This time, I am Trollheart's ally.

I don't buy music to look cool. I'm very private about my collection. To me, buying music because it's high-brow or underground is pretension, and I loathe that. Usually if music is good and not too far from mainstream genres, it will bubble up to 'normal' people and me. I am not going to spend time and energy sifting through junk for possible social cred via being one of the first to discover so-and-so. I like to think I can contribute to the world in more meaningful ways.

I avoid music which people describe using these terms.

Seriously I ****ing hate art*** rock.

I think Satchmo wins the thread :laughing:

I can name a whole host of albums that I've checked out because it seemed "cool" on Musicbanter or RYM. I'd say about 25% of the time I delete the ones I dislike after a spin, and the other 75% I hang onto in the vain hope of "understanding" them one day. Such as

In the Aeroplane over the Sea
VU and Nico
A Love Supreme
Rain Dogs
Ágætis byrjun

etc

^hm you dont like a love supreme?

Or Rain Dogs or Ágætis Byrjun?

A lot of interesting perspectives here.

In my mind, music is browless. I tend to put all music on the same level, and determine its "worth" based on whether or not I happen to enjoy it. Part of me enjoying an artist's music is identifying with their approach. As an artist who likes to play with concepts in my art, I just find "arty music" enjoyable. For me, there's no line between music to be admired and music to be enjoyed. Trying to understand an artist working with a "high concept" is an enjoyable pursuit as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think it's always meant to be pretentious (although sometimes it is, but that doesn't matter much to me).

So I'm trying more 'subliminal' listening with Confield and I think I might actually like it now. I've been queuing it up on my iPod before going to bed and while I'm not actively listening I've noticed that I've had better sleeps over the last few days...

I really love art rock/weird **** but I'm kind of glad I got rid of my Elvis Costello records.

... However, I'll keep holding on to my DEVO records and I'm actually kind of proud of my nice copy of The Turtles' "Battle of the Bands".

I had trouble liking Melt Banana right off, although it wasn't a far cry from what I liked. I kept it because all the other house-mates REALLY hated it. It was good ammo. But I came to understand the singer better and really like the instrumentation. So yeah, I actually like their music now.

Saw someone with a Melt Banana shirt at the store I work at. Struck up a casual nice shirt conversation, turns out he didn't even know it was a band shirt. He just bought it at the goodwill because it looked crazy and had funny words on it. Told him to look it up and be blown away.