If you don't feel like reading my wall of text, I've summarized the important parts in bold.
Happymeal, if you really are 15 years old like your profile says you are, then you're going through pretty much the same thing musically that I went through in middle/high school.
In my younger teen years, I listened to pretty much entirely jazz, prog jazz, and classical music. I basically considered myself a musical elitist because of this. I didn't like any artist that could be considered remotely "popular", partially because that just wasn't my style of music, and partially because I just flat out refused to like it. I would listen to it with friends, I'd dance to it at school dances, etc. but I didn't like it.
However, there were a few songs that brought me to the "light", well maybe not the light, but at least to a more optimistic view of popular music (and I use the word "popular" to refer to basically anything that's English-speaking market, from post-1920s, and not classical; so to that extent I'd consider most Jazz "popular").
"Bohemian Rhapsody": It was explained to me (somewhat correctly) that the song was based on operatic traits. The character Scaramouche and the fandango dance are both elements highly indicative of early Italian opera. Also, when I came to realize that when I knew ALL the lyrics to a song, it must mean that I at least like it a little bit.
"The Battle of Evermore": My dad, though not an enormous Zeppelin fan, first introduced me to this song by saying that it was about The Lord of the Rings (with references to Mordor, Ringwraiths, etc.) and that Led Zeppelin (arguably the most popular band among my peers at the time) were actually huge LotR fans. It gave me pleasure knowing that I knew something about all my friends' favorite band that they didn't even know, and led me to appreciate popular musicians as more than meets the eye. They are influenced by literature and other arts, not just each other and the current (post-1930s) music tradition.
"Beck's Bolero": This song is such a crazy derivative of Ravel's Bolero that it was hard not to like it. It also captured my interest a bit more than its classical counterpart mainly because it was shorter, and jammed a lot of content into a shorter span. Written by Jeff Beck and/or Jimmy Page, and featuring Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Keith Moon, and Nicky Hopkins, I first realized the importance of collaboration between musicians (something essential to classical music, where an orchestra has to work together in tandem). This song is what got me into Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Jeff Beck (though I quickly realized that there wasn't much else by Jeff Beck that I like).
While the songs did some of the work, the important aspect of me getting into "real" music was that I opened my mind and changed my philosophy, a philosophy I still hold today.Every song and album gets a chance, and every musician deserves some credit for doing what they love. Obviously there's some music that'll appeal to me more than others, but there's very very few albums which I've actually given a chance and then said I hate.
OK Computer used to be an album I hated. Even after I got into The Beatles, The Beach Boys, U2, The Strokes, The White Stripes, and so many other contemporary artists, I still could not get myself to appreciate Radiohead. I truly hated them. I hated their music. I hated that everyone else loved them. But then I decided to give them more of a chance than I had been. A friend gave me a playlist purely made up of Radiohead songs (the songs he considered their best), and I decided I actually liked "Karma Police". It still took a few years until I actually really opened up and gave their whole discography a listen. On the 10th or 12th listen to OK Computer, I finally realized, "Wow. This is art. This is actually really fantastic". It hit me and hit me hard. "Fitter Happier" still pisses me off completely (it would've been so much better instrumental IMO), but the album is one of my favorites now. As much as I want to give it a bad rating and say that it's not anywhere close to the best album ever, every time I listen to it I fall in love with it, and I can't help but admit that it's a contender for the best album ever released.
Anyway, if you actually took the time to read that...I'm still a huge fan of classical music, but I listen to it differently than popular music. I still like jazz, though I've had a bit of a falling-out with jazz. Jazz is absolutely wonderful to listen to live, but whenever I listen to recordings of jazz, I think..."what's the point?" To me listening to jazz is like watching a video of being on a roller coaster, if that makes sense.
Like I said earlier, if you're actually 15, you clearly have a pretty developed taste for music (compared to most 15 year olds who listen pretty much exclusively to radio pop mega-hits), but there's always room for expanding your palette.In my opinion, expanding your palette is a great way to develop a more optimistic view of art and of the world in general. _________________ 51 Washington, D.C. albums!
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