I was being facetious. Offering unsolicited opinions to my barber doesn't interest me at all. Except, of course, regarding my hair.

-Tom

This thread is awesome.

i'm a proponent of critical cordiality.

"I don't like them."

a discussion could ensue, in which I'll happily engage because I obviously know why I don't like this crap band. Alternatively, the subject will simply be dropped, and I can live with that, provided I'm not forced to listen to it.

as opposed to the following:

"This bands sucks my ass, just like your musical taste. You're a cultural baboon and a slave to commodified art and advertising, which suggests not only that you are naive and intellectually lazy, but that you also have a weak will."

regardless of what you think or believe, that's just not very nice.

Also, in my experience as both an musician and participant in polite critical conversation, silence is usually the least jarring way to express distaste. Or a softly uttered, "meh."

Hm, I wonder why people so rarely respond to my posts...

I might be a little off topic here. Excuse me iff i am.

Me and many of my friends share a love for quality music.
We've always had lots to talk about music and discovering new and not so new bands and really enjoying the thrill of pure musical excitement when going to shows and adding to our record collection.

The last few years though, within this small group of music "elitists" , the feeling crept over me that whenever i'm with someone outside of this small group, someone that i equally love as any of my music friends, that conversation at random about just any subject talking to a friend that i like very much goes much further these days than the genuine every day music talk.

The whole thing is getting very much boring in the sense that ,apparently , in this small group there's nothing else to be said to eachother than what new additions have been made to each individuals record collection and what bands we might want to look out for.

I'm what some may call a " peoples friend" or whatever and i feel that it, for me , takes an effort to get some people to not be so fucking elitist about their musical preference.
Two weeks ago at a wedding party of a friend there was this 2year old kid that, when giving him the word "Frank" he would immediately reply "Zappa!!!" with great enthusiasm.
Where the hell did that come from? I find that scary.

I have been known to point out bands that people (imo) might want to check out instead of the (imo) crap they are serving themselves at any time.
Some people appreciate it, some don't.
However, there's a point that i would never cross and that's the point where genuine conversation and good fun turns into a fucking lecture about my crazy amount of records i own and how unbelievably dedicated i am to music.

I've sworn to myself that iff ever one of my music mates blatanly plays the music guru thing again by blatantly stating his/her record-count and compare it to the rest of the group i will cop out and not be part of that small community anymore.

I think it's quite ok to tell your barber hes taste in music is not exactly yours but iff that fact makes it harder for you to make conversation with this person the problem is yours, not hes.

Thank God for spellcheck.

Peter

gio wrote:"This bands sucks my ass, just like your musical taste. You're a cultural baboon and a slave to commodified art and advertising, which suggests not only that you are naive and intellectually lazy, but that you also have a weak will."

regardless of what you think or believe, that's just not very nice.

Hmm, no ... wait .... Yeah, I think I can work with that. Needs a little editing, a little tightening up, sure, but all the elements are there ...

Yeah, gio, I think I'm gonna polish that little nugget up and keep it on an index card. I like that. With a little wordsmithing and rote memorization I could slip that pithy little gem into my everyday conversation as an almost perfect expression of everything I stand for.

Sure, it's not very nice. But neither is playing bad music in places where it can find its way into my earholes.

Salut!

Great thread!

I've had friends with similar taste in music/movies, etc, but it seems like our conversations usually revolve around just that, and little else. How much fun is it to have a conversation with yourself? So the best relationships I've had have been forged through a clash in taste, for some odd reason.

Having said that, the easiest way is to just block it out, which I've perfected over the years. Honestly, if it's not Dave Matthews, John Mayers, Matchbox 20 or any of that nu metal shit, we'll get along fine.

I used to work in a warehouse on the west side of Chicago. The guys in the warehouse played B-96 very loudly and every dawgone day. I learned to not only tolerate it but actually found things in some of it that I liked. It was a music I had no connection to and mostly I found it uncreative and woman hating and bizarrely self grandizing but here and there came great sounds, hot grooves, weird break downs, etc. I found this all surprizing.

In the office area where I worked also worked a total cockhead who LOVED Barenaked Ladies and Train and Counting Crows and that sort of thing. I tried and tried to take a simular approach to his music than I did with B-96 but I swear to you I could not enter that crap even a tiny bit. Was it because his music was corn filled turds or was it because he was a corn filled turd and any music he liked I had to hate?

He was the guy that always likened popularity to quality and believed it wholly as in the bands he liked were good, of course! They are popular and sell many many records. That was proof! The bands I liked he and his friends had NEVER HEARD OF, therefore they could not be any good or he and his friends would have heard of them.
I told him to go have lunch at the greatest restaurant in the world...McDonalds. That shut his big mouth up for about three seconds. That's the thing about assholes with big mouths...

my new girlfriend, who is really cultured, well read and has good taste in most everything.......except music
her two favorite things are:
The Disturbed
Metallica's St Anger....ouch
i think i can reroute her. any suggestions?How do i bridge the gap into my realm of taste? This will take time.

I have become very adept at tuning out whatever music is playing esp if I am at work. Because we have communal stereo in our area it tends to be lite fm/classic rock etc. If the music is really getting on nerves I will ask if we can listen to something else or turn it down. The people I work w/ are pretty respectful. Only twice (and both of those were on wknds when there were only like two of us in) have I ever played anything and they said they couldn't get into it cause it wasn't their bag (The Fall and Cecil Taylor). But they gave it a chance and actually engaged me in a very honest and sincere conversation about why I did like that stuff. Much more open-minded then most of my friends.

If someone asks me about Depeche Mode or Nu Country or whatever I always tell them what I think, though in a polite manner. I know some people who act like total asshats in situations like this and have always thought that was pretty lame.



internet is a completely different situation

For some reason today, they were playing Jay - Z in the waiting room for the doctors office over and over and over!

thank god no one asked for an opinion...

Has anyone else encountered such poorly picked genres for certain situations in life?