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Do you really like that? Honestly?

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I listened to an album yesterday that I dig out every now and again to see whether I like it yet. I won’t tell you the name of it, but it’s my bother-in-law’s favourite album. I think it’s rubbish, just noise. I finally worked out what it sounds like though. You know when you play a song on iTunes on your laptop, but use the laptop’s own speakers, so it comes out all distorted. And then, a pop up er…pops up on a webpage you have opened and plays another song at the same time, so you are getting two distorted songs playing over the top of each other. It sounds like that. Definitely not telling you what it is though.

I see my dislike of it as my failing, as many people love it, but those that do mainly seem to be people who were into it when it came out, so I guess you had to be there. However, I’d bet that there are a lot of people who say they love it just to be cool, when they don’t really. This goes on all the time. Trout Mask Replica is just horrible. I love that it exists, but it’s just unlistenable. I really like other Captain Beefheart albums, especially Safe As Milk, but I just fail to see why so many say they like Trout Mask Replica. Again, I am sure that many people really do love the album, but I’m guessing there’s just as many who say they do when they don’t really.

Opera, there’s another one. Loads love it, but I bet there are just as many who have sat through it in torture, but pretend they like it just to keep up with the Joneses (the slightly posher than us Joneses), just like many will be pretending they like caviar.

And then there’s the beardy Hoxton types. I bet there are loads of them wishing for an end to the popularlty of real ale…sorry, craft beer they call it, so they can go back to lager! And I bet a lot of them can’t really tell the difference between CDs and vinyl, but just want to be cool. Personally, I’ve always been a real ale drinker, but rather than a beard I have the belly.

So come on, what else do you suspect that large numbers of people pretend to like just to be cool/posh/clever, when really they can’t stand or even understand it. You don’t necessarily have to come up with rubbish things, just things that attract a lot of fibbers. Although they can be rubbish things, like Morris dancing, that people pretend to like because they want to convince themselves that they live in an olde fashioned village.

It was Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, by the way. Maybe I’ll get it next time. After all, it took me ages to get into The Fall and Tom Waits. Or maybe I’m just saying I like those to be cool?

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Comments

  3. Tea. I’ve only had a few cups of tea in my life but next time you stop for one of you many daily cuppas, pause, and ask yourself if the taste is actually pleasurable.

  4. Olives, I mean come on, tough salty grapes, show me someone who says they like them I’ll show you someone whose pants are on fire. That thing where you dip bread into oil and vinegar as well. And Sheffield United…

      • Olives! Heaven! Black, preferably. But green are okay if they don’t have that little man in them. Olives, a hunk of ciabatta (sp.) bread, a cold glass of Retsina. Maybe a little fetta cheese. Tomatoes. Oh my.

    • I’ve only come across four foods I can’t eat because they’re too vile: peanut butter, marmite, beetroot and olives. The first three aren’t really a problemo here in Italy; but olives – sit down anywhere for more than five minutes and someone’ll place a bowl of them in front of you.

      • Those 4 sound, in my book, the perfect toastie: one of those Marks and Sparks olive ciabattas with peanut butter, marmite and, preferably, chilli infused beetroot.
        Num num.

      • Only just got to this thread, and it’s very weird. I love all four of those things. Three of them (Marmite being the exception) can sometimes be rubbish, of course. Cheap industrial olives out of a jar from your local Spar are not going to convert anybody.

    • I had my first olive when I found it sat in the middle of a pizza. It was the first time I’d ever had a pizza in a restaurant. I was around 17-18 years old (our culinary tastes developed at a much slower rate in the 80s than they do nowadays). Looking back, I can’t imagine how stupid I was, wondering why they had shoved a black grape on the top of my pizza, but think that I did and, liking black grapes I popped it straight in my mouth. I think it left my mouth even faster.

      Ten years or so later I had a similar experience with my first bite of a pretzel from a street vendor in New York, when I found out that it was salt covering them and not sugar. I honestly thought they were something akin to nice big biscuit.

    • Nothing wrong with olives, nothing wrong with bread / oil / vinegar and certainly nothing wrong with Sheffield United.

      My home team growing up as a youngster and I believe one of the only teams in the Football league to have a totally British / Irish playing staff.

  5. I thought it would be Loveless, but it could have been any of the extremely noisy albums like Psychocandy or the truly tuneless Metal Machine Music. I got into MBV the album before, which was more straight-ahead indie pop – albeit with bursts of noisy guitar.

    I struggle with large swathes of prog and, more recently, Father John Misty.

    I have – get me! – been to the opera. In Vienna (I was inter-railling and it was a quid). It’s rather good as a live event but I don’t listen to it much at home. I could say the same about jazz.

  6. Is it Definitely Maybe? Great songs, but it sounds horrid (really, really trebly – hence sounding like it’s coming through a laptop speaker).

    Edit- just read the bit at the end of the OP I missed. D’oh.

  7. I guessed it was Loveless, and I feel the same way. I bought it a few years ago as something I “ought” to own, but now I know you ought to own only stuff you like, life is too short.

    On the difference between CDs and vinyl, did you watch ‘Back’, the new Mitchell and Webb vehicle last night?
    “Vinyl’s making a comeback.”
    “Yeah. With c**ts”
    I laughed…

  8. I don’t hate it, but, if I’m honest, my “Trout Mask Replica” CD is really only there to ensure “Safe as Milk” and “Strictly Personal” don’t get scratched at the end of the shelf.

  10. Princess Diana – does everyone really think she was the peoples Princess? I am sure there are a few people other than me who thought she was really a self serving, troubled attention seeker who was out of her depth.

    Michael Jackson – he wasn’t a genius musician at all and Billie Jean was not the greatest record ever made. He was a narcissist who got help from fawning hangers on who propelled him into a spotlight he couldn’t handle.
    In fact the two of them were maybe cut from the same cloth.

        • Ditto Michael Jackson. Suggesting he wasn’t a supremely talented individual is just… wrong and boring. What you mean is that you don’t care for him, because his abilities aren’t a matter of opinion.

            • I wouldn’t say “equally responsible”. Producers are important, but they’re replaceable. The musicians aren’t. I often think singers get sneered at or marginalised for not playing an instrument, as if holding something is the key to creativity. 🙂

            • Unless Quincy Jones taught him to dance and sang I Want You Back for him…. no, no he wasn’t.

              I’m not even an enormous fan, but the idea that Wacko was anything less than enormously talented seems plainly daft to me.

              • Not sure I Want You Back has much to do with Jackson’s later work. He may have been talented but The Jackson 5 were a product of Motown and Michael’s best solo work was a collaboration with Quincy Jones and others. I’m not a fan but I think he relied heavily on other people for his most successful work.

                    • It strikes me as a bit like saying that George Best was talented, but Matt Busby was equally responsible for his most successful period and he did have the benefit of playing for Man Utd.

                      Which is to say: it’s overly negative and nit-picky.

                    • They have different contracts to the players. And players do get “sacked” quite often, and go to a different club 🙂

                    • I think the Best/Jacko comparison is pretty sound. The SIMH was still only 22 by the time he’d one 99% of his best work – the same age George was when he scored in the European Cup final – so it’s hardly surprising that other, more senior figures, had an important role in their success. Football is self-evidently a team endeavour, but individual genius is also pretty obvious. Few would dispute that Paul Gascoigne was the most naturally gifted English player of the last 30 years, but there’s more to success than being gifted.
                      Jacko, like Elvis, Sinatra and Beyoncé, was principally a singer and, as such, some credit for the quality of his body of work, which was collaborative, must be shared. Is it fair to go so far as to say he “relied heavily” on others? Unless you’re a one man band like Prince it seems to me that charge could be made against most musicians and it’s rare enough that it is indisputably true (Frankie Goes To Hollywood, perhaps?) or irrefutably false when the merit attached to any artist’s work is so subjective…

                    • It just seems churlish to me.

                      Whether you like his music or not, Michael Jackson was a superstar pretty much from childhood, released the best selling album of all time, completely redefined the concept of what a pop star was, and laid down a blueprint that is still much-copied to this day.

                      To respond to the question of whether he was talented with “he relied heavily on others”, or “Quincy Jones was equally responsible” strikes me as willfully missing the point, even if you can make a literal argument for the statement. As you point out, there’s nobody who sold hundreds of millions of albums and changed the culture who didn’t rely heavily on others, and who didn’t in some way stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s simply part of the nature of being a cultural beast of that size.

                      You can dislike Jackson, you can think his music is pony. But he was clearly extremely talented, and it’s not much of a concession to admit as much.

                      OOAA

                • I like his singing, and think some of the songs he wrote himself were pretty good – I’m no judge of dancing so I can’t comment on that, but I do wonder if his main talent was as an impresario. For example, the video of Thriller was probably when the new Michael Jackson emerged, making pop music into a visual spectacle as much as a record. The song was by Rod Temperton, the music production by Quincy Jones, and the video directed by John Landis. But from what I know, Michael Jackson was the one who brought these people together and guided their work. He had the ideas which made this video a template which a lot of people are still working to today. It may not be to everybody’s taste, but that’s a big achievement.

              • Templeman, eh?
                Divides his time between his studio in Birmingham where he composes disco smasheroos and driving around London in a white jag (reg ST 1) fighting crime before ending the evening drinking champagne from a slipper when he comes home with a stripper..

                  • Well I didn’t really think Jeffrey Daniels (right name IIRC?) was the first ever but his performance was a sensation at the time and the first experience of body popping street dance for many. MJ ripped off much of the dance soon after. It was in a thing on TV with all knowing talking heads (Terry Christian, Gambo and the like) so it must be true.

                    • I think you’ll find that your precious Shalamar ripped off Bill Bailey.

                      Talent borrows, genius steals.And Shalamar was a genius.

            • “Singer – maybe?” seems a bit harsh. Although, I suppose, opinions on Sinatra vary from immaculately phrasing/best evs! all the way down. I do think it’s true that – like quite a few others – MJ’s best vocal performances stopped some time before he stopped making records.
              In terms of singing, his greatest achievement was that, like Elvis (and possibly more so), he became the most famous person in the world through being a singer..

            • A singer is a musician.

              He only wrote some of the biggest-selling and – yes – iconic songs ever recorded. What a LOSER of a songwriter.

              (It’s interesting to see the attitudes to dancing, as if there’s something “less” about it.)

              • Oh and the honest answer to your question is “no”. 🙂 The statement “Michael Jackson was extremely talented” isn’t an opinion. There’s nothing to disagree with. And apart from the Steve Hoffman forum, I suspect this is the only place in the world where the question could even be asked.

                I’m not saying you have to like him, but it’s a bit like saying Picasso wasn’t a supremely talented painter. Of course he bloody was. You just don’t like his paintings.

    • The Daily Express were wetting themselves last week.
      They finally had a “proper” reason to publish her picture on the front page.
      (Expect the return of Madeline McCann any time soon)

    • The Princess Diana thing does my head in. Didn’t the first edition of that Sunday’s papers have stories slagging her off for jetsetting round the world with her latest fancy man? All this nonsense about her being such a good mother to her boys, when she hadn’t seen her boys for one month before she died, not because she was busy with one of her charities, but because she was out living it up. Now she’s some sort of saint.

      And as for Jackson. It’s a good job that he continues to make some powerful people lots of money and a good job a good chunk of that money has been used to pay people off, because otherwise you can’t help thinking about Jimmy Savile.

        • And the idea that powerful people are paying people off to keep quiet about what he did with his dick is almost certainly nonsense. Secrets like that, about the dead, don’t keep.

            • I think that’s possibly true. It’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing illegal about that unless he actually abused young boys or viewed child porn.

              I think he was an emotionally stunted man-child and his sexuality was probably pretty knackered. But the likes of Macaulay Cullen, who after all is independently wealthy and has no particular reason to lie, say that Jackson never laid a finger on him. By that account the bloke was just deeply, deeply weird.

              I’m also just going to say the names Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and John Peel here. Apropos of nothing at all.

            • If Michael Jackson had played guitar in a turgid 70s rock group we’d have had a least a couple of “they were different times” and “nothing was ever proved” posts here.

              It’s almost as if people whose music we like get the benefit of the doubt, and people whose music we don’t are automatically guilty.

              • Yes, this does my head in. How Pete Townshend and John Peel seem to have escaped public scorn is beyond me.

                But with Jackson I believe it is on record that families have been paid off (with many more that are not on public record, by all accounts) and, if (persistent) rumours are to be believed, a few former child actors, who subsequently went off the rails, are continuing to be paid. If nothing else, he was genuinely weird and creepy in his last decade, has admitted both plying boys with alcohol and sharing the bed with them. This, with the pay-offs, seems strong enough for me to think it’s all a little sordid. I would guess that if it came out that a seventies DJ or a member of a naff 70s or 80s pop group had done all that he would be hung out to dry. Personally, I think he’s America’s Jimmy Savile, except that rather than preying on vulnerable kids he was lucky enough to live in a country where megastardom meant people were happy to send their little boys off to stay with him.

                • I’m not going to defend Jackson’s behaviour. I have no idea whether he was guilty or not, but there’s obviously a shed load of smoke.

                  What I will say is the following:

                  1. The frequent use of “pay offs” on this thread is misleading. These were legal settlements, and they don’t automatically infer guilt. You’re correct that the US is gentle on its superstars, but it’s also a litigious society in which it’s not completely impossible to rule out claimants looking to make a quick buck. At least one of the kids in respect of whom a settlement was paid subsequently said his family put him up to it. This element makes it hard to be absolutely certain what happened.

                  2. The Jimmy Savile comparison is hyperbolic and distasteful. Savile violently raped children as young as eight, had sex with corpses and abused the sick and dying. This statement would be actionable if Jackson was still alive.

                  3. I think you’re entirely incorrect about the naff 70s pop group. To give but one example, I’ve lost track of the amount of times over the years that I’ve seen magazines like Q chucklinglg, almost admiringly, report that Steven Tyler of Aerosmith once convinced the parents of his 14 year old girlfriend to all him to adopt her. The man has most certainly not been hung out to dry, and if anything the story appears to have added to his reputation in rock fan quarters.

      • Thats why MJ was going to do his run of )2 gigs: he was skint form pay-offs otherwise. The details from the Police investigations in his home are beyond damning.

        • Must be different ones from these? I wasn’t aware the police raided his home in response to further allegations.

          “The Chandlers’ lawyer Mr. Feldman explicitly stated “nobody bought anybody’s silence”.[99] Bribery to not testify in a trial is a felony according to California Penal Code 138.[100] Receiving such a bribe is also a felony according to this law.[100] District Attorney Gil Garcetti stated the settlement didn’t affect criminal prosecution of the molestation allegations, “The criminal investigation of singer Michael Jackson is ongoing and will not be affected by the announcement of the civil case settlement.”[101]

          Jordan Chandler was interviewed after the settlement by detectives seeking evidence of child molestation, but “no criminal charges were filed as a result of that interview.”[102] A Santa Barbara County grand jury disbanded on May 2, 1994, without indicting Jackson, while a Los Angeles County grand jury continued to investigate the sexual abuse allegations.[103][104] After which time the Chandlers stopped co-operating with the criminal investigation around July 6, 1994.[105] The police never pressed criminal charges.[94] Citing a lack of evidence without Jordan’s testimony, the state closed its investigation on September 22, 1994.[68][106] According to the grand juries, the evidence presented by the Santa Barbara police and the LAPD was not convincing enough to indict Jackson or subpoena him,[68][103] even though grand juries can indict the accused purely on hearsay evidence. According to a 1994 report by Variety, a source in contact with the grand juries stated, “none of the witnesses so far have offered anything that would directly implicate the singer.” According to a report in 1994 by Showbiz Today, one of the 1994 grand jurors claimed they “did not hear any damaging testimony” during the hearings.”

          • Police raided his home in 2003. I agree that MJ is in the same ballpark as Page, Townshend, Wyman etc. – I wouldn’t employ any of them as a baby-sitter – although thanks to his plastic surgery and ostentatious behaviour he came across as considerably weirder. But I don’t agree that there is any correlation between how he’s perceived as a person and his chosen musical genre (I generally prefer his music to Page, Townshend and Wyman’s).

            http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/michael-jackson-photos-naked-children-pornography-neverland-ranch-police-records-leak-abuse-a7094876.html

            • Jesus, the source there is some scurrilous gossip website! It’s like crediting the National Enquirer. The Indy there, showing the integrity that kept Johann Hari in a job.

              I *100%* think that on this site for sure, a 70s rock musician is always going to get a benefit of the doubt which wouldn’t be extended to the likes of Michael Jackson. 100%.

              I don’t even hold a particular brief for Jackson as a person. I like his music a lot, and think he was a fuckup who may have done some bad shit. But jeez.

              • John Lennon was a pathetic junkie who hit women. You wouldn’t want him babysitting either. It doesn’t stop the hero worship on here (nor should it).
                If you’ve any sense, your relationship is with the work, not the artist.

                It does strike me as a bit weak when (as has happened in the past) people defend, say, Jimmy Page (love his music, clearly a world class asshole at certain stages in his life) on the basis that he was basically the victim of predatory 13 year old girls.

                Half the Afterword’s heroes spent the 60s and 70s banging barely pubescent groupies. Let’s not pretend it’s a hanging offence round here.

                • Page (or Bowie, or anyone else around that sleazy environment) was indeed not the ‘victim’ of anyone. They were the alleged adults in those particular conflagrations, they were legally responsible for their actions. Undoubtedly the girl in question, Lori Maddox, was a willing participant, but she was still under the age of consent, however you want to paint it, and therefore the responsibility was on the ‘adults’ to manage that situation appropriately, however difficult and whatever the caveats. Page in particular did precisely the opposite, and indeed exacerbated the abuse.

                    • Yeah, I realise that. I misread your intent at first and started a ‘not having that’ riposte, but revised it and added an ‘indeed’ to indicate my agreement with you. I think it was worth emphasising your rebuttal of the ‘victim’ angle, though. 🙂

                • It’s a complex moral stance you have there, Mr Little. You insist the relationship should be with the art, not the artist, but personally, you clearly know a lot about the lives of musicians and have very strong moral options on them, and equally strong views on people who don’t agree with those opinions, Wouldn’t the logical conclusion, for you anyway, to completely ignore all of this gossip and just listen to the music?

                  I think very few people can totally separate the art from the artist – if it turned out that say, J K Rowling, was a bad mother in some way, wouldn’t if affect how a lot of people saw her books? I have absolutely no reason to believe this is true, by the way – I don’t even know if she has children. In the case of writers, I’d certainly hold to only having a relationship to the art, simply because writers, with a few exceptions, don’t do anything of interest apart from write, and that’s all in the books.

                  • It’s a very simple position – simply listening to the music is precisely what I’m advocating.

                    To give but one example, as noted on another thread, I’ve spent a lot of time recently enjoying the music of New York rapper Bobby Shmurdah. He’s currently in prison for attempted murder.

                    I have knowledge of this fact, I think he sounds a fairly contemptible human being. However, per my initial post, my relationship isn’t with him, it’s with the music.

                    The entire thrust of my argument is that people tie themselves in knots, particularly in this community, attempting to defend the indefensible because they’ve confused loving a piece of music with loving the human being who produced it.

                    • But knowing about the artist, even if they’re far from being good role models, sometimes enhances the art, becoming a fundamental aspect of one’s relationship with it. Van Gogh would be a good example of that. Arthur Rimbaud. Jim Carroll.

                    • But you clearly have some interest in this side of things. I have genuinely never heard of any allegations about John Lennon beating up women, and I’ve read a number of articles about him and the Beatles. I guess you’re a bigger fan of his work than I am, and your interest in his music has led to an interest in his life ( and some disappointment with it). I don’t think there’s anything wrong in that, it’s quite common as the biography thread show. It just seems inconsistent with your views about only listening to the music.

                    • I didn’t say “only” listen to the music.

                      I’m not proposing we stick our heads in the sand and avoid finding out about the lives of artists. I’m not sure that’s a realistic possibility in this day and age.

                      I’m proposing that their lives don’t ultimately matter that much. There are tons of musicians I listen to who I would actively cross the road to avoid, it’s no biggie.

                      As for John Lennon, you’re quite right – knowing anything about his personal life must of course mean I’m an enormous fan.

                    • My finely tuned emotional intelligence has detected just a hint, no more than a soupcon, of irony. Which means that you as a non-fan of John Lennon, actually know more about his private life than me, and I thought what he did with the Beatles was great, and some of his solo work was pretty good.

                      I have to admit, though, that while I think it’s natural for admirers of someone’s work to be interested in their lives, and often link it to that work, and you’re not keen on this approach, in reality, I’m not that interested in the gossipy side of the lives of artists of any kind, and struggle to get through biographies because of the amount of chit-chat about affairs and so on. In theory, I disagree with you, in practice I’d agree, and listen to lots of music without knowing anything about the artists. I’ve listened to Steely Dan on and off for about 30 years quite happily and only really found out anything about Walter Becker when he died.

                    • David, based on your own logic, all the people on this thread who’ve slagged off Michael Jackson on the basis of his private life must also be secret fans.

                      Clearly, it doesn’t work that way.

                    • I know I’m flogging this one to death, but I don’t agree.

                      The allegations against Michael Jackson went to court, and brought others to light. They were all over the media at the time, and still linger on. I think if I asked anybody I know over the age of about 18 even now if they had heard any scandal about Michael Jackson, it would be these allegations. They might not be clear on the details, and take different views on them, but they would know the story. And they wouldn’t have to be interested in his music.

                      The allegations against John Lennon of violence against women never came into the public eye during his lifetime, as far as I know, and I was 19 when he died, and remain obscure except to people who read a lot about musicians. And to me. I think if I asked anybody for any scandal about John Lennon, it would be that he left his wife for Yoko One, and the vague idea that he took drugs and got a bit weird, but probably not that he was an addict for a time.

                      Perhaps you have absorbed more knowledge about things you’re not interested by a sort of media osmosis, in the same way that I think I know nothing about football, but mysteriously know who Dele Alli is.

  11. It took me 25 years to get “Trout mask replica”. I found working backwards to it helped. The cap’n had a great blues voice, some of the tracks are in the dirty blues style I like, and he had an artistic sensibility once you hear it. I listen to it a bit like I would look at a Picasso – grotesque but undoubtedly effective. Other stuff by him is more listener friendly. I’d rather him than most “drilling and vomiting” music and the tuneless avant-indie things I struggled for years to like. Not a fan of anything they play on radio 1 these days. R2 is more enjoyable, though now has insufficient “Cliff Adams Singers” for my liking.

  12. The funny thing about Opera is how banal the lyrics are in translation. It’s stuff like ‘I’m disappointed, as the fairy princess has just left…using the door to do so.’

    • When I go to the opera (as I do a couple of times a year) I try to avoid reading the English surtitles which are projected above the stage at the Royal Opera House among others. I can never manage it though, which is a shame because not only are the libretti banal but the plots rarely rise above the level of pantomime. ‘An evil king tries to prevent his beautiful daughter marrying the stranger who actually a prince in disguise’, that sort of thing. The ENO at the Colisseum is even worse, because they have a policy of singing all opera in English translation. Guys, I really don’t think the lyrics are what carry these shows.

  13. AC/DC. Unfathomably huge and have been for most of my life. They were vaguely amusing when they arrived here and were fronted by Bon Scott, but their post-Bon massive success completely mystifies me. A few basic riffs overwhelmed by a truly horrible voice delivering infantile lyrics. And then there’s the schoolboy gimmick…. The Krankies from Hell.

    Coldplay. A bit obvious, but banal “anthems” consistently sung at the limit of Chris Martin’s range. Unbearable! (Maybe I have perfect pitch).

    Above all: the Rolling Stones. Does no-one – except me – care that Jagger’s American accent is beyond ridiculous and has been a parody since the early 70s? Hasn’t anyone else noticed?

    I’m not too keen on tea either…

    • I care.
      However, it was entirely calculated on Mick’s part, he saw EXACTLY which way the wind was blowing, so he put the cue on the rack and started counting the money.
      He’s still counting, there’s a lot to count.

      The trick is to not listen to any Rolling Stones stuff recorded since he made that decision.

  15. Metal. In any form you care to mention at all.
    A well-trodden rutted dead-end off music’s road, in my opinion.
    All those screechy vocals and the widdly-widdly guitar-string bending. I just can’t see the attraction and I never have.
    Hearing it won’t make me Run To The Hills, but more than a side of it at a time might well make me start strolling towards them.

  16. I like my Real ales, but overly citrusy or hoppy IPAs are a real turnoff. And Fruit Beers? Why, for fuck’s sake? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

    Next item: Craft Gins. Are we now at a tipping point with these? All these little distillers mixing up their botanicals, adding them to raw spirit and putting them in funny-looking bottles. Basically a load of amateur chemists are performing experiments on us. And I note that now we are pretty much at Peak Gin, Rum is making a resurgence. All those trendy entrepreneurs who missed out on Gin are going for their own Rums instead.

  17. Musicals and Disney Songs.
    Both make me shiver.
    Many people like them (Mrs D for one), but if I hear “I Dreamed A Dream” or “Let It Go” one more time, I may not be responsible for my actions

    • Aah … there I make an exception

      (My ringing dis-endorsement of all things animated fails ever so slightly)

      Ooh … and The Aristocats – there’s another exception to the rule

      • Feels like this has gone off the rails from “I honestly can’t believe anyone likes that and I cannot objectively imagine why another person would” to “I don’t like that”. Which is kinda less interesting, right?

        I honestly cannot see the appeal of Steely Dan, for example. Sour, noodly, horribly slick: it sounds like music by unpleasant people who have no interest in their listeners’ enjoyment (rather than most of the best pop music, which is music *actually* by unpleasant people but sounds like they’re trying to give you the best night of your life). I can hear there’s a ton of ability at work in SD’s music; it’s just so viscerally unpleasant to my ears that I can’t begin to imagine what anyone could possibly hear in them.

        So I move that it’s crackers to include things like Michael Jackson, because even from the deepest wholemeal guitar-lined nod-bunker, it’s surely no mystery why others like him, no? He sounds like a great time: he sounds like joy, like the dancefloor. People, and lots of them, like joy, and dancefloors, so they like him.

  19. I actually enjoy listening to Trout Mask Replica.

    The mood and the moment are crucial. Sadly, it’s a solitary activity. I haven’t found anyone willing to participate with me, at least, not without exchanging money. I like to set a date, a time and a place in advance, so my excited anticipation can enhance the experience. Then, I strap myself in and oooooh it feels good.

    • Never fails to wind the GLW up….

      ‘What IS this you’re listening to..?’
      ‘Captain Beefheart – he was a genius….we’ve had this conversation before.’
      *Hurrumph noise*…then muttering….

      • Never really did get this Trout Mask Replica as radical shock to the average listener stuff. It’s just a growly white-guys blues album with some gnarly guitar lines and a ramshackle feel, isn’t it. Not The Rite Of Spring, is it? Or White Light/White Heat.

    • My recommendation as regards listening to Trout Mask Replica is as follows.

      1. Listen to “Barbed Wire maggots” by Borbetomagus on YouTube (see below). Believe me, you won’t get through the whole 21 minutes.

      2. Then put on Trout Mask Replica. You’ll find that in comparison, it’s a nice tuneful listen. Voilà!

  22. Musical theatre: urgh, cringe-orama. Musical movies though, are more than fine. Funny that.

    As for Morris dancing, well, I like it. One of my sisters belongs to a couple of Morris sides. Not the bells and hankies sort though, but the scary masks and massive sticks type. In fact she met her new fella that way; they got married a couple of weeks ago. At Folk East.

  24. I don’t think you can necessarily get why someone likes something you don’t. You might have an idea or theory but that could well be wrong – you can’t get in their head. There’s much I don’t get but tastes can be acquired. Rather than say ‘go on impress me’ or ‘that’s just awful, people must be pretending to like it’, I think, well there could be something there, it might click with me one day. Never say never. Why close things down you can keep open? I know that I have come round to acts and records I once found unlistenable. I changed, my tastes got broader, less prejudiced. Steely Dan is one such case. I heard only a smart, smoothness. A kind of bland, middle of the road, soft rock. Do It Again being praised by DLT and the like. Understandably off putting. Now I hear beautiful melody, emotions like melancholic regret and world-weariness, droll humour, lyrics that are like snippets of movies or great American novels and great playing – not for some show-off purpose but as an elegant solution for the problem of what fits best in that space in the song. There’s admiration for a beautifully constructed work of art.

    • I agree, Diddley. As a youngster, the SD I knew from the radio didn’t impress me at all.
      A bit irritating, not beefy ( which is what I liked at the time) & with whiney vocals.
      Over time, more & more folk I respect (including D Baker Esq) insisted on their genius so I got a best of & intially wished I hadn’t- but gradually through trying to work out what the hell the songs were about, the hook got in & I’m a devotee.
      I know exactly what is is that people DON’T like about them as they are very atypical in terms of my taste. I don’t like anybody that I’ve had recommended on the basis of liking them. It’s just them in their own bracket.
      Also the fact the smooth veneer masks super dark subject matter just adds to the appeal for me & reinforces the notion of ‘getting’ or ‘not getting’ them.

  26. We were out last night for my son’s birthday, and we agreed two things about lagers…
    1. Peroni is for pretentious blokes who think they are being oh so sophisticated….it’s tasteless fizzy rubbish in a really nice glass.
    2. Carling is equally fizzy rubbish, but has no such pretentious redeeming features AT ALL! You really feel like having a word when you see a crate of it in someone’s supermarket trolley…and that word is ‘why?’….

  27. Fascinating that Peroni can have such different profiles. Here’s the ad which is so up market you can even watch the Director’s Cut!

    I can’t see this appealing to the sturdy working lads that Gary mentioned.

    https://youtu.be/A0L_XtB2TGc

    Imagine a Cornish pasty, mushy peas or fish fingers being marketed overseas as the height of sophistication!

    In Russia, MacDonald’s is seen as up market, chic and cosmopolitan.

    • It’s lobster all over again, innit? Used to be regarded as utter sh*t only fit for unwashed scum – along comes a good agent and boom! it’s the wallet-emptying ne plus ultra marine food experience..

      • Like the old Stella ads, making out it is top drawer, as opposed to the piss even Belgians reject and promote elsewhere.
        And Fosters, whilst maybe not or ever deemed posh, certainly ain’t something most aussies would give a 4XXXX for. (Or that)

        • I was working with a Belgian guy recently. He was going in to a local pub at night to pass the hours when he wasn’t at work. He came in to work one day and said “Stella Artois actually tastes quite nice in the UK”

  28. Pere Ubu – The Modern Dance. I got it long ago when you had to take a chance on a record cos you liked the name or thought it sounded cool. Listened to it a few times in a desperate attempt to justify my £3.99 or whatever it was. Truly could not understand why someone would want to listen to it for pleasure. I still have it and may try to listen to it again, just to see if my opinion of it has changed

  29. Olives (slight return)
    A friend brought some olives round once, he’d been given them by a friend who professed he didn’t like olives but loved these.
    We tried them,all the olive taste had gone to be replaced with the taste of lavender.
    Chewing away my thought was how can I explain that I think this is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten.
    “What do you think?” Asked my chum
    “Well!”
    “We think they’re bloody awful, we just wanted to see what you think”
    So to all the olive haters try lavender flavoured olives, (even worse than they sound)

  30. I love olives, as I said, but they have chocolate coated ones in the posh section, at Morrisons, which, even in Lichfield, is very small, barely one shelf. They are disgusting.

  32. I don’t understand why anybody finds Laurel and Hardy funny. They just make me impatient – two stupid people irritating each other and overacting their reaction shots in heavily laboured scenes. The setups and the slapstick might be cleverly developed, but the humour is so obvious, so lame, it’s slouching towards you slowly from the horizon with big Dylanesque sheets in turn reading “Get ready to laugh. “Any minute now”. “It’s coming” “Hold On” “Bear with me”, while you wait, knowing what will come, watching your life tick away.

    And when it arrives, the joke is so faint, it disappears in a hot stale breath of dust.

    I would walk quickly away if I saw them coming.

      • I agree it’s a shame.
        The joy of Stan & Ollie is that they’re eternal & the settings are essentially incidental. They are life’s perpetual tryers, & we know from the outset that they will almost certainly fail in their endeavour, but will return again to have another go in the next short. They are idiots, but so are we, & most of their balls-ups are ones we’ve suffered ourselves to some degree, or narrowly avoided.
        The fact we know what’s coming doesn’t detract from the humour, but rather adds to it. As any audience of a great humourist acknowledges, it’s not so much the joke as how the joke is told.
        They are masters & we are so lucky that their art was caught on film.
        OOAA.

        • I don’t find them funny in a similar way to not finding Fawlty Towers funny. Underneath any superficial ‘comedy’ are characters and situations that are trapped, claustrophobic and bleak. The difference between them, though, is that I feel sympathy for the poor sods stuck with each other on the Torquay riviera. Laurel and Hardy are just objectionable dullards.

      • I’m not a big fan of those either, to be honest, @minibreakfast. Ha ha, he hit him. Oh, my aching sides, he got run over by a truck. Sedate me please, that elaborate trap to catch the mouse/bird failed and trapped him instead.

        Tweetie Pie, Jerry and Roadrunner are arrogant little irritants, who deserve to die. I found Dumb and Dumber painfully unfunny and dull as well, I guess I just don’t understand the joy of slapstick or enjoy laughing at idiots. Give me verbal comedy over physical comedy every time. Apart from ‘The Plank’. I’ll make an exception for that.

        Interestingly, when I reflect on Tom and Jerry (and Tweetie Pie and Sylvester), that has a similar schtick to Laurel and Hardy of two boys playing tricks on and hitting each other, and being terrified of women.

          • Comedy purgatory, with the possible exception of Itchy & Scratchy because it turned T&J Up to eleventy-stupid and was funny because the latter wasn’t, and Bottom, where it sometimes looked like they were in actual pain. Does this make me a sadist?

        • But you do get, @salwarpe, that other people genuinely find that funny, regardless of how unfunny it is to you? If you were to list your top 5 comedy films (and all we AWers have such a list permanently in our heads in case an emergency situation calls for it, don’t we?) then I’m sure I’d be able to tell you in all honesty that I don’t find that one remotely amusing.

          The OP’s interesting angle was where you think that, for a lot of other people, there’s some other reason they’re professing to like something. I was at a comedy gig years ago seeing Simon Fanshawe, and the rapturous hilarity from the crowd which greeted most of his jokes would make you think he was the Comedy Messiah. And I sat there stoney-faced, wondering how much the reaction was due to his painfully right-on stance, and how much was because people genuinely thought that his line about how 1980s high court judges went straight from Cynthia Payne’s house to lock up anyone with an Irish accent.

          • I saw Fanshawe once and he was dreadful. He wasn’t getting enormous laughs, and then went to the audience, picking on a friend of mine who hadn’t heckled and was at least smiling. My friend is resilient enough to cope – he couldn’t have cared less – and this really riled Fanshawe. He basically lost it and seemed to cut things short to a lukewarm round of applause.

            • For the whole of these two posts, I was picturing Simon Farnaby and was a bit sad that the HHH wasn’t very good, or nice. Luckily, he’s not the same person as Simon Fanshawe, which is deducible from the fact that he’s got a different name.

          • I should reply to this, @Douglas – just been a bit busy with family matters today. Maybe it was becoming a father that stopped me finding anything funny any more. Apart from painful dad jokes, which I love. @Rigid-Digit does a good trade in those, btw.

            I suppose if people laugh when they watch Laurel and Hardy, it would be hard to claim they don’t genuinely find them funny. Such an unforced reaction would be hard to induce. I just find it as puzzling to understand what they’re enjoying as Paul in the OP does about Loveless lovers. It’s like I’m from a different species (or Germany, where I’m now living).

            Funnily enough (ha ha ha), I saw Simon Fanshawe in the late eighties on a university tour. He started his routine by saying he came from “Brighton, or ‘Be right on’, as everyone knows it”. I quite liked such wry self-deprecation, and went on to enjoy his somewhat Sub-Wildean dry bon mots. Mind you, I was singing alto in the choir he was preaching to, I must admit.

            I didn’t have a list of to 5 comedy films ready (I know, I’m really letting the side down). I rarely get to the cinema (once every 5 years, I’d say), and then don’t choose comedies to see. But looking through various internet lists, I came up with the following that I remember making me laugh, in reverse alphabetical order. Make it that what you will.

            Raising Arizona
            Planes,Trains & Automobiles
            Harold and Maude
            Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
            Airplane

  33. Led Zeppelin’s later albums after Physical Graffiti.

    Bar a couple of songs I never play “Presence”. And let’s be totally honest with ourselves, I mean totally honest with ourselves: “In Through the Out Door” is absolute crap. The band had lost the plot by then.

    There I said it.

  34. As much fun as it is to skewer Things We Don’t Like, I’m more interested in the OP idea of things where we strongly suspect others are faking their enthusiasm. I have zero time for Coldplay and Dylan, for instance, but I can see why others have a different opinion.

    Here are some things where I think many people’s genuine opinion is overtaken by the apparent coolness of admiring it:

    – Bill Hicks. I don’t doubt his trailblazing approach, but to my ears he’s just embarrassingly unfunny, because he’s all about the political stance and forgetting about the … you know … comedy.
    – Premiership football. It’s a soap opera, and English players on the international stage don’t operate on the level implied by their salaries. Are you really enjoying the “sport”, is it really as good as league footie on the continent? Or is it just to give you something to talk about with male relatives and the guys at work.
    – power electronics (Whitehouse etc) – I like non-musical music but isn’t this just an endurance test, to show off your macho “credentials”?

    OOAA, no doubt!

    • I share your view of Premiership football. I’ve long suspected that its widespread fandom is, like religion, largely the result of childhood indoctrination.

      • It’s a very handy way of communicating on a purely superficial level with other people.
        Except for the few who profess to dislike the game, male-stranger gatherings proceed a lot more smoothly once the subject of Football is broached.
        Whether the parties agree on who they support or not, or on the fairness of recent or historic refereeing decisions etc., there is a topic for conversation, or “bants” that substitute for actual conversation.
        You are safe, in that you don’t have to reveal anything about yourself at all in a football conversation.

        • Ahem. No “profess” about it. Some of us really don’t like football. I don’t even dislike it: it’s just nothing. I couldn’t name you a currently active footballer.

          I know you weren’t saying anything like this at all, so bear with me, but I was just reminded of how strange it is when people think you’re making your likes/dislikes up. I’ve had people assume my total blank indifference to football must be a pose. There’s at least one person on here who thinks anyone professing to dislike guitar solos must be striking a pose too, let alone anyone who likes hip hop or 21st Century chart pop. It’s hilarious, really. There’s a real tendency for people to assume their passions are, like, the default. I like it, so you MUST do! And if you say you don’t, you’re clearly posing. (Posing as what, we’re not entirely clear. But posing is what you must be doing.)

        • You’re quite @Mike_H about the topic of football smoothing all-male gatherings, although here in the West of Scotland it’s a considerably more delicate situation. It’s interesting how the youngish guys I work with, all from the Glasgow area, will happily talk (and apparently knowledgeably, to my ignorant ears) about the English Premiership and never about the Scottish league.

          But it still comes down to the OP: pretending to like something for the sake of other people. Quite an indictment of a huge section of the male population that we frequently can’t find anything else to talk about. If Im in that situation I just get profoundly bored and wait patiently, hoping that the conversation will turn to pretty much anything else, something I can genuinely express interest and/or an opinion on: politics, religion, the best road to drive to get from X to Y … you know, the safe uncontroversial stuff.

          • As a football avoidist, I was surprised to see in the bar of the Tigh-na-Mara in Sandhead a big sign advertising they show all the Premier League (England) games on the bar TV. With a big team like Stranraer just down the road too!!

    • Fab, that’s what I was getting at.

      The obvious one is people in Ramones t-shirts, as that bloke off Soccer AM found out. Although Batman t-shirts have taken over nowadayd.

      Another one is mega hot curries. Does everybody who eats them (or say they eat them) actually enjoy eating them or do they just enjoy finishing them because they can. Would they, for instance, make themselves a stupidly hot curry if they were going to eat it at home, alone, and not tell anybody? I get that people like spicy food, but the stupidly hot ones seem to be nothing more than a badge of courage to show off in front of your mates. I bet there are loads of people eating them who would actually prefer a chicken korma.

      I’ve got a mate who jumped on every retro musical bandwagon there was. You know what I mean, the old or dead singer that suddenly becomes popular again – Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, Johnny Cash, Brian Wilson (if I hear one more person describe Wilson as a genius I will scream. If he is such a genius how come he only made one great album? And another thing, Barry ruddy Gibb seems to be stealing the “genius” tag off Wilson at the moment. Strewth!), etc. I do love teasing people like that though, like Martin Freeman did.

      Me and another mate were at a jukebox once and he came over and saw a Johnny Cash album as we were flicking through. He started getting excited and said to put one of his songs on because he “loves” Johnny Cash. I asked him which is he best track to put on, for it was a compilation that didn’t have his few instantly recognisable songs on it. My mate stuttered for a while and said, “er, track 11”, so I asked him how it went. Soon shut him up.

    • You’re bailout elsewhere right about the premier league. I have ates who can tell you the details of the transfer market and rumours of managerial futures with the passion of an EastEnders fanatic following Den and Angie’s marriage*. They would be appalled if you told them they were really watching a. Soap opera, so I hold my tongue, even though they are.

      * Last time I followed it. I suspect this reference may not be up to date.

  35. Not quite what you’re after, but I’m always a bit baffled by the critical esteem in which the Pet Shop Boys are held.
    They’re ok – few hummable tracks, but that’s about it, surely …

    • Tea is the default beverage of civilised people everywhere.
      Coffee is essentially for maniacs. It has its uses but it’s disturbing to see how many people are permanently revved up on it.
      I feel it should be used sparingly & essentially like a substitute for speed ( generally considered not very healthy) – if you need a hit, brew up some f*ck off coffee & slurp it quick – it’s only purpose is the buzz, the taste is almost irrelevant.
      Tea on the other hand is nature’s bounty & indespensible.

    • I agree with Moose and Jim here – good one, I’d forgotten about coffee and was sure there was another topic where I’m very suspicious how keen some people are about it.

      Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy coffee – but the whole coffee shop / Frasier / Noo Yoik elevation of this simple beverage, to be almost a cult, is just weird. “Half Java, half Sumatra, with steamed soy milk and a shot of guava syrup” etc.

      • I REALLY love coffee and am fairly fussy about it, but milk/sugar in coffee is for people who don’t like coffee. Black filter, or espresso, or nothing. So there. 😉

        Oddly, given Jim’s confident divide and conquer post above, I adore both coffee and tea and could live without neither. I don’t seem to be super sensitive to caffeine and so the idea that coffee is like some kind of speed doesn’t compute at all for me. I can have two double espressos before bed and sleep like a log. I just love the stuff, because it tastes wonderful.

        • A bit like dancing, coffee comes in for some stick from certain sections of the population. Like it or not, cappuccino and latte macchiato are pieces of beautiful design that exist apart from what they originally are derived from. People like them, because they taste ace. There’s nothing at all wrong with that.

        • Tea drinking, egg munching oddball you may , but your serving suggestion for coffee is unarguable, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool and a liar.

        • Well Bob, I s’pose my stance is essentially that I could happily forego Coffee for the rest of my days, but Tea drinking is so ingrained that a day without is unthinkable. Some cups of tea have been borderline excstatic – taste, a sense of well being etc. whereas I honestly can’t tell the difference between top notch coffee & shite coffee ( & I suspect that goes for a large slice of the populace) unless it is actually monstrously stewed. Until recently, I’ve also considered myself immune to the coffee ‘ hit’. About a year back, a work mate made me an espresso with his Aeropress device of Death Wish coffee ( which claims to be the world’s strongest) – this was about 11.30 am – back home about 5pm I was still buzzing & had to revise my view on the bean. I now have a stash of jitter-inducing roast at home that I save for those ‘gotta go out, feeling knackered, need a 2nd wind’ moments. It certainly works, but I’ve still failed to appreciate why anyone would bother with anything milder or just for the taste.
          As far as I know, nobody has yet succeeded in making drinkable tea that comes from a machine, but there are millions of coffee machines in millions office vestibules & concourses throughout the world. I’ve long suspected that most folk will put up with shite taste for the hit, whereas I object to even family members making tea for me, as it’s never ‘ just so’.
          I’ll happily take people at their word if they like their Blue Mountain roast prepared in a meticulous fashion but I just can’t tell – unlike with tea, wine or whisky which I’m pretty discerning about.
          Coffee cake though, cor!

          • I don’t know I don’t like it. I might. (Though I suspect I wouldn’t cos coffee flavoured ice-cream, coffee flavoured cake and coffee flavoured sweets/chocolates are all horrid.) I’m not curious enough to find out.

                  • By and large I prefer instant coffee, granules, not powder, over “real” coffee. But it has to be a rich roast, Douwe Egberts dark or the Nescafe Costa Rica. Gold Blend at a pinch.
                    I especially loathe the coffee from pod machines. The only coffee shop coffees that really have ever excited were in Australia, otherwise I just lump for a cappuccino for convenience.
                    O, and espressos at the end of a meal in France somehow always work too.

  37. When Victoria Wood met Morrissey for a cup of tea in America. Morrissey’s assertion that the water must only be “slightly threatened” by the teabag and no milk was, I think, probably the direct opposite of Wood was expecting from a fellow northerner. She’d bought him a tea cosy and was hoping for a “proper” cup of tea. This is strongish tea, with milk. Sugar is a personal choice and no judgement is given over this.

    Tip – if someone asks for sugar and you give them one more teaspoon than they ask for, they will invariably compliment you on your tea making.

  38. Hmm after watching it again I note that he said the teabag needs to “skim the surface” of the water. I was thinking of someone else who said that tea should be slightly threatened by the milk. Either way, this is crazy talk.

    I have a large teapot made in England with Sheffield Steel and it has a strainer thing where you spoon in 4 teaspoons of leaf tea. Leave to stand for a few minutes. The great thing about it is that you can come back to it an hour later and the tea is still hot. Probably my most treasured possession.

    • Tea needs to be doused in BOILING (not hot, BOILING) water immediately, given plenty of time to brew and shown the merest scintilla of a twinkle in the eye of a splash of milk.

      Basically if it’s not the colour of a mahogany fireplace and you can’t stand a ladle up in it, I’m going to be disappointed.

      • Not a tea lover (as you know), but this is the error of coffee shops.
        Those coffee machines have the water at something like 85 to 95 degrees, hence tea from Costa, Starbucks, Cafe Coffee, Mr Coffee, whatever, is pretty ropey

  39. In Sweden tea is posh, coffee is what keeps the country going: the drink of lumberjacks, farmers, truck drivers and moose hunters. One grouse I have though is that Swedes call these herbal and fruit infusions tea. If there are no tea leaves, it is not tea.

    I cannot believe that I have known DuCool for 25 years and never once noticed that he never drinks tea.

  40. In discussions like this, I always remember wine-slurping TV chef Keith Floyd’s assertion that the reason Americans are so crazy is their over-consumption of coffee.
    I like tea and I like coffee. Either of them needs to be in that middle ground between teeth-dissolvingly strong and utterly helpless. I prefer my Coffee to be a bit stronger than my tea.
    I prefer to drink either with milk and without sugar, and I care not at all if you think I’m wrong to do so. If you have no milk, I’ll drink without when thirsty and not complain.
    Instant coffee and cold tea are both abominations.

    • Interesting one Dave. I bow to no-one in my appreciation of thief records, which are things of wonder. Indeed I’ve posted here before, about how we really should think of MP as a band, not a comedy troupe. However …

      I think it’s true that a lot of their TV work is admirable, ground-breaking, boundary-pushing (for the time) etc. However, if you actually watch the old episodes a lot of it is not nearly as funny as they think it is; let’s be charitable and say that it may have been side splitting at the time but simply hasn’t aged well?

      Either way, I do wonder whether someone saying the TV work is “hilarious” these days has either (a) watched much comedy since 1974 or (b) watched many MP TV episodes since they were a teenager.

  43. The OP reminds me of that theory (can anyone else fill me in on the details?) that if you listen to an album you’ve heard and loved dozens of times already, you’re not actually listening to the sounds it’s making any more, your brain is playing you the memory of previous listens?

    So if you loved it as a teen, but only play it occasionally and as background music these days, you’ll still enjoy it because of the atavistic effect. Whereas if you sat down and really paid attention to it, there’s a chance you’d start losing your appreciation of it given the hundreds of other albums you’ve heard and enjoyed since your teens?

    • Fascinating idea, @Douglas, and one that probably deserves a thread of its own. I’m spending 2017 listening to one song each night, repeatedly and then blogging about it, so I’ve had time enough to contemplate what it means to listen to music. To start with I chose songs I love, For one month I chose songs I’d never heard before. One month I chose songs from when I was 14. The listening experience was different in each case.

      With songs I love, it was a chance to recognize and identify what it was I liked about the song – what made me react so positively, with such Pavlovian salivation when I heard the opening bars. And I think that is due to your notion of repeated playing – the song is already in my head and that’s what I’m hearing when I start the song – the eager anticipation of what I know is to come next. And isn’t that the joy of music? Why the crowd sings along so lustily to well-know classics – the instinctive rush to join in comes from the song in your head,

      For the songs that I had never heard before, there was a familiar pattern. I would listen once, and my first reaction would depend on the complexity of the piece – how much was there to take in? Simple one instrument songs, I could easily give an opinion on. Songs with multiple instruments, sections or layers would just be a jumble of sound. A bit like a Loveless track, probably. It would only be through repeated listening, where I could,bit by bit recognize milestones in the music, individual elements and lay those to rest – in a way stop consciously hearing them), that my mind was free to process other parts, subtler elements in the mix, or even begin to make sense of the track as a whole. Songs I hated, or found bland to start with, would often emerge from the process as revealing depths and resonances I hadn’t (couldn’t) appreciate at first.

      For songs that I used to hear as a teenager, but hadn’t revisited since, there would probably be the echo of a memory of a chorus, a riff or a rhythm, but much of the rest would have been forgotten, or never noticed in the first place ( many song lyrics pass me by). Listening on repeat would flesh out such bare skeletons, either to positive or sometimes stultifying effect (I liked this crap?).

      Clearly now in middle age (gonna be a centenarian, of course), I’ve heard many songs since then. I can now identify basslines, for example (mostly). I”m aware of the difference between rhythm and lead guitar. But part of the pleasure of listening to once loved and still loved songs intensively is in the discovery of new elements to add to the synergy of sounds, the point and counterpoint of melodies and rhythms that make so many of music so great.

      Like with people, first impressions of music give a certain rough feel, but it’s the repeated encounters with music and other art that makes it come alive as a perpetual dance between our memories of the thing and our current experience of it.

      • wonderful post, sal.

        On a tangent, I know, I never thought it but my needs are different as I age. I took my 17 year old on a University visit, a 600 mile round trip. We listened to his music on the his phone. It was pleasant, passing the time very nicely. I liked it but did not feel inclined to seek it out for myself. Despite that I have SZA’s CTRL album and love it. You’d think she’d appeal more to a 17 year old boy but he has never heard of her. I love its modern take on R&B, finding it sinuous with loads of feel, despite being created more by computers than instruments. It is a shoe-in for my top ten of 2017.

        However, mainstream music is the exception for me. I’m increasingly drawn to the bizarre and unusual. This year, so far, I’m thinking JLin & Arca. Modern day catchy choruses no longer hit the spot for me.

        • Tigger – Have you seen that there’s a new Mammal Hands album – their third – out next month, entitled Shadow and Work? Might be worth checking out.

  44. I think this is true, which is why live music is so great when you hear a band you love: your mind plays the original and irons out the muddy bits, whilst picks up the overt changes and enjoys them, or not.

    • You’re probably right there, because very rarely do I come out of a gig thinking the band were rubbish, whereas when I’m watching live performances on the TV or even listening to them on CD I tend to be more critical.

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