| By :
Mark Etinger
As I have grown up as a music fan I find myself feeling less and less obliged to take everyone's taste into consideration. Gone are the days where a bunch of great reviews of a jazz album or a midtempo adult contemporary rock record insists that I give said record the benefit of the doubt. In a way this could reflect a near sightedness that is less than healthy but I do not see things this way. Instead what I see us a chance to be better at understanding what I like and better at cultivating that taste into something I can more clearly recommend and share with others. Do not ask me about the new Bon Iver record. I do not know or care about that music but let's spend the next few hours discussing the nuances in the latest release from noise pop band Times New Viking. Songs you love as a kid do not necessarily get chosen by you instead they choose you. For anyone who has read even a little bit of music writing this probably seems like a gigantic cliché and that is because it is one. But not all clichés are false. As a child and then as a teenager I engaged directly with what I perceived to be the best songs ever from the Ramones and Nirvana, eventually opening up my pallet to Gram Parsons and Wu Tang Clan. But as my pallet for quality music became more diverse other factors started to enter in. If I liked every kind of music that had to be some sort of a mission statement. I could like rock, country, rap and not jazz. So I bought Thelonious Monk and dabbled in Miles Davis. I never much liked any of it, but I claimed to. Not liking something that was objectively good made me less of a fan I thought. Of course what I realize now is we are defined by what does not turn us on as much as by what does. Cutting yourself off from things certainly does not make you understand things better but neither does forced continued exposure or commitment to things you clearly have problems with. Forcing yourself to like everything belittles one's taste in everything. This revelation of course happened deep into the wrong side of my 20's. The early part of my third decade was spent truly assuming I was made to like everything. Now that I am out of that I understand the things I like more and in a strange way I have a distant respect for folks who have differing opinions more. My top songs of all time is my list and your's is your's. That's what gives those lists any interest at all.
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