Mar 242009
Guys, I’ll keep this brief. When I was in high school, I had no stomach for any music that involved funk, disco, or any kind of repetitive groove. And I was adamant about how bad it was. James Brown sucked. P-Funk was awful. All forms of “disco” were retarded. In short, I was a fucking idiot.
How about you? What were you most wrong about as you grew into the generous, open-minded, brilliant music aficionado you think you are today?
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
p.s.: I also remember going through a phase in junior high when I sincerely believed Ted Nugent was a better guitar player than Jimi Hendrix.
Beside acknowledging that “Communication Breakdown” and a couple of other songs from the first two Led Zep albums were kind of cool – and before the release of In Through the Out Door, the first Zeppelin album I would buy and enjoy, I thought all Led Zeppelin (even some of the songs I liked) was morally reprehensible. Freshman year in college I began to change my mind about them.
Also around that time I saw Yes in concert – in the round – and I went from disliking all their music except for the coda on “Starship Trooper” to thinking they were kind of brilliant, if not always my cup of tea for more than one or two 9-minute suites at a time.
I really hated Andy Partridge’s voice and the loopiness of XTC until I was won over by bass parts and songcraft over repeated indirect listenings. I had a similar experience with the voice and persona of Declan McManus. Imagine, two of the totems of this list! I think I changed my mind about him after my brother asked me what I thought about EC and I said he was a joke, without knowing anything at all about more than a couple of songs. I reconsidered very soon thereafter.
This stuff can come back around too, I thought REM was boring, then I was converted by late 1984, but I went off them by 1988 or so. I still like the stuff I did like then.
Oh, Hrrundi, I have hung onto my disco hate. Hate keeps a man alive. Love fades.
Yeah, we don’t want to forget that the disco phenomenon really did have a painful effect on a lot of what rock music was becoming at that time. I think that led a lot of people to reject out of hand (in a way we can now call “rockist”) a lot of brilliant and worthwhile music.
I used to think Cheap Trick was too pop.
On a related note, a friend of mine who had a period of discussing things on this list (if anyone remembers the brief participation of D Gutstein) tells a story about being on a bus in high school and trying to give shit to a black guy who was listening to some disco funk or other on his boombox.
And the guy’s response, “Yeah, and what are you gonna do? Go home and listen to some White Floyd”?
Let that be the epitaph to that age.
i love that story about white floyd!
i used to not like the all of the following bands/kinds of music before later growing into liking:
the la’s
james
the stone roses
GBV
leonard cohen
bob dylan
the brand new heavies
rap
house
techno
rock with drum machines
or keyboards
guns and roses
INXS
syd barret
thin lizzy
always loved white floyd, right from the 1st note.
thin white duke too!
Funk and disco was not my problem. I was way into JB and P-Funk. I mostly drew the line at club disco, though I remember having a Tramps best-of.
My problem has always been hard rock. I ‘outgrew’ it in approximately 1969, some time after buying the first Led Zeppelin album. Ever since then I’ve always considered it beneath me, because I can be a snooty bastard. Trashy pop is fine with me, but trashy rock is generally not. It’s not machismo I mind; it’s the fake machismo and the humorlessness.
I still find LZ morally reprehensible. I’ve come to have some grudging respect for them, but not enough to actually acquire any of their music. It’s not like it requires my support in any way. The song remains the fucking same.
I was also wrong about ZZ Top. I think I may have described previously my car radio epiphany with the song Tube Snake Boogie. El Loco is still the only album by them I ever bought, but now I know better than to judge them by their fans and what I thought they represented.
I’m miserably wrong abut everything until i hear it.
seriously. in fifth grade, i liked the monkees better than the beatles. then i heard the beatles. thus began a long series of misperceptions followed by revelations.
i hope it never ends.
Man, I hated The Stones when I was a kid. Then again, I liked much more grandiose music and didn’t think they added anything that Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry hadn’t alreadydone better. Besides, they were just sooo popular. How could they possibly be any good? Some Girls and a smelly friend with green teeth ended up changing my mind. I looked in my record box and there were more Stones albums than any other band, and I had to admit that I was apparently quite the fanboy.
I still don’t like Zeppelin. I may start trying with Lynyrd Skynyrd again, though. Freebird is atrocious, and Gimme Three Steps is hoedown music for yokels, but I hear Saturday Night Special the other day and I was really liking it. Maybe that worm is gonna turn – then what? Allman Bros and jam bands? I’m gonna make that Hank Hill noise!
I really don’t think I’m all that open minded, because I can always tell that there’s some kind of guitar that makes me like something. In the wide world of Rock I may have varied tastes, but in the actually wide world of music I pretty much just like Rock and I can look down my nose at all sorts of other stuff. I don’t have much to be a snob about, but that doesn’t seem to stop me.
I know that I used to be WAY more vehement in my pronouncements of distaste for whomever it was that I found reprehensible, though I don’t think for me it was ever really about blanketing entire genres as worthless, just specific bands or “artistes”.
I also cop to what saturn was talking about, with the prejudgment of stuff I hadn’t even heard (“Oh great. It’s another one of those _______ bands.”), this became especially true in the “grunge” years, the one probable exception to my not blanketing genres attitude. At the time, it all sounded like crappier versions of Black Sabbath-style metal, with whiny, “you don’t understand anything, mom & dad!” 15 yr old girl-angst lyrics. I was also pissed off at how they tried to align themselves with punk rock, while having no discernible ties with the ol’ DIY attitude. Plus, they all looked like hippies to me. Humorless hippies with Heartbreakers-sized heroin addictions. In retrospect, there were a handful of bands I ended up liking. There usually are.
mockcarr, Listen to a Chic’s Greatest Hits comp, & then tell me all disco sucked. The playing on those records is fucking amazing. Nile Rodgers is a Guitar God!
The playing might be good, but I bet the disconess SUCKS!
When I was a kid, because Neil Young’s songs were relatively easy to learn on guitar, I thought they weren’t that cool. Of course, that’s what makes them cool.
Here’s another one I just thought of that took me longer to rectify: I thought all “Frank Sinatra music” was crap until I was about 30 and finally started to be able to appreciate the song stylings of Tony Bennett. Around the same time I realized that an Ella Fitzgerald album I’d gotten for free years earlier was really good. Today, I’ve been known to voluntarily buy and listen to an occasional Rosemary Clooney record, a record of French equivalent artists (eg, “La Vie en Rose”), a Dean Martin collection, and the like. I still don’t own anything by Sinatra that a Townsman hasn’t burned for me.
Great answers so far. I also had similar problems with what was then called “grunge” since it became popular when I was in high school. My issue wasn’t with the groups that were basically garage/punk groups with longer hair and perhaps some flannel. I’m thinking of groups like Mudhoney, L7 (esp. the early stuff) and others of that ilk, but the more popular, commercial stuff. I thought that Alice in Chains (other than a few songs), Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were atrocious. Since then, well I now have a grudging respect for Alice in Chains, though they’re not really my cup of tea and they influenced a lot of bad music to this day. I also respect Pearl Jam for their political stances, the Ticketmaster thing, always picking good bands to open for them and thus exposing their audience to folks like Buzzcocks, Idlewild, Sleater-Kinney, The Fastbacks, etc. However, I still can’t stand their music. I’m somewhere in the middle on Soundgarden. I liked some of the stuff I heard back when they were popular, but never bought any of their records back then (and now I only have the Screaming Life/Fopp EP). Nirvana is obviously the big exception here. I wasn’t cool enough to have heard them circa Bleach, but I loved Nevermind when it came out.
Anyway my other big prejudice when I was a teenager was against anything that could be construed as “dance music” and especially any and all forms of techno. This was long before I realized that things I liked (for ex. early Jamaican ska or Motown) were, at their core, dance music and that of course there was nothing wrong with that. As for the techno/electronica thing, hearing Bjork’s first few solo albums, Portishead, Tricky’s 1st album, Massive Attack, et al. helped changed my mind. I’m still not a huge fan of electronica, but I can at least appreciate some of it now, esp. the DFA-type stuff (LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, et al.).
HVB, I’m curious as to what finally got you to turn the corner on funk if Brown and Clinton couldn’t do it. Apologies if you’ve already shared this here.
Did Massimo get you on the good foot, HVB?
I think he was on the road to righteousness by then. I was rebelling against my earlier self by that time, actually. I’m pretty sure I got him into Prince and The Jam, for what those are worth.
“This stuff can come back around too, I thought REM was boring, then I was converted by late 1984, but I went off them by 1988 or so. I still like the stuff I did like then.”
Yeah, in terms of general tastes I’m more like I was in junior high than I was 10 years ago. My answer was gonna be “I used to think punk rock was icky,” but I mostly think that again.
I remember seeing a Nixon’s Head poster in the late 80’s and thinking that it was some hardcore band. I didn’t like hardcore then (or now) and I never bothered to check them out. About 15 years later, I realized my dunderheadedness.
Talk about dunderheads, how ’bout the idiot who came up with that band’s name!
I got into an argument with a guy who insisted, insisted, that Primal Scream were in no way influenced by the Rolling Stones. Man, their whole f*cking act was the Rolling Stones.
Um, yes, I did like Disco Inferno. It was my favourite track on the SNF soundtrack. But it was a long time before I got near James Brown, Al Green, Marvin Gaye…
The Meat Puppets “Up on the Sun” made next to no impression on me one way or the other when I first heard it. I was like, “meh”.
Boy was I late to the game with that one. Took me about 4 years.
mockcarr, I believe the correct term is “discosity”, & yeah, you’d probably think Chic’s level of discosity sucks.