How important is the music you dislike?

[No need for Tanya Headon to answer this one.]

To an extent it defines my taste, but often in scattershot ways. Thus, I certainly have no problem at all with fey English rock per se, clearly. And yet I must destroy Gene. Similarly, I have no problem with heavy metal noise with a guy MCing (or trying to) over it, and yet Rage Against the Machine lasted ten years too long. Etc. etc.

Having encountered music in the past I tried to give it a fair shake before ignoring. Nowadays if you can't even work the first time (cf Andrew WK), then fuck off. I am perhaps impatient in my old age. ;-)

my taste emerges in bas-relief.

I don't know how important it is to me, but everyone else seems to love it.

Actually, this is a difficult question to answer. Instinctively, I have a hard time focusing on music I don't like, but when shopping, for example, I'm constantly faced with music I don't want to hear. Sometimes I change my opinion on music, and what was bad can become good -- listening to the radio can be really good for this.

I don't think I could say I 'define my tastes' very much from what I don't like. That sounds like saying "I hate pop, and this is not pop, therefore I like this."

My music I dislike is very important, it defines where I can go on a weekend since I can't stand house music of any one of its 104 flavours.

Hmmm, this might be a "'You know you are" thread

"'You know you are a music critic when you spend more time thinking about the music you dislike than the music you like"

Most music that I dislike, I simply ignore. Many times, when I hate music actively, it is because the music represents a certain scene that is either disaapointing to me or disgusting to me. For instance, I tend to get frustrated by the indie community because I joined it years ago thinking I had really found a world of creative and open-minded people. Instead, I got... scenesters (and I seem to meet a lot of girls whose complete devotion to indie is predicated on the fact that Lou Barlow is a "dreamboat"). I do not doubt that plenty people in the indie community are nice people like the ones described above, but I seem to meet few of them. This has really affected my take on the music. I still listen to it, though.

In general, whenever a genre or an underground of a genre purports to be open-minded, but isn't, that is when I get pissy.

I think many times when people actively hate music, they are hating it as a symbol instead of a reality. Except for numetal and post-alterntaive like Nickleback, which does deserve it (I know - shooting fish in a barrel)

Hating music is one of the great things about being a music fan. I try to keep an open mind, and will listen to anything (although admittedly there are genres of music I have less time for than others), but nothing delights me more than bashing bad music. In conversation, there is not much I can say about music I love, while I would be far more vocal about music which irritates me. I'll give anything a few spins, but if I don't like what I hear BY GOD you'll hear about it. Once I've established a dislike of an album, I won't play it again, but just you try and stop me criticising it.

When Bad music gets in my way (radio, in shops/fast food places, booming car stereos, Television etc) I consider it aural pollution.

RNB/Swing/commercial hip hop - ghastly overproduced plodding music,

UK Garage - all that horrible stuff with skitty production and naff vocals particularly the summer of 2000 was horrible with booming car stereos in North London,

Hair Metal/ Hard Rock/ cliched AOR the stuff on melodicrock.com,

Britpop/lad rock/ trad rock songs types, most overtly 60s song based rock/pop melodies,

Twee indie-pop - amateur lofi indie muck that track & field supports and Peel unfortunately has a fondness for this type of music over the years,

Post-Grunge/US Corporate Modern Rock types: the massive amount of muck that came out of the US particularly from 93/94 onwards right up to 2002 - check the gavin alternative charts/ spin magazine,

Kiddie pop trance with wailing diva types,

Uncut po faced type Alt.Country/Americana bores,

lightweight pop punk/goofy rock types including ska punk,

ghastly cliched rap/nu metal that major labels churn out like widgets

Adult contemporary stuff like Celine Dion.

bland "smooth/dinner" easy listening jazz

Stick it all in Room 101, and chuck the key away !

The trouble with bad music that you often cannot ignore it, particularly radio is so frustrating - that amount of crap Xfm/ Kiss 100/ 6 Music/ Radio 1 play is so infuriating particularly when so much creative music gets overlooked or at best shunted to obscure times late at night/or early hours of the morning!

I remember Maura.com mentioned a naff local station Mix 95.7 in Philadelphia, what a hideous radio station this is ! Listening to this by default would be torture ! I suppose every city in the US has a radio station like this.

In the London the worst music stations are Capital FM, Heart and Virgin - shops, fast food places and even getting a haircut - are all potential aural pollution zones.

martin do you like anything but darkwave?

a great deal of music I don't like is important to my tastes because I consider it a challenge to figure out what there is to like about it, or to gradually allow myself to come to the point where I can see that. some of the music I dislike (different from don't like) falls under this heading. there are other things that I am aware of but don't put the effort forth to like. in general I don't think I have good reasons for this other than time or personal inclination, but since I try to keep in mind why I make the time for the things I do, or why I might have the inclinations I have, I try to treat that music I dislike but deliberately won't try with as music that could be important to me, even if it's not. I'm not sure what this means - maybe something like according things other people might think is the most important thing in the world enough respect.

of course joking complicates all of that.

I can imagine some people reading this and saying 'well what about music that's just bad and there's no way around it?' in most cases, someone thinks it's important even if you don't, and thinks you think sound terrible sound great to others, so I can't make a special exception for 'obviously' bad music.

You may not believe it, but I've kind of reached a point in my music-listening life where I don't really actively hate any music. Sure there is plenty of music that doesn't really engage my attention or that I wouldn't choose to listen to, but if forced to listen to just about any piece of music, I can usually find something about it to appreciate, even if it's something very small, like the sound of a particular snare or a little ornamental lick at the end of a bar.

I find it difficult to slag off entire genres (even hair-metal -- shit, "We're Not Gonna Take It" is one of my favorite songs of the moment), though certain (often non-musical) aspects of various genres tend to irritate me -- like the angst-thug mentality of nu-metal or the tendency of emo singers to sound like the girl that left them also attached a Vise-Grip to their gonadular region, things like that.

As for specific bands I hate, I find that I said hatred relies less on how they sound than how much they fit into the critical pimping routine. The Hockey Night is this annoying bunch of indie dorks from where I live and they get college airplay and occasional local press; the fact that their album is in reviewed in Pitchfork is probably a big deal so they don't grate on me that badly. Sleater-Kinney, though, are a decent-enough band with some great singles that've been somehow anointed as "The Greatest Rock Band In America" and for that I cringe nearly every time I hear their name.

In short, the music I dislike is about a fraction as important as the media attitudes I dislike. I suppose this is kind of dysfunctional but at least I've outgrown my "[This band] sucks and must die" phase.

the distinction between music I dislike and music I don't like is key for me because often it seems like a bad reaction to music can be because I don't like it, only I think I dislike it, and I just mistake the one for the other.

If there is something particularly hideous playing wherever I am, I will leave (or turn the channel, or turn it down). Worse than the public though, my indie friends are so one-minded that any mention of pop or anything on a major label is likely to get me expelled from that circle, or looked at funny. Common dialogue - 'Have you heard the new Cornershop album?' 'No, have you heard the new (insert mind-blowingly BLAH indie band name)'. 'No, I have not'.

The music I complain about most is never obviously bad music. I can't work up any real hatred for, say, Hootie and the Blowfish, when I know any music-lover I know with a lick of sense will hate them too. It's the music that people, who's tastes I respect, are drooling over for (what appears to me to be) no good reason. It's always great taking a stand against "Sacred cows".

Sick of slating things, I'll slate things I mildly dislike more for one silly reason or one good reason more than things I hate for lots of reasons.

I'd rather be raving about things pardon the pun these days.

Btw Kilian, the problem I'd have with that is with something like The Streets, it gets loads of praise and thus you slate it, but in fairness you'd never listen to anything of it's type anyway. It gives the impression you're pissed off you don't like this thing that all the critics or whoever do. (also I fucking love the Streets, ahem)

Most people aren't as passionate about music and the quality of songwriting, prodution, etc. If something comes along that suits their mood and has a nice melody, they don't dissect it along the same lines I might. It might be offensive or heavy-handed to me, but most mainstream music isn't intended for someone is discerning.
On the other hand, there's those jam bands and nu-metal bands whose listeners rave about the "musicianship". I know exactly what I want or at least the basic requirements, most listeners don't have such stringent guidelines.

DJ Martian - I think I want to have your children :)

Yes it's important in the ways already stated - but I also think that there is a validity to the idea that your hatreds can be part of your defining sense of self/identity as much as your loves, even though I can't disagree with dleone's logic. (Is it one of those some/all fallacies?)
Music's general embedding in a set of cultural associations and representations which you may also find irritating might be justifiably attention consuming, too, given our social natures.
And yeah, because it seems so much easier to articulate reasons for not liking something rather than liking it, and because the act of being so polemically critical may in itself be a rewarding one for those of a writey bent (ahem), there might be a coping mechanism of: 'Oooh, more shit for me to have fun slagging off!'
And this can be fun, of course, but too much of that response can also end up leaving you feeling like your blood has turned to creosote.....I just wish I liked more stuff!

I don't slate it cos it gets praised, I slate it cos I don't like it. However, I will accept that it's not from a genre I listen too much, and perhaps I should be slightly less scathing in my criticisms when this is the case. Not that I'm gonna stop, or anything :-)

Music I don't like is much too important in my life as I am flooded by it. Discovering new interesting music gets more and more difficult I find as I have to listen to so much mediocre stuff to find a gem. Downloading and listening to ten mp3s I think could be interesting yields between 0 and 1 good songs. Closer to 0 actually. In the radio there is hardly anything worthwhile anymore, there are only retro bands which don't do it for me. Bands like The Vines, The Strokes, even Interpol cannot excite me (actually I almost hate them) like The Smiths, The Cure or My Bloody Valentine did ten or fifteen years ago. And I am just discovering that I don't like a lot of my CDs. Maybe I should stop listening to music for a while, at least to contemporary pop/rock music as it is so disappointing. I feel that I will become another pinefox listening-wise if it continues like this.
I just got the free CD of the German Rolling Stone today and there was not one song on it I ever want to listen to again.

Music I don't like is much too important in my life as I am flooded by it. Discovering new interesting music gets more and more difficult I find as I have to listen to so much mediocre stuff to find a gem. Downloading and listening to ten mp3s I think could be interesting yields between 0 and 1 good songs. Closer to 0 actually. In the radio there is hardly anything worthwhile anymore, there are only retro bands which don't do it for me. Bands like The Vines, The Strokes, even Interpol cannot excite me (actually I almost hate them) like The Smiths, The Cure or My Bloody Valentine did ten or fifteen years ago. And I am just discovering that I don't like a lot of my CDs. Maybe I should stop listening to music for a while, at least to contemporary pop/rock music as it is so disappointing. I feel that I will become another pinefox listening-wise if it continues like this.
I just got the free CD of the German Rolling Stone today and there was not one song on it I ever want to listen to again.

I wouldn't say that I igonore what I don't like but in somecases I may try to find out why something is appealing to friends trying to get more than a "it's good" answer from them.But one of my pet peeves is people who tell me that I only like something because it's not popular and that is very far from the truth. I usually lay My Black Sabbath/Stereolab/Neil Young mix tape on them and they shut up

The music I dislike isn't nearly as important as the music I like that's bad. Sting, for instance.

Music I don't like is much too important in my life as I am flooded by it. Discovering new interesting music gets more and more difficult I find as I have to listen to so much mediocre stuff to find a gem. Downloading and listening to ten mp3s I think could be interesting yields between 0 and 1 good songs. Closer to 0 actually. In the radio there is hardly anything worthwhile anymore, there are only retro bands which don't do it for me. Bands like The Vines, The Strokes, even Interpol cannot excite me (actually I almost hate them) like The Smiths, The Cure or My Bloody Valentine did ten or fifteen years ago. And I am just discovering that I don't like a lot of my CDs. Maybe I should stop listening to music for a while, at least to contemporary pop/rock music as it is so disappointing. I feel that I will become another pinefox listening-wise if it continues like this.
I just got the free CD of the German Rolling Stone today and there was not one song on it I ever want to listen to again.

How important is the music I dislike? Well, over the past year, it's become fairly important to me.

I had to reconcile myself to the fact that deep down in my heart of hearts, I didn't hate the Strokes, that I actually kinda liked the guitar playing and the rhythms, and that my initial negative response to them had more to do with them being touted as the Best/Worst Band Evah! than any standalone artistic merit. (I still think the production on Is This It is pretty flat and conservative, and doesn't do much to show off the band's strengths. And the lyrics aren't Lou Reed-quality yet. But I can see that the Strokes have potential, and maybe they'll make better records down the line.) So I had to retrain my ears and learn to listen to them as a group of musicians instead of merely a big ugly fashion-albatross.

I've been going through the same thing with electroclash for nearly a year now. I really don't wanna slag it and dismiss it just because it's so trendy -- I'd rather try to learn and listen and evaluate, figure out who the best artists are and think about why I find them superior to the lesser artists. If you're gonna talk shit about a genre, you should be conversant in it, right? Otherwise you'll look like an ignorant fool. I still have a love-hate relationship with electro (like, why is Larry Tee's upcoming Electroclash tour so bimbo-centric, when the 2001 festival was so diverse? Is "Lovertits" the only way to give electronic music mainstream credibility?), but it's the kind of relationship that makes me wanna keep digging deeper.

Good question. DJM's private hell of all round bad-music assault is wierd. I mean, how hard is it really to ignore, say The Lighthouse Family in a shoe shop? How much hardship is it to have to endure Celine Dion while you get your hair cut - really? I guess you could always take a Bark Psychosis tape along with you. You don't like London radio stations - easy, don't switch on! Or turn up your walkman when you go into shops!

Alex's claim to be 'flooded' by bad music is distressing - maybe you need to look further afield than Interpol, Vines etc. I very occasionally think that there are only about 20 decent records that have ever been made. This mood strikes me about once a year and lasts a day or so - I've reported it here before. Generally though, I'm in a mild panic that there's so much good stuff that I haven't yet heard (mainly in soul, dance, pop, funk, possibly prog). This far outweighs any irritation about occasionally hearing something I don't like/don't want to hear. So music I don't like doesn't matter.

Music I don't like... when all's said and done there is not too much that when in a reflective, personable frame of mind I would become distressed at listening to (perhaps The Manics...). But in the everyday run of things, when you are going about yer business like the chap up there pointed out, getting a haircut et al, and you're subjected to Magic or Radio 1 or something, well, you don't have the choice to rip the stereo out the wall, or even walk away, and so you sit there thinking harder and harder about all the stuff you'd rather hear instead. Perhaps this fortifies one's positions on teh subject...

Anyway, for the purposes of being amused, sparking debate and fingers crossed, ultimately leading to enlightenment, I find it pays to take a concretised stance when it comes to certain music that leaves me rather cold. If one refuses compromise or indulges flippancy, upon reflection, I usually find later analysis of one's words yeilds some wonderful dividends in terms of how one actually *feels*, not to mention inducing, as in the example of these boards, some delighful responses from those who take these things even more seriously, have more interesting things to say, and are more enlightened than oneself.

dr. c = otm.

Alex your apathy is otherwise know as old fartism, I know the symptoms well.

Approaching the anniversary with a four in front and a nil behind, I guess I quite well qualify for an old fart. It would probably be scaring if it wouldn't be like that. You can't stop nature, can you?

Have I listened to too much music already? Is there a threshold for music? And after passing the threshold you can't enjoy "new" music anymore? But the thing is that most of today's music is not new at all. Just a bad take on older stuff. I think I have passed the threshold of bad music in my life and this really pisses me off. I am torn in between the need and hunt for new sounds and the cost in terms of having to listen to rubbish to find it. To find and listen to a new gorgeous three minute song my ears have to support 3 hours of bullshit. Is there a solution to this dilemma or will it become even worse with the years?

The thing is even the retro bands were much more exciting ten years ago than now. I was just thinking of Elastica's or Beck's first album which almost enthralled me at the time. And they just melded together what they found, it wasn't innovative at all.

Sorry for avoiding the subject question, Mark but it seems really hard to ignore the music I dislike, though I would like to.

DJ Martin thinks of these as 'aural pollution':
RNB/Swing/commercial hip hop
UK Garage
Hair Metal/Hard Rock/cliched AOR
Britpop/lad rock/trad rock
Twee indie-pop
Post-Grunge/US Corporate Modern Rock types
Kiddie pop trance with wailing diva types,
Uncut po-faced type Alt.Country/Americana bores
Lightweight pop punk/goofy [..] ska punk,
Ghastly cliched rap/nu-metal
Adult Contemporary [Celine Dion.]
Bland "smooth/dinner" ez-listening jazz

Ok...so that leaves us with...with....ummmmm.....ummmmmm....

uh....well, okay maybe the radio stations could play....er...um...

the answer to your confusion lies above, custos.

can i just say that, dr. c is, like, inspiring to me. on a daily basis.

ah...I had gotten as far as DJ Martins post and responded. I have now read Dr C's post and agree wholeheartedly, with the small proviso that if DJ Martin is getting a haircut, wearing a walkman might be tricky if he doesn't have "ear-bud" style headphones. Besides, a sloppy barber might accidently cut his headphone cord if he doesn't watch what he's doing.

Hi Lord, your last post about "DJ Martin's haircut" (great song title) made no sense to me so I'll pass on that one, but obviously there's plenty of great, great music left after you remove what Martin doesn't listen to (that's not that much, really, just the trash foisted on us by clueless marketers). All the "ummmm"s and "uh"s just point out the lack of imagination on the part of the listening public at large, and if the radio weren't so bland and hackneyed I might actually be concerned about what they'd play in the absence of the garbage currently cluttering the airwaves. But it is, and I'm not. I wouldn't care if all of radio went silent altogether.

Matt: Hi Lord, your last post about "DJ Martin's haircut" (great song title) made no sense to me so I'll pass on that one,
You have to imagine one or two comedic scenes:
1) The barber has to cut his DJ Martins without moving his headphones off the top of his head. End result: he ends up with a "sideways mowawk" going over his head from one ear to the other.
   or
2) DJ Martin is sitting in his chair with a wire going into either ear. The barber doesn't see the wire under DJ's hair and cuts the wire accidently.

Matt: but obviously there's plenty of great, great music left after you remove what Martin doesn't listen to (that's not that much, really, just the trash foisted on us by clueless marketers). All the "ummmm"s and "uh"s just point out the lack of imagination on the part of the listening public at large...
I was so tempted to have a third post that blurts out "ummmm....KLEMZER!"
But i'm suspect that joke would've even been drier than the ones about DJ Martins hypothetical haircut/headphone scenarios.

wow, dr. c. is so right on. posts like his make me remember why i keep reading the interweb.

[Lord Custos check my weblog/ ILXor profile of what should be played -there is more than enough scope for a new diverse style radio station.]

Matt, cont'd: "...and if the radio weren't so bland and hackneyed I might actually be concerned about what they'd play in the absence of the garbage currently cluttering the airwaves."
Who knows. Something interesting, maybe? A little novelty might do us some good.
Matt: "But it is, and I'm not. I wouldn't care if all of radio went silent altogether."
Volume knobs and 'power' buttons are great aren't they?
But don't give up hope, Matt. There should be another big upheaval around 2005. Nature hates blandness as much as it hates a vaccuum. Things are bound to get interesting soon.

Holy shit: New Messages Alert! That is such a bad-ass feature! Someone give props to whoever installed that module|routine|applet.

DJ Martin: [Lord Custos check my weblog/ ILXor profile of what should be played -there is more than enough scope for a new diverse style radio station.]
'kay.

Sounds Covered:

* dark/black metal (the more atmospheric, epic or experimental artists)
* darkwave/ gothic/ ethereal
* electro / breakbeat/ nu skool breaks
* epic alt-rock/ art-rock/ electro-rock
* hardcore/ metalcore/ noisecore (artists on the experimental/multidimensional side of loud music)
* IDM/ experimental electronics/ glitch/ ambient sounds
* industrial/ electro-industrial/synth sounds
* jungle/drum n bass
* leftfield/ instrumental/ avant/ electronified hip-hop
* post punk
* post rock/ spacerock
* shoegazer/dream pop sounds
* techno/tech house/deep house/ minimal house/progressive house
* and many other hybrids and musical mutations (avant jazz/electronic crossover, dub, electro-acoustic etc)

Yeah...I'm all for it, DJ Martin. What'll be the call letters of this hypothetical Radio Station

i should probably also add that i've been really just DRENCHING myself in dislike lately -- from being suspicious of pretty much every hyped new york city band and dismayed by the reactions i've seen to them, because they all seem cut from the same press release/'insider tip' to walking into the deli in my building's downstairs at the exact moment, every morning, that a billy joel song (or vanessa carlton) comes on. but i have found good stuff on my own -- it's just taken work, more work now that audiogalaxy and napster are gone, and that the nme's increased accessibility seems to have resulted in a collective brain-seize on the part of, well, too many people i interact with.

does anyone else think that the critical world right now is in serious throes of grade inflation? i mean, shit, i even see it in the recaps of 'raw' and 'smackdown' on pwtorch.com.

I will nick the slogan from The Wire: "Adventures in Modern Music"

Andrew Weatherall would have a weekly show, ala Groovetech.

When you start broadcasting, I'll be listening.

major taste-shifts in recent years have left me *very* wary of writing just about *anything* off: i'll use words like "crap/terrible/worst-ever" when i'm trying to wind-up my friends or bonding with a fellow hatah, but that doesn't mean i won't still try my hardest to give my friend's limp bizkit album a fair listen (okay just the once. with finger on the 'track skip' button. sorry dave q. and future googlers. but i did try.)

only in recent months would i say my taste-shifts are kinda consolidating into some personal aesthetic (albeit one that doesn't put much faith in 'gut-reaction' listening). today i listened to an album i immediately really didn't like at all(incidentally, twas a nick drake 'best of', not to start another angry debate): i won't be able to return it without another, serious 'engagement'. i feel like i'd be doing myself a disservice to listen in any other way.

dave q (again)(and who, it should be noted, i sometimes suspect of being absolutely correct about everything) once said on these boards -and his degree of seriousness remains (happily) unknown- that if you need to 'aquire a taste' for something, it ain't worth it (which reminded me of that jackie mason joke about no-one having to 'aquire a taste' for a potato chip.) there's a finite amount of time and music, yeah, but the product of working on (yes, i think you can 'work on' enjoying something, while enjoying that process itself) liking something often (at least in my experience) reveals greater rewards than first imagined- finding that 'something you like' in a streets/wu tang/lambchop record leads to discovering similar likeable threads- sometimes tangential, sometimes crucial - in any number of other musics. maybe this can all be distilled into the loss of post-teen need to define taste against something else (that nabisco wrote so well about on an old thread), but right now hating any sizeable chunk of music feels like cutting myself off from a potentially fruitful experience, and i'll see how long this feeling lasts. (but right now, please, PLEASE don't ask me about: jamiroquai, anastacia or the constant barrage of 97 ninja tunes that gets played every damn day by the art skool stoner kids- boundless objectivity has its limits people)

(this probably has something to do with my most listened-to album of the year so far -"music for airports"- being pretty much a blank canvas)(all-embracing vastness or post-embrace burnout?)

(and its not really blank i know)

Music that strikes me as dull and bland and sort of mush-headed to such an extreme that it's physically uncomfortable to listen to, like nausea and suffocation at the same time: Sarah McLachlan, The Cranberries, Tortoise, a lot of Mogwai, Rachel's, some Labradford and Aix Em Klemm, probably most post-rock actually, Michael Nyman's soundtrack to The Piano, a lot of Sinead O'Connor, the soundtrack to The Sweet Hereafter (especially when Sarah Polley sings), . . .

Some music I find viscerally irritating: Garbage, No Doubt, The Barenaked Ladies, Cher, a lot of Tori Amos post-Under the Pink, Paula Cole

Music that I think I'm supposed to find really powerful and moving but I actually find totally empty and somewhat embarrassing: U2, Bends-era Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Husker Du's Metal Circus, probably a lot of singer-songwriters that don't fall in the first category (though twee hippie stuff like Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell is OK. Tim Buckley and Skip Spence are good judging by the songs Robert Plant covers on his new album.), maybe Slint (though they might occasionally verge into the first category and sometimes I've actually liked them)

Music I dislike but never think about: adult contemporary, country

Music I hated at one point but now like or love: synthpop - all dance-related music for that matter, pre-20th century Western classical music, rap, modern rock

I wish I could say something like what Josh or Dr C said but I do spend time thinking about and actively disliking music. Often it's out of defensiveness when people see music I like as obviously inferior to stuff they like as listed above, which happens frequently. Sometimes (not so much now) it's because I'm trying to figure out how someone could find this stuff appealing. It wasn't until recently that I realized that a lot of people have just always had this kind of unthinking knee-jerk visceral dislike for things like prog or AOR or Linkin Park. I used to assume that people made fun of it because they found it kind of fun or cute but passe and cheesy and that their tastes were much more refined than mine since they were able to prefer singer-songwriters or post-rock. I thought people criticized noise or avant-garde music because they were able to see structural or compositional or technical failings that eluded me. Once I realized they were as blinkered as me but they just had worse taste about it I stopped being embarrassed about liking stuff I liked. I actually tried really hard to like Sarah McLachlan. I'd listen to the albums over and over, studying the lyric sheets, trying to make a connection of some sort. I even spent two years in a band with people who loved her. For a day or two I convinced myself that I liked The Freedom Sessions. I was even thinking a couple days ago that the pain her music causes me is somewhat fascinating in and of itself so maybe I should give it another try. It's the last frontier of challenging oneself and all that. Obviously I mostly just find now that finding things I like and following them expands my tastes more than trying to force it. I think I'm getting closer to the Dr C state of musical tolerance though.

Most of these distastes are genre-based so being able to somehow redefine a genre as good would end the distaste. I'd be happy to get over all of them and never have to mind what's on and be able to appreciate all kinds of musics.

I have no explanation for the preponderance of female voices in the first two categories other than that a lot of this is stuff I've been forced to hear and react against from my sister's collection.

It may already be obvious that I am semi-obsessed with not liking mostjazz (including mostjazzgreats). I keep saying I'm giving up on trying to extend my taste in jazz, but I keep trying things. I suspect I will really give up at some point, but it's not even clear what that means. I am not going to not try an artist who I've heard something by that I like, just because it is a jazz artist. I take chances often enough with buying in other genres. Also feeding my semi-obsession is my love of much of Sun Ra's music (which leads me to ask myself why, why, why this music sounds so different to me than most other jazz--well, maybe because it does sound different?). (It's as though Sun Ra is jazz corrected, ha ha ha.) And of course, my ears messing with me: even as I've been writing this, the Thelonious Monk CD I am playing has been sounding better to me than it did earlier (but that could be unrelated to my writing this, since the second half of the album is a bit newer, enough to make a difference in my reception of it).

Or someone will recommend a jazz album to me, singling it out as something special, and when I hear it it just sounds like the jazz I've heard on the radio, the jazz that has repeatedly driven me away. It's just more of that. I'm not one of these people who haven't heard "real jazz." (Do they really exist? Don't they spin their radio dial around, hear any jazz on TV, etc.?)