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.

Atheisting Properly

It's true, as the popular atheist meme (*ahem*) says, that being an atheist means only that you don't believe in God, and nothing else. But it's obvious that very many atheists don't really believe that. Otherwise, the very popular sarcastic expression "yr atheistin wrong" wouldn't exist. If a lot of atheists didn't have a lot of other rules for atheistin, that popular sarcastic phrase wouldn't be funny. It wouldn't mean anything at all.

I can't tell you how many times some atheist or another has immediately assumed that I believed God exists as soon as I disagreed with him or her when he or she said that ending religion would end all of humanity's problems, or that Constantine and the Pope wrote the Bible at Nicea in AD 400, or that being an atheist means one is more intelligent than a believer, or that we are all born atheists, or that religion was invented in order to control the masses (In point of fact, there were no masses when religion began: there were no towns or cities, and humans didn't live in herds, but in small bands.), or that religion poisons everything, or -- if you've hung out in atheist groups for a while, you can add to the list yourself. Yes, being an atheist means not believing in God, it means only that, but that doesn't stop some atheists from adding a whole lot of other rules. A whole lot of other things in which you'd better believe. Or else.

It may often seem as if I argue with other atheists just because I am cantankerous, because something's wrong with me -- and no doubt, there's something to that. Don't worry, I'm in therapy, I'm working on me. But there's more involved here, when I or some other atheist keeps saying to groups of atheists: No, I don't agree. (Not always 100% as politely as that. I'm working on it.) We're also speaking up for others who may be more timid. Clearly, for some people, becoming atheists did not mean ceasing to live by a long list of rules, maxims and Truths which for them are not up for discussion. Others of us, however, cast aside the revealed truths of religion, and DON'T want to replace that religious dogma with atheist dogma. We stopped letting clergypeople and holy books tell us what to believe, and we DON'T want atheist leaders and books by Dawkins, Harris, etc, to tell us what's what. We actually want to think for ourselves. (It's not for everybody. Clearly, it's not for all atheists, not by a million miles.)

And wouldn't it be a shame if some timid atheist was scared away from a group, or stayed in a group but was afraid ever to speak freely, because everyone in the group seemed to believe in a bunch of slogans and historical inaccuracies, because no-one ever spoke up against them. Yes, it would be -- no, it is a shame. There are many such groups. If I argue with somebody about whether or not babies are atheists, to a point, it's about semantics. But there's more to it than that. It's also about not just giving up and keeping quiet when others want to force me to conform and agree.

Are you seeing a lot of parallels between the pressure to conform I'm describing in atheist groups, and the squelching of discussion in conservative religious groups? You are, if you're paying attention. Notice I'm comparing these atheist tendencies, not to all religious groups, but to conservative, reactionary religious groups. That's right: in some cases, you're more likely to find an actual discussion about things among believers than among atheists.

Obviously, not all atheists are that fucked up. Obviously, I'm not the only one denouncing atheist conformity. But -- yeah, there could be more of us. More of you could be speaking up along these lines. No pressure. Only the future of humanity is at stake. (Ha, ha, kidding. Sort of.)

Ich wohne in meinem eigenen Haus,

Hab Niemandem nie nichts nachgemacht

Und - lachte noch jeden Meister aus,

Der nicht sich selber ausgelacht. (I live in my own house, I've never copied anyone, and I've laughed at every master who never laughed at himself.) -- Nietzsche