Overcoming Peer Pressure About Which Music I Should Hate

Like any other typical product of Murrkin culture, I have always been taught by peer pressure that it is very important to hate certain types of music. The earliest time I can remember that this made a strong impression on me must've been in or around 1973, when I was 11 or 12. In school, in music class, our music teacher not only played "Unsquare Dance" for us, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet -- she actually made us get up and dance to it. And I was really enjoying myself, doing the dance to the 7/4 our teacher had explained to us. Until I noticed the looks on some of the faces of other students. It seemed that this music was Not Cool.

Flash-forward over 40 years, and I heard "Unsquare Dance" again and realized that our music teacher had been underrated and that the peer pressure which had said that this music was Not Cool, was -- well, I shouldn't have listened to it. The peer pressure, that is.



A few years later, the Eagles were tremendously popular, and me and my homies didn't like them, and neither did the critics at Rolling Stone. All was in harmony -- until I learned that "Take It Easy" had been co-written by Jackson Browne, whom I, my homies and the critics at Rolling Stone all liked very much. And then things got even more confusing because Joe Walsh, just about the epitome of cool in my young world, joined the Eagles.

And then in the 80's, Don Henley put out some stuff I really liked: the single "Dirty Laundry," and after that, the album Building the Perfect Beast. I didn't like the entire album, but I liked more than half of it a lot. However, the critics who had hated the Eagles along with me still hated Henley, and their descriptions of why did not make sense to me.

Had I become uncool? Luckily for me, I paid much less attention to those critics by that time.

Then in 1989 Henley released "The End of the Innocence," title track to the album of the same name, with Bruce Hornsby and Wayne Shorter sitting in. I just assumed that this had to be cool with those critics. But eventually I found out that they had shit all over this one as well. Their opinions were meaning less and less to me.

There was also the matter of James Taylor. These critics seemed to hate James Taylor even more than they hated the Eagles. This never made sense to me. I've only ever hated 2 or 3 of James Taylor's singles.

Phil Collins was definitely uncool for me and those like me in the 1980's. But then, things started to get complicated again: "Abacab," by the post-Peter Gabriel Genesis, was pretty cool, I thought (to myself). And then came "Sussudio" and "Take me Home," which I absolutely loved. And then I read a interview with Miles Davis, and to my astonishment, he liked some of Collins' stuff too! (He referred to the keyboard-and-horns riff in "Sussudio" as "a bad jam.")

More complication: I noticed that some recordings by Peter Gabriel, unquestionably cool, contained drum and vocal tracks by Peter Collins!

It may have been the interview with Miles Davis, 1986 or so, which finally just pushed me over into listening to the music I liked and no longer caring whether people thought it was cool or not -- but it took several years to do that good work. During the same time, a quote by Cormac McCarthy kept rolling around in my head, doing essentially the same work, a quote about how you've crossed a major hurdle in life when you stop worrying whether people think you're cool (I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist of it.)

Back to the late 70's, and from there into the 80's and beyond: punk rock and new wave made a tremendous impression on me and others of my set. And then there came the times when some punk and new wave bands changed their styles, and some of us damned them for it and called them sellouts, and I didn't.

And finally there's Coldplay. I don't really understand why people hate Coldplay, and I don't much care anymore either. "Clocks" is a bad jam, your loss if you can't appreciate it. No, I don't particularly care to discuss it. Your loss, Jack!



"Clocks" was released in 2003, and "Viva la Vida," the Coldplay song which you may think is called "When I ruled the World," as I used to assume it was, and long after that, I finally learned that that awful single "Yellow" is by the very same band, released in 2000. If "Yellow" was the only record they'd ever released, then, yeah, I could understand the disdain. But the band who made "Clocks" and later music is clearly a completely different band, and members of the band have talked about how they made their second album, the one with "Clocks" on it, twice. They thought they were done, and then they thought about it and said, We can do a lot better than this -- and they did a lot better, if "Yellow" and "Clocks" are any means of judging.

I actually recently did a Google search for why do people hate Coldplay, and I found no good reason, just a bunch of nonsense.

The first song I ever hated entirely on my own, in fact, I can't remember ever hearing anybody else saying they hated it, and I never cared, because they're my ears: "Hey Jude," by the Beatles. But even this case has become complicated, because on the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's wonderful movie The Royal Tenenbaums is a very nice melody and -- oh my God it's an instrumental version of "Hey Jude" by the Mutato Muzika Orchestra, and I enjoyed several minutes of it before I realized Oh my God I'm enjoying an instrumental version of "Hey Jude," and I kept enjoying it even after I realized.

Maybe I'm just not a very good hater.

Rock Criticism

It may have been the overwhelmingly negative opinion of James Taylor among rock critics -- that is to say, among the rock critics at Rolling Stone, where I read most of the rock criticism I have read -- which caused me to begin to question the authority of their opinions and aesthetic sense. "Fire and Rain," "Your Smiling Face," "Mockingbird," "Shower the People" and other James Taylor singles -- well, I liked them, plain as that, even though the critics called them wimpy unbearable shit. "You've Got a Friend" was and is wimpy unbearable shit to me, but everybody slips now and then. Apart from that one song, it became more and more undeniably clear to me that I found the average James Taylor song on the radio to be more edifying and worthwhile than the average record review in Rolling Stone, or even the average above-average review in Rolling Stone.

It wasn't just James Taylor. Around the same time that Taylor began to be an unreconcilable point of contention between myself and the rock critics -- that is to say, in the 1970's -- I also came across a couple of remarks from great musicians: Frank Zappa calling rock criticism "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read," and Lou Reed complaining about working on an album for a year and a half only to have some asshole in the Village Voice (Robert Christgau) give it a B-.

And Christgau, most people would agree, is one of the best rock critics.

John Peel -- or Sir John Peel if you prefer, he was actually knighted -- was considered by many to be the very best rock critic in the world, and he didn't seem to think much of rock criticism, devoting more of his career to being a radio DJ.

 Mystery Train by Greil Marcus is probably the most highly-regarded book ever written by a rock critic. Like my growing and increasingly disturbing awareness that I simply couldn't accept the critical consensus regarding James Taylor, and Zappa's pithy dismissal of rock criticism in general and Reed's of Christgau, and Peel's disappearance from his rock-critic columns in favor of the DJ booth, Mystery Train is a product of the 1970's. I own a copy of it. I've never really known what to make of it. Marcus' description of how Little Richard disrupted an episode of the Dick Cavett Show when it was becoming quite pretentiously silly is well-written, and his interpretation of Richard's motives for the disruption -- because some other guests were beginning to pontificate in a very silly way about art, and he knew that he was the only artist on the stage at the time, and that he knew that his artistry was far more important and enduring than the fact that a couple of of those other people thought he was silly -- that analysis of the incident on Marcus' part is not entirely unconvincing. But other parts of the book, unfortunately, consist of unbearably silly pontification about art.

Part of the pointedness and venom of my current disdain for rock criticism (I realize that many other names for it may be preferred these days, but when I stopped being able to take it seriously that's what it was still called) is a deflection of my shame at having taken it so seriously for so long. But I was only a child! How was I to know?

But is there a point to all this vapid rambling? Well, no. And perhaps that's the point. And perhaps Duke Ellington said every single thing there ever was to say about any sort of music criticism when he answered the question, What is good music? thusly: "If it sounds good, it is good."

Indeed. Cazart. Believe your ears regarding music and do not let your reading eyes hand you any wooden nickles.