Do you ever find complicated abstract things more immediately accessible than simple conventional things or am I just a maladjusted egghead?

These are all listener-relative. If I understand what you mean by "accessible", then yes: let the simple conventional thing be a simple conventional thing in any genre or style that I don't like, and let the complicated abstract thing be a complicated abstract thing in a genre I really like.

i got into george crumb right away , i still dont get mozart

Yes. I feel something like an egghead myself, but, you know, I can hardly throw a goddamn (american) football. I still feel twinges of grade-school guilt that thinking is more fun...

This is an interesting question to bring up. In my opinion, it has to do with the sound environment you were brought up in, and your relationship to it. And of course, it's pretty darn relevant to your parameters of how much of that sound is "music" or whatever to you. It also has to do with fascinations with other aspects of music that most folk dont think about (physics of sound, mathematics, electronics, et al). In the end, I think , it's just a matter of where your personal tastes lie, and where they are going to lead you.

I mean, I used to herald THE RUINS as the music of a future world. Now, I'm baffled at the sheer complexity of a Bach piece.

It's a relative endeavor. Don't be put off by it.

Sometimes, mostly when the simple things are being bomb blasted out of passing cars by football players in wifebeaters and bleached hair. But I just finished listening to Eyes of a Stranger four times over so I shouldnt be take a side.

Sundar, I definitely agree. I mean, you probably ARE a maladjusted egghead, but so are a lot of us ;-)

I find a lot of very "indie" indie-rock (and I mean US indie) to be quite inaccessible. It's not that I think the music is difficult per se, but just that I don't, in a quite real sense, understand what the musicians are doing, or why they're doing it. I feel like with so much of that stuff, you really have to be part of a subculture to "get it," and that it's inaccessible to those who aren't.

On the other hand, I guess you could call, just to pull an example out of my ass, the Cyclo album pretty inaccessible by most accounts, but it excites me on a very basic level--"Oooohh, neat sounds! Cool sproingy noises! Sounds like someone plucking a high-tension digital rubber band inside my brain!" I find an alarming amount of music like this highly accessible--Ikeda, alva.noto, etc.--just playing with sine waves, digital pops and hums, shit like that. I eat it up, whereas I find a lot of acoustic guitar-y indie stuff, or as Tom would say "present-day angular post-punk garage rock" (mind you, angular post-punk guitar rock from the early 80s is some of my favorite music--I just think American kids in the 90s suck balls at it), quite "difficult." Interesting thing to bring up, Sundar.