How can I stop being a snobbish jerk about music?
I’m going to suggest that you look at the equipment on which you play music frequently, very carefully. Many young women are quite sensitive to high frequency noise and distortion, to a degree men have real trouble understanding. Your hearing at 13Khz and above maybe as much as 6 to 12 db more acute (2 to 6 times, in absolute sound pressure terms) than his, and you will therefore be much more aware of various kinds of electronic distortion and noise. Some of these are added locally by your playback equipment, so you can benefit by improved equipment which generates less distortion, and provides smoother more accurate high frequency response. That may go a long way to making “his” music tolerable to you. In addition, you could make sure any “loudness” controls are off (they boost both the bass and the treble portions of the music spectrum, to compensate at low volume, for the human ear’s non-linear response to absolute sound power, but too often, the loudness contours overcompensate), a
In any case, before this turns into a holy war over the definition of good music, I will readily concede that I listen to some really terrible music. I listen to some great music too, but I honestly try to change the subject when people ask me what kind of music I listen to (I mean, I already put show tunes out there – let’s also say hypothetically that I like to listen to the Disneyland Audio Tour for the Blind when I’m driving). The issue really isn’t that I think my music is better than my boyfriend’s. The issue is that I think the music he likes is by turns irritating and boring. My music may be irritating on occasion, but it’s irritating in a way that pleases me, and I can’t tolerate boredom. I’m trying to find a way to either learn to tolerate his music, or learn to shut up about how intolerable I find it. I really don’t care about relative quality. I think my music falls on a pretty wide Gaussian distribution in terms of quality compared to his…and there’s a long tail on both
I live for heavy metal (and special thanks to everyone using metal as an example of “bad music” or “a joke”, especially if you couldn’t name more than twenty metal bands if Howie Mandel were there with a million dollar box riding on the answer. That’s always appreciated). My boyfriend likes reggae, and has hated metal since the 80s. We solve this by alternating who gets to play music. The “driver gets to choose and BTW I always drive” game is really childish — I understand wanting to play your own music while driving, but it’s really not that big a deal to alternate. Institute a “you choose this album and I’ll choose the next” policy. The random button on the iPod (one that has a roughly equal number of things you like and things your boy likes) also works. In my experience, the mix-CD idea doesn’t work unless the person is at least a little bit open to the idea of hearing new music; the random setting is a great way to get people to that point, without giving anybody reason to blame.
If your tastes are so narrow that you really only like a few things in music then the problem is you, not other people’s music. Open your horizons by listening to really good music from genres that you know nothing about. It might help you open up a bit in the genres you are most comfortable with. If you don’t listen to jazz, try immersing yourself in Miles Davis, Coltrane etc. Life is too big to restrict yourself to just a few things, but the only way to get outside the comfort zone in which you are imprisoned is to keep trying what you didn’t like the first time. Rely on the fact that so many others have found the greats to be great and eventually you will find a whole new world. Then you can go beyond the greats to the cool little avant-guard corners of that genre if you like. Just remember, often, being avant-guard is more about feeling cool about yourself than about great music. Yes, the music is great, but so is a lot of other stuff, but many people are just too uncomfortable wit
