do you feel "guilty" about your inability to be interested in certain types of music?

on the other hand latent interests can easily be retriggered by others comments. just looking at Tom's "download this" has me thinking "Ah, my position on that might be a little prejudiced" but its mainly because i've been avoiding pop for a while, despite having loved it at one time or another. Rockist & Amatuerist sometimes also make me do a double take.

(as for your alienation from 60s rock and soul, last night i decided to burn you a mix to go along with the vehicle birth disc and there's a few songs along those lines from that. maybe that'll help. or hurt. who fucking knows.)

yeah, the OTHER inspiration for this thread was my sister getting me a copy of stairway to hell for xmas and pouring over it and realizing how LITTLE i'd heard of this stuff. (and i was supposedly "into" metal as an early teen.) slsk has helped a bit, but in a way it's just made those slightly opened windows that much more tantalizing. (it also helped that i was far enough away from my square-ass punkah teenage years to be able to admit things like the fact that i liked led zeppelin, etc.)

oops, i think yr probably onto something, but maybe not so desperate.

All regulars of rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1970s and rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s to thread. :-)

Why hasn't Jazz lured me in yet?

Jazz for me, certainly. As I've said elsewhere, I like and in a few cases love some jazz albums, but I'm obsessive about virtually none of it, and no jazz album (and probably no individual songs, if I'm truly honest) plays an absolutely essential role in my listening (though occasionally they fill a need, though that "need" is best defined as "something other than pop music"). And I wonder now if because I'm in my late 30s I'll ever really cross that bridge, or if I want to bother trying hard to do so--because it IS an effort.

On the other hand, one of the things I like about this board is that some of the jazz threads (can't recall a specific one right now, but some of the writing about Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, for instance) have made me not feel further revulsion towards--or fear of--this stuff, but have actually made me feel like I AM missing some great shit. (The punchline is I download it or pull it out of my collection, and it never quite lives up to the writing!) (Whereas I have a feeling if/when I download or purchase Junior Senior I'll almost certainly like something from it...I'll take stupid dance beats over jazz homework anyday.)

I feel guilty about some genres. Most country doesn’t appeal to me, same goes for metal. I know there is good stuff in both, (tho I’ve heard way more country I like than metal) but could never see myself delving further. But I’m not gonna beat myself up over that while there is way more stuff I’m actively interested in and want to learn more about.

guilt tends to come in on things I like/love but feel like I need to learn so much more about. I grew up on jazz, funk, disco & reggae. When I moved to the states in early 80’s I discovered punk, new wave, postpunk and classic rock. I think I was lucky in a sense that I heard all this stuff simultaneously which maybe allowed me to approach stuff in a more open way (and I thank god for the 9:30 club which throughout high school helped shape my tastes in music/expose me to so much stuff) but I have huge gaps in all and always feel like somewhat of a dabbler.

Now I’m mostly listening to what jess referred to as ‘non-western”, partly due to work, partly due to the fact that most stuff I used to listen to (outside of some hiphop and pop) bores me now. The accusation that ‘world music is the last resort of the jaded’ sometimes worries me as I’ve occasionally felt that myself. (sidenote - something interesting to me is that there is a huge generational shift going on in ‘world music’ mostly on the promoters/managers/agents in that a lot of ppl came up through punk/post-punk and approach the music in a v. different way. Causes some tensions with older crew but interesting to me that so many folk have come in to the field from a whole different area)

I tend to feel guiltier about not knowing wtf is going on with dance for example. I see terms like microhouse, handbag house, glitch etc. flying around on ILM and have no fucking clue as to what is being discussed and feel like I should know something at least.

Ok, that was way too rambling and I should get some work done.

i think i have a different kind of guilt: when i get into a new, untouched genre, i feel bad that there has been a whole style, geographic location, era, etc that i didn't know anthing about and realized how much wonderful music there is in it.

because you're totally lame. it hasn't lured me yet, most jazz sounds like soulless, muso crap to me and i strongly suspect that three-quarters of the people who claim to enjoy it are purely full of shit (and probably own no slayer records, either, and are thus untrustworthy).

i don't really feel guilty about it, though. i do enjoy some jazz-derived music (magma, annexus quam, area, sun ra, borbetomagus, nmperign, the tautology label) but i refuse to feel bad about other people's fucked up tastes.

well my brother has been listening to lots of eminem and even tho i like it I just feel that its one listen stuff really.

I don't feel guilty bcz I've found ways to get and enjoy recs from genres such as indie, rock, classical (20th century avg stuff so far), free jazz/improv, some electronic as well. this is all I've tried and engage with and I've found things to like abt them.

the things that haven't appealed to me on one listen (soul, hip-hop) I haven't really tried to like but I'm sure i'll get round to it someday.

Non-western music I'll probably never be able to get into...

But other then that, a lot of stuff is just different forms of pop. So it shouldn't be that hard...

I think of my tastes as pretty broad. I have lots of pop, soul, jazz, rock, hip hop, country, drum & bass, various African styles, reggae, techno, punk and so on. I have a fair bit of soca/calypso, cajun, folk and other things. I have a little bhangra, a few Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan albums, and so on. This still leaves broad areas of which I know nothing or I don't like, such as the whole of classical and opera, hindi music and almost any Oriental music (bar J-pop, say). This doesn't worry me - it's already too much for me to keep up with, and I'll never own all the wonderful records I would want in those areas. I've never worked to get into anything in any deliberate way, but some of these did take time, and if I hadn't been hearing the style often (not deliberately, just through friends or radio shows I liked for other things) I'd probably have never got into them.

The short and uninteresting answer is no, not guilty.

I like what Yanc3y says: So around age 12 I started buying all sorts of indie records that they suggested, and I didn't like it for a long time. But I kept trying and buying because I really admired these guys (one of them now runs Squealor Records), and at some point I started digging the stuff. To listen because of simple aspirations to fit in or to be liked isn't really a bad thing (I don't really believe in right and wrong reasons to listen to music)

Especially that last part. Or even if there are right and wrong reasons, in the long run it doesn't tend to matter.

When I was about 12 I more or less went through the same thing, except it was college radio DJs whose opinions I took as almost authoritative (although the music wasn't limited to indie rock).

I've said before that one reason I stuck with listening to Oum Kalthoum is that the guy I was buying Arabic music from kept gently pushing her and I wanted to like her partly for his sake. It wasn't a matter of thinking it was cool by that point, but still wanting to fit in, in a way.

because you're totally lame. it hasn't lured me yet, most jazz sounds like soulless, muso crap to me and i strongly suspect that three-quarters of the people who claim to enjoy it are purely full of shit (and probably own no slayer records, either, and are thus untrustworthy)."

haha \\m//

But I do not feel guilty about disliking the majority of jazz writers. What a bunch of pissy little geeks.

I've always loved jazz, but part of that might be how young I was when I got into it, so I sorta grew into it - stuff I didn't like at first I loved later.

I know what you mean, but try not to worry. I know someone who has an enormous classical music collection, and is very informed about the music, and Arvo Part is one of his favorite composers (or at least one of his favorite contemporary composers). Also, I turned him on to Lou Harrison, who is often seen as too accessible, but he was very excited by Harrison's work and liked a good portion of it. Granted, his opinions on classical music are a bit outside the mainstream, but they are at least informed. I think some of the difference between his views and common wisdom on classical music may be due to his East European roots, as well as his involvement with the Eastern Orthodox church, which gives him a lived experience of a link between music and the sacred (real or imagined). He's not that interested in complexity as such.

then again, i might've said that not too long ago about prog ... and now i LOVE yes.

Not that anyone should have to like jazz (or fine wine for that matter) but it really does help to have some understanding of the form and be able to follow it, especially with straight ahead jazz (though I admittedly have grown to find much of that stuff boring after years of loving it).

It's not snobby or elitist, it's just a fact, as much as it helps to know all the detailed rules of baseball, and not just the basics, to really enjoy it as a sport.

At the same time, the best and best-loved jazz albums usually have some kind of intensity or feeling that transcends the form of it -- Kind of Blue, Maiden Voyage, A Love Supreme, etc.