Subjectivity. We keep coming back to this here at ELM. In previous articles, I have mentioned how you just can’t help what floats your boat, and it has returned to prominence with this week’s heated ‘Is rap shite?’ debate (answer; no. See Public Enemy if you don’t believe me.) The questioning of a distinct type of music got me thinking, always dangerous I know, but; what happens when you dislike a whole genre but you really really don’t want to?
For me, it’s jazz. I’d love to love jazz. Everything about it is cool. The clothes, the nicknames, the instruments (saxophones are icebox.) I love the freedom, I love the way the guys play intuitively, I love that it’s all about the way sound marry together. I think that Jazz pioneers were the first rock stars. Hell, they were taking heroin before rock n’roll had moved away from beer. But fundamentally, I don’t like the music. I have listened to it, and I can appreciate it – I know good jazz from bad jazz – but i would never choose to go and put it on the stereo. I’m not a stupid man. I am aware that anything by Charlie Parker has more artistic merit than some stupid indie rock sludge. But my collection is full of one and not the other. I have a fondness for Blink 182 despite knowing, fundamentally, that they are corporate cocksucking spunk punks who are, in the main, atrocious. But I like the toons, dude.
I’m fervently of the belief that it is how you approach your music and what you want from it. I have always loved country and folk music. Not the big hat or finger-in-the ear stuff, but the real, proper heartbreaking kind. It’s not a conscious thing. It hits me emotionally in a way I can’t explain, leaves me marvelling at the beauty of it. I have an immediate and unmistakable investment in it that I just can’t replicate into other types of music. I have a friend, however, who is not a lyrics man. he prefers dance music as it is the sound that is important to him. Instinctively, a great bass-line will do more for him than a lonely pedal steel ever could.
So in the end, it all comes back to the way you are wired. It’s pretty obvious that repetition can have an impact on your tastes – but what gets you gets you in a way that you just can’t replicate.
So let’s hear it then. What do you like that you shouldn’t and hate which you’d rather not?
Filed under: General Stuff | Tagged: country, folk, Funk, jazz, punk, soul
I have a secret love of bluegrass.
Anything banjo driven can’t be bad.
Tell that to the guy who got bummed in ‘Deliverance’.
I have a soft – spot….
However, lets talk about music.
I know I shouldnt ,but I have a love of old” crooner” songs,slow,lush orchestration, often strangely – yet masterfully – constructed,somehow timeless ; “moon river “.is probably the pinnacle of their evolutionary tree.
I hate the mc5 and the stooges though my mind tells me they are the sort of thing I should like
.To me they also sound like the musical equivalent of mechanically recovered meat .
split daddyo ! Does ” king of the swingers” from “The Jungle Book ” count as jazz?
I am a massive dub and reggae fan, but cannot for the life of me listen to any post 1978. However, this may be because it became girly-fied and shite then. Apart from Musical Youth and UB40.
…..I particularly like reggae on Panzerfaust records, swineshead.
White reggae…NO!
I like Cod-Reggae.
Hotel California,
fantastic Smashy – too right Nicey.
White-Power reggae ……NO!
I can’t get into any reggae, now you mention it. Especially dub – but that could be related to the neighbour below me in my old place playing it all the time at volume. The fucking wigga.
That’s not to label the entire genre shit though, just not my kink.
I love dancehall, but just can’t get into laid back reggae. Dunno why.
I also love proper 60′s sould but despise it from the 70′s onwards. Dunno why.
I actually used to like reggae,I put that down to hanging about with two jamaican guys during my formative years( assuming those ever end – thats a whole other debate)and going to their parties etc.
Now I find it quite tedious.
Anyone remember Glasgow reggae band ” man at the window”?
Where the hell is Babylon?
i used to work with one of the guys out of Man at the Window. He fabulously used to say that his band was “training” as opposed to “rehearsing”. I had this great mental picture of them all ka-chinging away whilst stretching and jogging on the spot. Not unlike the Specials stage show, actually!
Cockney Rejects quote, Dusty, I like it.