tell them how important music is to you, how without you’d probably die.

But you can’t say any of this because, for music people, not saying it is the key. But you know that’s what’s going on inside the heads of the people moving with the beat at The Local 269, throwing their hands at your roommate on the stage. And for the first time tonight, you feel entirely OK standing at the back with your hands in your pockets, just watching. Maybe in a perfect world you’d break free of yourself and bust a move. Then again, get five more vodka-somethings in you, and it could be a perfect world. But none of these music people would want you to do something that doesn’t feel right. They just want you to love this, and in your own awkward way, you do.

By Daniel Lefferts