Because it's devil music?
A friend of mine recently told me that she doesn't like the Beatles. Not that she doesn't particularly love them, or that she prefers the Rolling Stones, or that she only listens to obscure hardcore bands on cassette,* or that she doesn't listen to music with lyrics unless it's an opera—just she does not like the Beatles.
I am aware that this happens, and I am generally sympathetic to left-field, unanimity-bucking opinions. (For example, I'm inclined to think that anything as popular as The Wire, which seemingly everyone I know thinks is the best television program ever made, cannot possibly be good—even though I had the same reaction about the British Office and ended up loving it. In other words, the mere fact of an opinion's being a bit of a surprise makes me respect it at least a little, at least in theory.) However, I find this particular opinion difficult to accept—like when a friend of mine told me that Lolita was a good book even though it was badly written. (Huh?!)
Because they're vulgarians?
One direction I could go from here is to wonder (again) about whether there's such a thing as objective truth in art, whether Shakespeare would still be "good" if literally no living human being thought so—but I'm not going to go there, not today. Instead I would like to present a list of questions for people who do not like the Beatles. Please take them as unironic, nonsatirical, and not rhetorical: if you don't like the Beatles, I sincerely would like to know your answers to these questions...so that I can understand.
- Do you like music? [If no, ignore all the questions that follow.]
- How much music would you say that you listen to?
- Do you consider yourself a "musical person"?
- What music do you like?
- Do you like...The Rolling Stones? the Velvet Underground? Bob Dylan? the Beach Boys? the Kinks? the Mothers of Invention? Trout Mask Replica? The Residents? Prince?
- How do you find the music you listen to? (E.g., the radio, friends' recommendations, Pitchfork, your parents...)
- What is music for? I.e., what is the point of music? I.e., why do you listen to music?
- When was the last time you listened to the Beatles?
- When you think of the Beatles, what songs or albums come to mind?
- Are there some Beatles songs that you do like, or that you like better than the rest? (Like, do you hate Sgt. Pepper but kind of enjoy "I Want to Hold Your Hand," or "Helter Skelter," or "Ticket to Ride"?)
Just not into punk rock?
I'm serious when I say I ask these questions with all respect. Most of them are pretty much designed to help me figure out what it means that you don't like the Beatles—like, do you really not like the Beatles, or do you just not like the fact that everyone likes them?—or do you not like rock music?—and so on and so forth. (A girl I knew once said that she hated Amy's ice cream in Austin, Tex., but then revealed that she also hated ice cream; my feeling about that was that "Amy's has bad ice cream" is effectively a misleading statement coming from someone who thinks all ice cream is bad.)
Please comment on this post if you think you can help explain—and please be sure to answer question #4! I don't know what it is about me—perversity or pretentiousness or some actually admirable character trait—but if you hate the Beatles in a way that I'm not able to dismiss as irrelevant (that would be if you don't like music or if we have obviously incomaptible taste), I would love to get music recommendations from you. Horizons are made to be broadened.
Aw, shit, George ate your bird, didn't he? I'm sorry, I didn't know.
* Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust?
1 comments:
Better late than never?
1-Yes.
2-If you mean duration, two to four hours a day maybe? If you mean in terms of number of songs the playlist that I usually listen to is currently 509 songs, although I do a lot of skipping.
3-Although I'm interested in the nuts and bolts behind music, I would say no. I'm unable to play an instrument, so I never had much occasion to learn about it.
4-Favorite bands/artists: Acumen Nation, Fawn, 311, Beck, Filter, Army of Anyone, Rabbit Junk, and to a degree Soundgarden, Korn, Taproot, Matryoshka, They Might Be Giants. Rock, Industrial, Electronic/Techno (if there's a difference, I'm unaware of it).
5-I'm not too familiar with some of them, but no.
6-The radio, word of mouth, researching the genres of songs I like on Wikipedia and randomly choosing other artists/bands in that genre to search for on Youtube and elsewhere on the internet, random internet radio stations, late night talk show musical guests, Pandora, other "music suggestion" websites.
7-It's for enjoyment, but perhaps I'd say that's the reason for anything.
8-In the "History of Rock and Roll" class I took in college, a few years ago. We spent about 2 weeks on them.
9-The first is probably that "She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah" song. Hey Jude comes to mind. Those are the only two I can dredge a few lyrics out of.
10-During the class I remember really not liking the early boy-band stuff, and being indifferent to disliking the rest. Except for one song, there was one song I liked, but I don't remember the name of it. It was one of the "experimental" songs, it had like a crow cawing song effect kinda.
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