When did you stop being a genre partisan?

this is a good question

when i was little i only liked metal, but i probably got over that in high school. but sometimes i would feel sort of weirdly disloyal for either not liking metal as much as i used to or liking something that wasn't metal.

i think i got out of metal the usual way, through "weirder" metal bands like faith no more. i think metallica's covers of stuff like killing joke and misfits too....also their wearing of misfits t-shirts was a big deal.

i sort of liked rap in concurrence with the end of my metal phase but for some reason i didn't see that as disloyalty as it was sort of a totally different thing, not rock....and then anthrax and PE and everything made it seem okay in a way.

i think metal lost me more than i lost metal....i grew up on stuff like priest and maiden and ac/dc and def leppard from people's older brothers and cousin, handmedown cassettes....then i transitioned into metallica and anthrax and all that...but i couldn't make the jump when everything turned into death metal and grindcore...i remember being "blown away" by napalm death and death and morbid angel, but not really loving it...it seemed like the drama and melody had been stripped away, so i guess i turned to whatever scraps of "punk" or pre-alternative stuff was aggressive enough. like jane's addiction and stuff like that.

also, the movie -- sad as it is to say -- pump up the volume had a big impact on me, even though it's silly.

then i guess, you know, nirvana and everything happened and here i am listening to bark psychosis and charles mingus and talking on a message board.

I don't think I was ever like this, the first records I bought were ZZ Top, Van Halen, and Bruce Springsteen, and from there I went to the Beatles and hip-hop... I think country was the only thing I thought sucked up through my teens, but that evaporated fairly quickly once I heard Johnny Cash and a bunch of other early 60s country. I still have zero inclination to listen to electronica/techno/trance/house whatever they call it these days.

I meant to write

...scales fall from your ears...

I stopped being genre partisan about the time I actually started really liking music.

^^

I've never really been a genre partistan... when I was growing up I listened to lots of stuff, whetever was on TRL/106/Hot 97, old r&b and reggae from my parents, etc.. even around 2003 when I first got into rock via The Mars Volta I wasn't really a snob about it and I still listened to whatever.

When KISS started to suck ('78?)!

Serious answer: Early '80s; when I started listening to lot's of r&b/soul/funk/reggae, instead of just the standard hard rock/classic rock shit I had been listening to up to that point, I guess.

Though there was a preiod like around 2004 to mid-2005 when I kind of was on some OMG RADIO/MTV SUCKZ shit.., then I snapped out of it and was like "I don't actually like the crap I'm listening to" so I just started listening to what I actually like again, which is pretty wide-ranging..

Once I got out of high school and what I liked no longer had any reflection on who I am.

A friend played me Metallica's Unforgiven in the school music room when I was 13 (not their hardest song by any means, I know) and for about three years after I was convinced that no other genre could come close to the drama or dynamics of metal. Then someone put on Portishead's Dummy in art class one time and I was entranced from the first bar of Mysterons, so that was the first non-metal album I bought. Later got into more electronic stuff via the handy bridge of Nine Inch Nails. That and taking some drugs.

When I was a kid I loved The Monkees and Three Dog Night, but the pop radio station I listened to played album tracks at night, so I gradually got into Grand Funk, The Who and Hendrix. Their overnight show was weird; it was the first place I heard King Crimson and ELP. From there it was on to freeform FM radio, which mixed "Bare Trees"-era Fleetwood Mac, Siegal-Schwall Blues Band and The Crusaders, so I've really never been any sort of genre purist.

drukqs / vocalcity

the combination of those two albums helped me escape from the idm ghetto

(one by disappointing me, the other by stunning me)

my parents showed me the beatles and thelonious monk, which got me into pop and jazz......then i checked out brad mehldau the modern jazz pianist and through his covers of radiohead, got into radiohead. around this time all my friends were listening eminem and i utterly hated him. then for awhile i got into fusion like the mahavishnu orchestra, and around this time i had a short linkin park phase too, then i got into horrible prog metal like dream theater, and then that led to other crazy metal like dillinger escape plan, the red chord, from a second story window, death, meshuggah....and around this time i got into rap through mr. lif. a few years later i was listening to j dilla, prince, chaka khan, and also some crunk shit like t.i., young jeezy, and three 6 mafia, then this last summer i got really into lil wayne, and after that i think i understood hip hop more, and got into jay-z, nas, and finally eminem. so now i go to conservatory and study jazz, but listen to metal and rap. i still like all of the artists i mentioned except dream theater.

After being a huge, huge Michael Jackson fan as a little kid, from like fifth grade, I only listened to hip hop, which around seventh grade narrowed itself to underground hip hop, definitely on some OMG MTV/RADIO SUCKZ (as so elegantly put upthread) steez for a while. I got into other types of music from hip hop kids (both in real life and online) talking about them. Portishead and Radiohead were the first two bands that really got me, I think.

people's older brothers and cousin

Yeah that's where my listening started. And this being circa 1980, there was major prejudice against Disco and New Wave among my dope smokin' cousins. The continuity from the Who to Aerosmith to Lynerd Sknyrd to R.E.O Speedwagon got less and less tenable for me though, and I couldn't really get into Styx and Journey like they did, tho' I liked Yes just fine. Eighth grade music class, we even "analyzed" "Roundabout" (This is part A, part B, part C, part D, part B again! Part D!...).

The song that changed me was hearing the Clash's "Clampdown" on WBCN in Boston, which I started listening to because I was honestly getting sick of the short playlists on classic rock stations. In retrospect it sounds so much like the Who. But at the time, I found Strummer's voice very awkward and hard to take. But it was so much louder and more rebellious than Quadrophenia. From there, I found a college station, and my cousin (who I lived with) was immediately annoyed. Got the US version of The Clash and somewhere in the midst of "Complete Control" decided punk was superiorly rocking to all other forms of rock. Sold off the Ten Years After and Traffic records to get more punk. Wish I hadn't done that now.

1985 to the end of the decade, I just listened to music derived from punk and the new wave, all else was Old Testament and incomplete in it's revelation. Except rap, like you say. Schooly D's "No More Rock and Roll" was right on. Prejudices faded gradually as I got into jazz and country.

Strangest thing was how long it took me to really enjoy electronic music though. I took some stabs at it in the 90s- I liked jungle a bit, since I could connect it to dub and dub to postpunk. But it wasn't until I picked up college radio DJ'ing again in 2001 really started seeking out electronic stuff. Ladytron, ADULT were the path in. Had I found Amon Tobin in the 90s, it probably would have happened earlier.

Became partisan with Hip-Hop in '82

Stopped due to the fallout of Nirvana in '92

I don't remember ever being a genre partisan; the most-often played albums in my house when I was 8 were:

James Brown - Live at the Garden
Pink Floyd - The Wall
Rush - Fly By Night
Prince - Controversy
Leonard Bernstein/NY Philharmonic - Mahler 2
Average White Band - Person to Person
Vanilla Fudge - s/t
The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's...
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five
Steely Dan - Aja

My dad and brothers were all into jazz, rock, classical and R&B, so various albums in all of those genres were played constantly. Add to that my brothers also going for various underground/indie movements as they arose and basically I grew up with a very agnostic/egalitarian veiw towards music genres except for country.

i miss being a partisan! i'm just some gaywad with a big record collection now, i used to be a metal soldier when i was like 12 and 13.

http://www.rocksoldiers.com/logo2.gif

http://kissasylum.com/archive/2005/11/images/20051117-02Starkey.jpg

Late 2004, when Mos Def and Talib Kweli put out albums that sucked total dog dick and broke my faith in the backpack rap that I was into, and I found myself liking Usher and Ciara singles more than I wanted to admit. I stumbled across an article about popism soon after, and it made sense of the conundrums I was trying to sort through in my mind at that point.

I've been mostly into post-punk/new wave for the past many years. About 3 years ago I started branching out into funk/soul via Prince, hip-hop via Jay-Z and MF Doom's various projects, drone/metal via Boris and Sleep, and a bunch of other stuff I can't pinpoint as easily. But that's just what comes to mind.

Blondie>Television>New Wave>Post Punk>Electronica>Dance>Pop>Blondie

I like Blondie

lol when I was 11 I was all "XTC and The Cure are my favourite bands, New Wave is the best genre ever!"

then when I was 17 I was all "MOGWAI! Post-rock for the win!"

now I don't even think of either as a genre :D

i miss being a partisan! i'm just some gaywad with a big record collection now

^ DING DING DING

Yeah, I mean you just kinda float around waiting for things you like the sound of to bang into you. If I was so hung up on genre I might not have loved blackout and load blown. And thought they sounded pretty similar a few genre signifiers aside.

I have no intention ever to get over it, as genre is what decides whether I like a song/album or no. If I like a genre, I am likely to like whatever is released within that genre unless the genre boundaries are being torn down to too much of an extent. And the other way round, if a certain genre has certain stylistic elements that I just cannot accept, then I will also dislike virtually anything made within that genre.

I am so glad I'm not you.

geir for the win

it was pretty good.

I am so glad I'm not you.

-- HI DERE, Friday, January 4, 2008 10:48 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

This should be attached to every Geir post.

i was never a genre partisan, but it took me five steps to stop getting bent out of shape when people slammed prog rock, and yes in particular 1) the flaming lips admitted in magnet that they like yes 2) dominique leone reviewed the yes reissues on pitchfork 3) i heard ilk's canticle 4) i heard ruinzhatova's cover of "close to the edge" and 5) i saw a picture of brann dailor in a yes tshirt. i am obviously very impressionable

i miss being a partisan! i'm just some gaywad with a big record collection now

^ DING DING DING

^ DING DONG

What the hell does have a big record collection have to do with being or not being a genre partisan (or a gaywad)?

Seriously the biggest doofuses are those guys who only listen to jazz or nuggets-style psych rock or whatever and have like ten thousand records. I'll take DJ Shadow's expansive record collection (and maybe even his scroatee) over that anyday.

it was more just a joke. but i was so into metal back then, but i was a kid....i just don't think i enjoy anything now as much as i enjoy like a tesla cassette or something.

but metal was cool cuz you felt like you were a part of something. i didn't get into punk until it was too late, but i suppose that was like that for some people.

I think a lot of genres are (or were) kind of like that (goth, hip hop, reggae, mod, punk, metal, etc.) Although I guess some of those genres are as much about stuff other than music.

I can't really bear to listen to more than maybe 4 or so standout bands/artists in a particular genre or style. Beyond that everything just starts running together to me. That's not to say that their isn't great music beying made aside of those artist its just that I have an extreme case of ADD when it comes to music and I get bored with the same type of sounds easily. Now I'll admit that in many cases the bands/artists that I'm really enthusiastic about tend not to be very good representations of their respective genres as a whole (which has gotten me in a little trouble in discussions on these boards in the past), but I personally don't see the point of having to adhering to stylistic rules in something as nebulous and subjective as music anyway.

I've got to ask how many record do you have?

yeah alex you're def taking that too seriously - personally i was using 'gaywad with a big record collection' as shorthand for the kind of useless cherrypicked itunes disconnection you get nowadays, not exactly a scintillating concept i know. calling it partisanship is over-divisive anyway; call it "genre love" and everyone would agree that magical riches present themselves when you work within an deeper understanding of the foibles of a genre

Everyone's a genre partisan, and it's pretentious to pretend you're not. With very few exceptions, everyone always has a few genres they're not into, if only out of neglect. I have yet to dig into opera and am not really excited about trying. I currently have a strong aversion to modern country. I don't really keep up with new jazz either. Few people had anything good to say about my favorite hip-hop albums of the year, as apparently they're too "indie" and thus not in fashion at the moment.

It's a little bit more grey area in regards to a genre I still like, but have not spent the energy to keep up with in recent years, like Asian classical.

Alex,

Not that many, actually. Maybe around 760ish or so. Still growing.

Why do you ask?

i mean, i don't think i've ever been a proper partisan for anything anyway - never had the social interaction tbh, feeling like you were a part of something like matt says - but i try to work up an element of partisanship in the random genres i do listen to, however incomplete

everyone always has a few genres they're not into, if only out of neglect

this is way different than being a "partisan" - no one can listen to everything.

fastnbulbous: I think you're missing the point. The "genre partisan"-ship is in listening to only one genre of music to the exclusion of others, which most people do at some point or other. I don't know if that's the case for you, you obviously listen to plenty different types of music as it is, but I certainly suffered from genre monogamy at one point, and it looks like plenty of other people on this thread have, too.

I refused to listen to "z100 music" (pop, hip-hop, R&B) all throughout highschool and when I started college. Then, and I feel really stupid saying this, I started writing about music for my crappy college newspaper, and I became a (very lowercase) authority about music in my social circles. And that simultaneously made me feel obligated to expand my listening, and also gave me some freedom to have opinions that weren't "acceptable" among friends. So I guess I never listened to Jay-Z in highschool because my friends hated hip-hop (and I felt superior about only listening to rock music), and around college I stopped feeling pressured to reaffirm that identity.

"Why do you ask?"

Because four bands or four records in any genre doesn't seem like a lot to me, but what do I know. . . if I love one thing I'm usually inclined to like the half-dozen copies as well.

i can say i love x genre quite happily, i'm just not actively invested in any particular genre or scene these days

Yeah I sort of feel weird saying "I love (genre)" unless it's something absurdly specific that contains a calculable number of participants

I was thinking about this during the week cos we wandered into the queue for a Muse gig by mistake and I decided it's the football supporter mentality to bands/genres that I just don't get nowadays. And am consequently a bit of a snobbish dick about.

Wasn't there there a football supporter mentality to the big bands in the past? Its something that is easy (but not right) to assume in anything that involves large crowds.

Oh yeah I guess football supporter mentality has existed since the mid/late 60s, I just decided it's the thing I like least about Rock music. lol maybe football too. Not proud of my misanthropy, just observing it.

aren't you just talking about fandom or fanaticism generally?

Not really cos I definitely think the "supporting your fave band" thing applies more to some kinds of music than others. You could argue that, say, hardcore jazz fans have their own mode of nobbishness but it's not the same thing as a big stadium-ish rock band's fans.

lex comepletely otm

No, I didn't mean ironic in the "ironic hipster" sort of way (ironic in the modern sense, meaning detached or sneering or whatever) - I mean, more, listening to it with the specific idea of being perverse, or doing it to prove a point or something.

The only comparison I can really make is... after I dropped out of art school, I went through a phase of listening to really deeply "uncool" heavy metal - Guns N Roses and Hanoi Rocks and even Motorhead and Led Zeppelin. I was listening to it, quite pointedly, almost with the specific idea of distancing myself from - and pissing off - my "pretentious" art school friends who listened to nothing but the Velvet Underground and Joy Division and The Cure and the like. It was almost like I was shedding a skin.

It's not that I didn't love the music that I was listening to - I certainly did. But loving the music was not the only reason for listening to it, I was making a deliberate statement in listening to stuff that my friends thought was so naff.

So when full-on dronerock Kate met post-indie people listening to ChartPop music, I was suspicious that there was an element of wanting to distance oneself from Indie Snobbery in deliberately listening to something that would horrify them.

Then again, several years later I was accused of essentially the same thing - the most indie of indie twats walked into a Plan B gig, expecting it to be UberIndie of UberIndieness and sat down at a table where the Lex, Robin and I were discussing Britney Spears with genuine interest. But then again, he turned out to be such a twat that perhaps I exaggerated my pop-lovingness in order to wind him up.

'deeply "uncool" heavy metal - Guns N Roses and Hanoi Rocks and even Motorhead'
Whaaa? What art school is this that hates on Motorhead? Motorhead is like the Tom Hanks of rock.

There are a fair number of people that hate Tom Hanks.

I don't Motorhead = Tom Hanks of rock ...probably more like Tommy Lee Jones or someone like that.

Tömmy Lee Jönes
(I just wanted to see if the umlauts went through)

got over 'britpop' and its turgid offspring when i realised how basically stodgy and shitty it all was and how i'd been played for a rube by britishes music press. started expanding my horizons shortly before that i guess.

became house/techno partisan when i started clubbing more often.

Most of what I listen to today can be traced to a pair of friends I had in 7th grade, one of whom lent me his copy of Ready to Die while the other lent me Ride the Lightning. The last two walls that needed knocking down were prog, which came down when I realized how proggy the metal I liked was anyway so why shouldn't I fuckin buy Yessongs, and really being able to love radio pop, which In the Zone took care of.

I never got the whole "what is your taste in music / what is your style" thing because my formative years were the early seventies when the radio played hard rock, soul and country all on the same station.

That sounds like an amazing station! I'm young enough to have grown up on 'alt rock' stations, which probably stunted my musical growth in some way or another.

i listened to pretty much nothing but radio pop right throughout high school - i think college and ilm ruined me (weird, i get the sense that for many ilxors it's usually the other way round), in that now i like maybe 30% radio pop and a bunch of whatever indie/techno/house. i suspect it's more a sign of the times than anything else though - my high school years (1999-2003) was a golden age for radio pop and I've never understood aversion to it; if anything, it's the most genre-blind genre. I'm just not liking a lot of what I'm hearing on the radio these past couple of years.

could still do better, esp with classical, soul, jazz, country, classic rock - all genres that i don't know enough about but have found the one or two things that i really love from each. and pfunkboy's been trying to get me to listen to metal, with mixed results.

i think, with a lot of the music that i don't "like" or "get", it's usually due more to an ignorance or lack of understanding of the context or for aesthetic reasons than anything to do with the music being created. this is pretty obvious but i think most people could probably find good stuff in every genre, if they had the time and inclination to really dig deep. or you know, lex otm.

i repped for metal for about 2 years (12-14?) but after that my tastes just seemed to expand rapidly - probably due to having joining a band with a dude who had very broad tastes. the last wall came down when i heard sign o the times on the radio and thought "you know, maybe i better not count out this pop stuff just cause everybody likes it"

Whaaa? What art school is this that hates on Motorhead? Motorhead is like the Tom Hanks of rock.

It was the 80s. The past is a foreign country.

I don't remember Motörhate, ever!

You lived in a different country, in a different culture.

The Motorhead thing is a red herring anyway.

1) true, fair point
2) yeah...

Funny, I got a box of "books" given me at my mums yestarday. Along with a perusal of old family photos, Alice found some photos of my old band circa 1983 (which I'd managed to keep them away from all physical evidence of until yesterday!)

I also found "Rock and the Pop Narcotic" Joe Carlucci (book), in which if I remember he says that Black Sabbath were the most significant band to come from the post 1969 era. Which I scoffed at, but not long after I originally bought the book, the whole Seattle/grunge thing happened. So, yeah.

Waited too long for a bus to come and went to the newsagents to read magazines. Q called OK Computer the bestest album ever or whatever. Went into town later that day to hang with friends and buy the first Alicia Keys album at OurPrice but it wasn't out till the week after, so I bought OK Computer. And so Eminem stopped being the only white person I listened to (other than hearing Basement Jaxx etc. on the radio and liking it but not enough to buy it). Not long after I made two new friends, Paul and Steve; Paul getting me to read the NME and dress like a Libertine and listen to the Smiths, Steve getting me to listen to Coltrane and Aphex Twin and John Zorn and Penderecki etc. Then a couple years later my bro would drive me to the cinema every Sunday and make me listen to what was cool in pop.

ILX's 2008 metal poll kind of got me interested but still being years behind on discovering other genres, I have got nowhere since. I have a feeling I could get into country (I like a lot of alt-country, so I assume there has to be a crossover point) but again, I', still playing catch up on the first genre I loved (hip-hop), so god knows when I'll actually get around to it.

I'm pretty sure I was a total genre partisan at various points - I remember liking rock and the more 12y/o-girl-friendly end of metal and thinking pop and dance stuff were, like, less REAL, and then developing via grunge and "alternative" into total corny indie rock kid (also found way into electronic music and became Warp nerd after Select magazine made Aphex/Orbital/Fluke sound, like, even indier than indie; brief allegiance to d&b which was pretty lol for a pasty white rural shut-in)...

...but I can't pinpoint the moment I stopped (though ILM was helpful for getting me out of one rut), because every time I realise I'd been listening to that already, just... when I was into rock and caught up in "lol 2 Unlimited not real music" joeks, I still loved the KLF and the Shamen but I had some kind of "this is stuff which I like on the radio or to talk about friends with, but this is the real music which I will buy", which I guess I kept up throughout school and university to some extent.

And when I discovered that electronic music could be awesome too, I got pretty voracious about all the different genres of it that my mid/late-90s teenage self could discover by internet-less home listening, trying to, heh, understand them all. So there's a lot of 90s stuff I work back to now and curse myself for being too insular to listen to at the time, but in fact I was already almost there. Not so much being snobbish as working through possibilities opened up by one genre and then faddishly finding a new one to be partisan about, not ditching the old stuff but just not having time for it either.

Eh, sorry, tldr. Beginning to worry that I may be more partisan now, despite listening to genres which might previously have seemed kinda beyond the pale to me, e.g. disco

good question. i don't think i was ever a genre partisan. well ok, when i was really young i heard that XTC and The Cure were 'new wave' so i went around declaring that 'new wave' was my favourite genre. this lasted until i was about 10.

Sounds a bit like me. Early 90s NME/MM was maybe not such a bad way into music - just eclectic enough to keep doors open, and with certain writers always with an eye out for the new, even if they did get the non-indie stuff a bit wrong. Seriously, though, a low boredom threshhold is the best thing ever for getting out of ruts.

Not you, Louis.

"pop and dance stuff were, like, less REAL"
to be fair, pop and dance songs are better vehicles for debauchery and escapism than social criticism, like how chumbawamba's big hit was about drinking and passing out instead of how fashion-obsessed rich girls were vapid and stupid. (I'm not sure how "common people" falls in this)

Don't think "Tubthumping" is a celebration of hedonism, or that debauchery and escapism are opposed to social criticism, or that there aren't absolutely millions of Rock songs about debauchery and escapism.

'Don't think "Tubthumping" is a celebration of hedonism' If this song was impetus for anyone fighting the power instead of sake bombing, more power to that dude!

"Rock songs about debauchery and escapism." These tend to fall under the pop umbrella, no? I'm trying to think of a rock song that crossed-over without these elements. Maybe "Rock the Casbah"?

That wd make "Ace of Spades" a pop song?

why not. its the metal song for pop fans who dont like metal.

I get confused when we twist the accepted definitions of words to make them fit whatever crazy theory we're trying to run with.

It's pretty popular for a song warning of the perils of gambling addiction!

these days i go on big genre kicks, and this:

magical riches present themselves when you work within an deeper understanding of the foibles of a genre

is more true than i ever would have thought. however, besides maybe sometimes punk rock there's nothing that i feel i can really get behind and say "this is my genre." they're all flawed and they all start to grate if i listen to too much of one for long enough. it takes a while for this to happen, and there are alot of beautiful moments along the way, but i feel like my appetite for music wouldn't be what it is if i didn't have an open mind about it. when one genre dries up i'm glad to always have plenty of others to go to. and those are some of the best moments, coming out of an obsession and everything is new again.

The liner notes on the album Tubthumper, from which "Tubthumping" was the first single, puts the song in a radical context, quoting a UK anti-road protester, Paris 1968 graffiti, details about the famous McLibel case and the short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner". The album version of the song opens with a sample of a monologue performed by Pete Postlethwaite in the movie Brassed Off:
Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.
Near the end of the song, the melody of the Prince of Denmark's March is played on a trumpet.

two incidents that got me out of the indie mindset:

reading a small tom ewing piece on pet shop boys' 'can you forgive her'. massively eye-opening, this is the point i 'got pop'

year or so later, listening to klf at 8am on a retina-burning sunny morning after staying up through the night, this is when i 'got dance'

prob early 00s after hearing dizzees i luv u. still loved hip hop, still do, but after that point, i got more and more into electronic/dance music, and loads of other stuff i would prob have laughed at/hated before, rather than listening to 90% hip hop like i used to.

(also listen to loads more from other genres too, though this was partly to do with where i was working too, they played pretty much all pop/rock)

I went through a fairly lengthy stage of serially monogamous genre sluttery from age 11 which ran grunge --> hip hop --> dance --> ambient --> The Magnetic Fields (steps omitted for brevity) -->, each leap happening more quickly than the last until I reached a point where each leap is sufficiently close to the last that it rarely lasts for more than one album. The frequency of the leaps has deffo been sped up by reading ILM and the increased and more, uh, cost effectice availability of music these days.

Apologies for coming across like Dr Sam Beckett.

Even when I did leap into periods of intense consumption of one particular genre (industrial circa 1988-1991, rave circa 1991-1994, trip-hip/drum n bass circa 1994-1998), I still always bought other stuff and, more importantly, never disavowed music that I listened to before. To this day, I will rep hardcore for things like Sly Fox's "Let's Go All The Way" or The Breakfast Club's "Right On Track" because they have imprinted themselves on me; I can't deny the seductive charm of those tracks any more than I can deny that the soprano solo in the 5th movement of the Brahms Requiem is one of the prettiest lines of music ever written, or the "golden-era" ICP (Ringmaster, Riddle Box) still makes me laugh, or that Skinny Puppy's Bites is still their most terrifying album.

When I was growing up, I used to declare that I liked all music except country. I'd picked up the prejudice from my parents, who really were rebelling against my mother's parents, who listened mostly to the syrupy Western swing of the late '50s to mid '60s.

I latched on to that and amplified it, being a little music Nazi myself, so that I'd be unable to be in a room that had steel guitars or vocal twang without grousing loudly. Aside from that, I cobbled together a moderately respectable rockist outlook, and the first genre I really went full-bore for was industrial. Then my dad went to some Yo La Tengo show out in the middle of nowhere New York while he was on a business trip, and brought me back a t-shirt. I was now into industrial and indie rock; t'hell with the rest of music.

Since then, the transition was slow but sure, and had a lot to do with dating a freeform college radio DJ. I had already largely ditched industrial; she got me into a lot of electro and techno instead. Indie rock, I think, stopped making sense as a category around 2003, at least for me. It described too much and I felt bored by a lot of it. Along the way, especially writing about music for a couple years in the upper Midwest, I developed a loathing for jam bands and confessional singer-songwriters that I haven't shaken yet, but I'm not really trying to. I got into country through that DJ girlfriend too, going through the traditional steps of liking some country-ish rock and Johnny Cash, then alt-country, then getting sick of alt-country and just liking regular country.

And finally, getting drawn into arguments about rockism and popism that made me rethink a lot of the sort of knee-jerk justifications I had for not liking things. I still think a lot of music that other people make and listen to is crap, and I can still be a domineering wanker when it comes to selecting music for a party, but that's because I think it's crap, not because it is crap. I also made an effort to stop "liking things ironically." I either like them or I don't, and I don't have a lot of patience for pretending that something is so awful that it's awesome—I just admit that I like a lot of cheesy shit that other people don't have the taste for. Stuff I don't like, or don't love, I just kind of ignore, and I spend my time seeking out stuff that I do like (since there's more out there than I'll ever get to).

It's weird, "So awful it's awesome" is something I really love in films, but I have no time for in music.

(I wonder if this is because film is one of the few artforms that I really have no real understanding or feel for.)

Is "so awful it's awesome" equivalent to ironic distancing? Isn't it more of a knowing embrace -- like a dog with three legs and ecsema that you love all the same? I associate "ironic distancing" with a certain aloofness and lack of enthusiasm, which I guess could be brought on by overfamiliarity.

with time i've become increasingly genre partisan. I'd say most of the music I play as 'genre music'. I've always liked to play things that sound like each other but this has increased more and more with time. similarly I've become increasingly detached from music which feels to me like it is 'outside of genre'. While I feel like i actually like quite a few different genres I like the sense of continuity and cohesion that comes from 'within genre' and similarity appeals more than difference

i seem to be going in the other direction

I still think 99.9999999% of certain genres suck hugely, but there seems to be an exception to every single rule.

Is "so awful it's awesome" equivalent to ironic distancing? Isn't it more of a knowing embrace -- like a dog with three legs and ecsema that you love all the same? I associate "ironic distancing" with a certain aloofness and lack of enthusiasm, which I guess could be brought on by overfamiliarity.

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, September 8, 2009 7:34 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Uh I think it just means you find its awfulness funny and gain enjoyment from it as a consequence

luomo releasing vocalcity was the first step towards me unsubscribing from idm@hyperreal

up from nerdery

(to a more sophisticated, socially acceptable nerdery)