There’s an awful lot of awful things happening. War in Ukraine, emerging environmental catastrophe, democracy itself facing multiple threats in the era of post-truth politics. The horror of the global Covid pandemic has not gone away. We have so much on our plates. But perhaps what we really should be focusing on is why you really hate a particular band, singer or musical genre?
Why do people feel the need to share this? Why is it important to announce to the world that you don’t like Coldplay, Harry Styles, the Beatles or whoever? And not just announce it, but go on and on and on about it and actually spend time arguing with others about the relative merits of things that rather obviously come down to personal taste?
Perhaps on this I’m akin to a reformed smoker complaining about cigarette smoke. I grew up loudly denouncing any form of music I didn’t love. It felt like we all did. I was a teen in the tail end of the short-lived punk era, when it was de rigueur to slag off everything that had been before (even if punk borrowed very heavily from much of it). We hated prog rock, we hated the sixties, above all we hated disco. Anything that resembled pop was utterly derided – ABBA’s catchy tunes were an insult to the ears, and as we moved in to the 80s, that detestation would switch to Wham! and anyone else who wrote feelgood pop songs. Popular music – and much of popular TV and film – was an abomination to our sensitive souls. And not just sensitive. We were cool.
Yes, the desire to be cool, to like things that were rated by the most discerning critics, to swim against the mainstream. That is what drove so much of this attitude and still does. “I preferred their early stuff” was the stock response to anyone who became popular, because widespread popularity instantly shredded cool in our minds. We still see it today – I look at some of the album polls on indie Twitter and it feels like a competition to name the most obscure act or album. Not denigrating their choices – but listening to things no-one else does doesn’t mean you have elevated taste. It might even mean you haven’t quite shredded the teenage desire to be one of the cool kids.
None of this is to say that some music isn’t better than other music. To my mind, David Bowie is better than everyone and the Beatles’ enduring popularity is no surprise. I love a wide variety of acts that I won’t list here. I have come around over the years to good pop music (I suspect I was always pretending to hate Abba and Wham!, as who could, really?) and having a teen daughter has made me appreciate people like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who I once would not have given time of day to. There is also loads of music I don’t care for at all and lots that I actively dislike. But that’s just me; my ears, my taste, my likes and dislikes. I’ll write some more here about my likes and may even try to convince you that Bowie is untouchable, but I’m not going to spend one second trying to convince you that you shouldn’t like the music that you do.
It’s goes further than lambasting the poppiest pop, of course. The other day I saw a poll for ‘worst band ever’ that included such luminaries as Radiohead and U2. Oasis had the shortest journey from being the epitome of cool to the band it was cool to hate. I suspect their success was a bigger factor in that than their music: in their pomp they were a great band who provided a soundtrack to the mid-90s. But then what happened to them was only what they once did to the supposedly terminally uncool Phil Collins. Being hugely successful is the surest way to put a target on your back for the cool kids to aim at, or gaze disparagingly at, at least.
When I grew up about music, stopped pretending to be cool (I never was), stopped pretending to like what I should and hate what was popular – my tastes became much more eclectic and I stopped getting cross about things other people enjoyed. There are still things I’d hear and think why on earth do people like this?, but that’s fine. If I don’t like it, it’s not for me.
It would be cool – in the true sense of the word, not the try-hard one – if we could all just agree on that.
Rory writes 