Lately, I’ve been thinking about differing tastes in music. On the face of it, this isn’t a contentious subject. Music is very personal and subjective.
But I have come up against two areas of resistance that have me wonder…are some us a little tunnel-visioned when it comes to musical likes and dislikes?
I like to think I am pretty open minded, certainly when is comes to most music. To me, music is classical, jazz, rap, pop, rock, and opera, to name a few.
I guess part of it may be we often immerse ourselves in one sort of music early on or maybe the bands associated with a formative decade in our lives and we stick with that, because that’s what we know.
But I find it really confusing when someone says they don’t like a particular kind of music without really listening to it. After all you don’t really know if you like something unless you try it …So back to the areas of resistance I have experienced recently. I don’t really like to make sweeping generalizations but a number of friends who are mothers HATE rap.The capitals here are warranted - they literally won’t listen to it and if I talk about it they won’t tolerate the conversation! It’s the funniest thing!
I wonder if it’s the image associated with rap, rather than the actual music, or maybe it’s a bit of both? I love rap and am transfixed when I hear a great rapper, wishing secretly that I could do it… although I’ve never tried, so maybe…anyway, certain “mother” mates won’t be swayed.
The other people resistant to listening to different music are perhaps predictably my kids.
Last week, I unusually had both my kids in the car; I think we were all off to the dentist or something. Anyway, we drove off and I switched on my music.
Before we were ten seconds into the intro I was bombarded with a chorus of “No way! We’re not listening to that! Your music is rubbish!”
Firstly, let me reassure you that my playlists are not rubbish (!) and maybe using my kids as an example is not great here, because in my experience children go from loving every song you play them to dismissing everything you listen to.
Anyway let’s keep going with the example.
When pushed they couldn’t tell me why they didn’t like what was playing, so after a bit of “to-ing” and “fro-ing” I decided to give in and turned the radio on - and well, I can’t bring myself to say the name of the “band” that came on.
But let’s just say if I hadn’t such given a long impassioned speech about being broad minded about different musical styles, the radio would have been turned off before this particular girl band started “singing”.
Now, you may be thinking, “Aha!’ I do exactly what I am accusing others of doing. My get out clause here is I have heard quite a lot of …“manufactured pop” and my point is that some people don’t give certain genres a try at all.
Personally, I feel it is far too easy to listen to the music we already like, without exploring and giving other untapped genres a chance …there is a lot of good music out there. So, what about you? Are you adventurous with your music or do you stick to what you know? PS: And as far as my kids are concerned, if they could just get over listening to the same things as their mother, they might actually like some of things on my playlists…